Resurrection

Tim Curran

EXHUMATION

1

This was Witcham in the teeth of the storm:

A bog of sucking black mud and rising waters. The rain had been falling for four days nonstop and just after ten that night, it reached its peak. Truth be told, it did not just fall, it hammered down from the heavens. It sprayed and lashed and turned the roads to mud and filled cellars and pissed in through every available crack. Bolstered by sixty-mile-an-hour winds, it ripped off roofs and punched in windows and blew doors right off their hinges.

And by midnight, the cement wall hemming in the swollen Black River completely collapsed, sending a wall of water rushing through abutting neighborhoods. Particularly River Town, a historic part of Witcham. And not just water, but filth and debris and sewage from backed-up drains. Terrified as their houses crumbled around them, people ran out into the streets and were driven under the rippling mud and lost for good. Block by block, the lights blinked out one by one like somebody had drawn a single, masking shade. And then there was just darkness and wind and destruction, the rain pouring down.

The darkness, however, was not absolute.

It was spotty, a murky dreamlike half-light cut by elongated shadows. And had you been able to withstand the onslaught out in the open, you would have seen that wall of water strike Hillside Cemetery with incredible force. The hills it sat on did not just gently erode away, they dissolved. They disintegrated, exhuming things best left buried, creating a massive mudslide of bodies and headstones and rotting caskets that washed down into River Town, engulfing the neighborhood in a deluge of coffins and corpses. Tombstones speared through the walls of houses, caskets erupted through living room windows, and hundreds of cadavers ended up in the flooded streets, some standing upright in the mud and others caught in trees and bushes and wedged in doorways as if they were preparing to knock.

This was not just a night of fierce storms and flooding. This was the night the dead came out of their graves.

2

Later, Alan Sheeves wished dearly that he’d just gotten out like the others.

Meg was pregnant and the waters had been rising for days, but he had steadfastly held to the idea that the rain would stop and the waters would simply recede as they had other years. But that didn’t happen. And maybe down in his guts, he knew it wouldn’t. There had been no sleep for either of them that night. Just a tense cuddling with Meg under the covers, the both of them holding on for dear life as the storm battered the little house, making it shake and tremble on its foundation. The rain sounded like pellets. Like thousands of pellets striking the house.

And then, on around midnight as darkness and rain licked at the windows, a rumbling. A roaring wall of noise as the river burst its banks and rolled through the neighborhood, washing houses away and uprooting trees and vomiting the charnel waste of Hillside Cemetery into the streets.

Alan and Meg became aware of that when the picture window downstairs shattered and wind and chill rain blew through the house.

“Alan…” Meg said. “Alan.”

“Probably a tree branch. I guess I better have a look. You stay here.”

But Meg wasn’t staying there. She threw on her robe, the thick terrycloth one, and went down the stairs with him. Eight months along, it was no easy bit for her going up and down the stairs. Alan had even offered to set up a bed in the living room for her, but she’d have none of it. But that was Meg. Eight months pregnant or not, she would not let it slow her down or alter her lifestyle anymore than necessary.

The lights were out, but Alan had seen that coming. He had flashlights by the bed and a couple gas camping lanterns all primed and ready to go. Flashlight in one hand and lantern in the other, he moved down the narrow stairs, smelling the water and the night and something else that just did not belong: a putrescent odor. Like something had died and been washed into his house in the dead of night.

In the living room, water spraying into his face, he stepped around the fragments of glass while Meg waited behind him.

“Be careful for godsake,” she said.

Setting aside the lantern, Alan put the flashlight beam on the thing that had broken his window. Not a tree branch at all. But an oblong shape, a box dripping water and covered in mildew and clots of earth. A coffin.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“What?” Meg said. “What is that?”

“It’s…it looks like a-”

“A casket,” she said for him, a note of panic just beneath her voice.

He swallowed. “Goddamn Hillside must have washed out of all things.”

He stepped forward, panning the light over the intruder to his happy little home. The box was old, pitted and discolored. It must have been in the ground for decades. Thank God it hadn’t burst open and spilled…well, spilled anything onto the carpet. It was wedged through the window tightly, just wide enough to slip through the pane. It was probably only a matter of shoving it back out.

You seriously want to touch that thing?

But he knew he didn’t have a choice.

There was no way in hell Meg would sleep with a goddamn casket stuck through the side pane of the picture window. She was a good kid in every way, but she was also a little on the superstitious side. Partly because of her Catholic upbringing and partly because she liked to read books that scared the hell out of her.

“Let’s get out of here,” Meg said. “I don’t like this, Alan. I’m not too adult to admit that this is freaking me out.”

Alan chuckled. “We can’t leave, Meg. Not right now. There’s nowhere to go to.”

“All the same…”

“All the same nothing. I’ll just push it back out.”

It was the only thing he could do. There was no other choice. Outside, beyond the windows, a river of black water was flowing through his yard. The rose bushes were gone along with the picnic table, the street invisible. Nothing out there but rushing water and bobbing debris. Maybe alone he might have chanced it, but not with Meg. Not with Meg.

Behind him, she lit the lantern.

“Don’t touch it, Alan. Please…just don’t touch it.”

“I have to.”

He went over to it and put his hands on it. Jesus, it was cold and slimy. The wood was soft. It gave under his fingers and he didn’t like the idea of that. The idea that he might give it a good push and his hands would go right through it, his fingers brushing up against a polished skull or rotting grave clothes. Sucking in a sharp breath, he placed his hands flat on the slimy wood and applied some pressure. The box did not move. But the wooden panel at the end bulged inward an inch or so with a mournful, unpleasant creaking.

Meg was breathing hard. “Alan, just leave it there. Do you hear me? Just leave it there.”

He looked back at her. “Meg, it’s just a wooden box. That’s all it is.”

“I don’t like it.”

“C’mon, it’s harmless. If it was full of Tinker Toys it wouldn’t bother you, would it?”

“No, Alan, it wouldn’t,” she said, her tone of disapproval growing. “But I’m pretty sure there’s no fucking Tinker Toys in there.”

He just shook his head. The rain was still falling hard out there, but the wind had lessened. That was a good thing. At least the house was no longer shaking. He pressed his hands back against the box, feeling an almost atavistic repulsion against touching it. He gave it a shove. Then another and another. It wasn’t moving.

“Now what?” Meg said.

“Now I push a little harder.” He smiled. “No harder than pushing out a baby.”

“Ha, ha.”

“I’ll get it.”

“Just leave it there,” she said again.

“If I leave it there, you’ll never get any sleep and you need your sleep.”

“Like I’m going to sleep anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, Alan, there’s a coffin trying to get into my living room.”

Funny. Well, she might have been eight months down the road, but her mouth still worked just fine.

Bracing his feet, he put his hands back on the end of the coffin and gave it everything he had. The box moved maybe an inch or two before the panel bowed in again and a trickle of black water came oozing out, running over the back of his hands. He yanked them away like he’d been scalded, letting out a little cry. God, of all things. Drainage from a coffin.

Meg giggled into her hand. “It’s just a wooden box, Alan. That’s all it is.”

He chose to ignore her amusement. Yes, it was just a wooden box hammered together in a casket factory somewhere and a spider was just a spider, still you didn’t want to go touching one if you could help it. And you sure as hell did not want to grab a fat, juicy one in your palm and squeeze your fist shut until that spider’s soft body pulped in your hand and brown juice ran between your fingers. And the coffin-and the juice running from it-gave Alan about the same sense of aversion and disgust.

But it had gone beyond that now.

At first, he was hesitant to touch it. Then merely revolted at its feel. But now he was simple pissed-off. The storm wasn’t bad enough. The damage to his house and yard were not enough, now he had a fucking coffin stuck in his window. And that sonofabitch was going back outside whether it wanted to or not. He put his hands on the box again and this time, he really put his back into it. His back and his upper body strength, which was considerable after working in a lumberyard these past twelve years. The panel almost completely collapsed, but before it did the box moved five or six inches, enough so that most of its length was hanging out the shattered window. Gravity did the rest. The casket balanced precariously there for a moment or two, then fell out the window.

“Ha!” Alan said.

It hit the water with a great splash, stood straight up and down like a ship about to go under, bobbed for a second or two, then righted itself, twisting in a lazy circle as the current found it and carried it away. It joined that gently rushing river of filth and bobbing things. And was gone from sight.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. “Just needed some convincing was all. A little push to show it who was in…”

Alan’s words dried up in his mouth.

For one crazy second in the glare thrown by the flashlight beam, he’d thought somebody was standing out in the street. But that was crazy. Nobody could stand out there. At least not for long.

“What is it?” Meg said.

“Ah, nothing.”

And it was nothing. Just a shadow or something swept by in the current. That’s all. There was nothing out there now but that black, oily water and all manner of flotsam caught in its pull.

“Look at your hands,” Meg said.

Alan did. They were muddy and dark. “Grab me a towel from the kitchen, will ya?”

“You’re not going to wipe that crap on one of my towels.”

“Meg, please.”

Sighing, she turned from him and then stopped. Stopped dead as he stopped himself. He could not have just heard what he’d thought he’d heard. Not on a night like this. Not in a storm like this. It just couldn’t be. But then it came again: a slow, insistent pounding at the front door. Thud, thud, thud.

“Alan…”

But he ignored his wife, things flowing through his brain, thoughts that told him how there could not be anyone out there knocking. Not tonight. It just wasn’t earthly possible. There were other thoughts, too. Thoughts that told him to take his wife by the hand and run upstairs, pretend that he had not heard a thing.

But that was silly…wasn’t it?

The porch angled away to the side, so he could not see who was out there from the living room window.

“Don’t answer it,” Meg whispered.

The pounding came again. An almost mechanical sound.

He walked over to the door, something seizing up inside him, his belly pulling up like it wanted to fill his throat.

“Alan, please…”

But it was too late, because his hand was already gripping the knob and his other was undoing the latch. Behind him, his wife made a weird, moaning sound. And something in him, something like panic, wanted him to make it, too.

Without further ado, he opened the door to what waited out there.

3

Any given night in the summer or fall, had you been out walking down Angel Street in Witcham’s River Town, you might have noticed a garishly painted edifice squeezed dead center of a group of false-fronted buildings between 12^th and 13^th Avenues. Though the block featured everything from pawnshops to fried chicken counters, there was no mistaking that particular establishment with its bright scarlet facade and gold scrolling along the roofline. And the sign which read: COSTELLO’S MUSEUM OF MORBID MEMORABILIA in antique lettering.

From June through October, it was strung with red, yellow, and white bulbs and calliope music played from speakers over the door. Its proprietor, a somewhat seedy character named William Barney, was from a long line of carnival and circus performers. Though he had not labored on the midway for thirty years or more, Barney-as his father and grandfather-had amassed a sizeable collection of souvenirs and mementoes from those heady and raucous days of yore.

Step inside and the walls were plastered with old circus posters and railroad show banners and sideshow accordion boards advertising everything from bearded ladies to three-headed goats, half-girls and half-boys to fire-eaters and armless wonders and alligator men. You could view the skeletons of giants like “Sky-High” Lester Brown to those of dwarves like Wee Willie Wilkins in their respective, neon-lit caskets or marvel over the death masks of Bobby the Frog-Boy and Slim Gerou, the Caterpillar man. And if you were especially daring, you might want to investigate the body cast of Laddy the Human Larva or see firsthand the implements of old-time torture shows and view a photographic panorama of the lives of rubber men and monkey girls and nail-eaters.

As can be inferred, Barney’s collection concentrated mostly on the more grim and sensational aspects of carnival lore.

On dusty shelves and scattered over tabletops there was an exceptional collection of natural and decidedly unnatural wonders. Everything from embalmed devil-babies to stuffed mermaids, the tanned hides of man-eating snakes and giant rats, shrunken heads and ossified hands.

There was another room in the back that drew most of the museum’s business. And for an additional three dollars, you could go inside and view Barney’s collection of bottled babies and pickled punks. In jars and glass vessels and tanks of preservative were human and semi-human curiosities, things that died at birth, things unborn, and things that could never have lived in the first place. They were lined up on shelves and lit by red light bulbs to enhance atmosphere and lend an uncanny, otherworldly illumination to things most definitely uncanny and otherworldly-freak births and bucket babies, parasitic twins and monstrous fetuses of every description. Drifting in their oceans of brine, here were things with too many limbs or not enough, one-eyed and two-headed and six-fingered, squid-babies and spider-babies, a menagerie of flesh twisted and mutated into the most abnormal shapes.

Costello’s Museum was just down the road from Hillside Cemetery and of all the buildings on that block, it took the worst beating. Its facade, which was little more than reinforced plywood and joists, was obliterated by the rushing wall of water, mud, and debris that had burst the banks of the Black River and pretty much sucked up everything in its path. The water crashed through the museum, destroying Barney’s collection of oddities and spilling into the Parlor of Pickled Punks, and with such force that nearly all the vessels and jars were shattered instantly. The backwash sucked everything out into the streets, out into that river of foul water and falling rain.

And for some time, up and down Angel Street, monstrous things that had not been free of their liquid prisons for decades were exposed to what fell from the sky. Things that had haunted the dreams of generations were set loose upon the world. They bobbed and drifted and long-curled limbs unfurled…

4

Bodies.

Oh, Jesus Christ, look at all those bodies.

That’s what Heller was thinking as the enormity of it all sank into him, piercing him and making him want to shove his fist in his mouth to stay the scream that begged to get out. A mire of bobbing bodies and mud and filthy black water and coffins.

Standing there in that dirty rushing water, rain spraying into his face, he said, “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Next to him, Miggs just said, “Can’t say that I have. Now keep moving.”

Yes. Yes, that was important. Heller knew that much. They’d been sent down here to knock on doors and urge people to leave on account the river was cresting the wall and the sandbags were failing. It was the sort of shit job you pulled when you were a cop. Not even an hour into it, the wall had burst and that enormous wave of silt and water and grave matter had coming rumbling down on them. It hit the cruiser and spun it like a top, carrying it away like a paper cup. If it hadn’t wedged up against that house, it might have flipped right over. As it was, they’d had a hell of a time getting out without being carried away.

At least now, the ferocity of the flooding was spent. The water was still deep, but its current was gentle. Thank God for small favors.

But it was a mess.

Just an absolute mess. Entire houses had come apart like jackstraws. Trees and light poles came down. Cars carried away. Anything that wasn’t tied down was swept away along with a lot of things that were.

They still had their long-handled flashlights, though.

Miggs moved across the street, playing his light around. And what it revealed was a horror. A stone monument with a cross at its apex was jutting from the muck outside a cafe along with a couple smaller stones. Caskets were drifting past, bumping into one another along with the wooden wreckage of things that might have been caskets once. Across the street was a little neighborhood convenience store and two corpses, one naked and the other dressed in black rags, were standing upright in the doorway where the wall of water had deposited them. The roof from somebody’s house had gone through the plate glass windows of an insurance office and there were ragged, stick-limbed things trailing from it.

This was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.

As they plodded along, Heller felt things bump into his legs in the water and he just didn’t want to know what they might be.

“Gonna be a hell of a job to clean this up,” Miggs said into the wind.

Oh yes. It certainly was. When the waters retreated, there would be a lot of mud and in the mud…oh, Heller didn’t even want to think about it. But one thing was for sure, if they thought that he was going to be down here fishing stiffs from the muck, they had another thing coming. He wouldn’t put up with it. He’d go to the fucking union.

“Hold it,” Miggs said.

Something came floating past…another corpse. This one was pretty fresh, floating like a board, legs together and fingers still intertwined at his or her breast. Miggs’ light passed over it and Heller saw yellow bone where the face should have been. It passed on by and he started breathing again.

“C’mon,” Miggs said.

The wind was picking up, whipping and howling, throwing rain around in a wild thrashing tempest. The street was a churning shadowy sea of mud. It came up past their thighs. Slopping and stinking and just as black as quarry mud. Good God. A river of sewage and foul water and grave waste. The smell of it was absolutely nauseating.

They were making for a little saloon that rose up out of the water. It would be a place to wait this out, anyway. Heller followed behind Miggs and then something caught his legs and he almost fell into the drink. He tried to untangle his feet, but it was like he was caught in fishing line.

“Help me for chrissake,” he said.

But Miggs wasn’t helping him: he was laughing. In the wind and rain, he was laughing at Heller’s predicament as he scrambled around, trying to stay on his feet, trying to shake whatever had snared him up. Not that that was any big surprise. Miggs made it no secret that he did not like Heller. From the first day he’d been partnered with him, the older man had looked down his nose at him. Heller thought it was because he had only three years on the force and Miggs had something like twenty. But that wasn’t it at all. Heller asked him once what his problem was and Miggs, being Miggs, had told him. “You’re a fucking whine-ass, Heller. Everybody knows it. I don’t know how I pulled a guy like you, but you just keep your pissing and whining to yourself and we’ll get along fine.”

And now Miggs was just loving it.

“Asshole,” Heller said to him, stuffing his flashlight into his belt and reaching down into that filthy water and taking hold of what had him. It felt like sticks. Like wicker or something. He yanked it up best he could and it wasn’t wicker at all, but the ravaged skeleton of a woman with long trailing black hair sprouting from her skull, something held together by scraps of gray meat and wound up in threads of her funeral dress.

“Yah!” Heller said and fell right into the water.

He’d stepped right into her, got his feet trapped in her ribcage. That stinking water in his face, his bicycled his legs until he felt that grim baggage break free.

“Oh, ha, ha, ha!” Miggs said, his light on Heller. “You ought to see the look on your face! It’s priceless!”

Heller scrambled to his feet, pawing mud off his raincoat. “Let’s just go,” he said, wanting nothing better than to take a punch at his partner.

Another coffin swept past them and this was a recent interment. In that yellow half-light coming out of the sky, he could see it was black and shiny still, the brass handles not tarnished in the least.

“That’s a nice one,” Miggs said, finding it all a little too amusing. “Don’t you think it’s a nice one, Heller?”

“Oh, shut up.”

Finally they reached the saloon and climbed the steps out of the water. The door was locked, but Miggs blew it open with his 9mm. Inside, it was dry. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and old beer. A wonderful smell after being out in the streets.

Heller heard a creaking sound. “Hell is that?”

Miggs shook his head.

The back door burst open like a stick of TNT going off and a tide of surging ebon water flooded into the bar room in a tidal wave that knocked Miggs off his feet and put him under. Heller let out a high, girlish scream, swimming for the door, managed to squeeze through before it wedged close. Miggs came up gasping, alone, trying to fight his way through the flood. His drenched fists hammered uselessly against the door as the water rose and rose. Finally, he got it open enough to squeeze through. A tide of water came with him.

“Back to square one,” he said.

Dripping wet, the mire sluicing around him, Heller said, “What the hell happened?”

“How should I know?” Miggs said. “Maybe we opened that door and it created a vacuum or something. Must have been a lot of water caught behind that other door. Who knows?”

“Miggs,” Heller said. “Miggs.”

“What?”

“There’s…there’s someone over there.”

Miggs turned around, put his light where Heller was pointing. And, yes, there was someone over there near the telephone pole. A kid up to their chest in the water.

“Hey!” Miggs said. “C’mere! You can’t be out in this!”

But the kid-a little girl, Heller saw-was not moving. She just stood there and so very stiffly he thought she might be just another corpse. But then she moved. Did something.

Miggs went over to her.

“No,” Heller told him, tensing suddenly, “don’t.”

But Miggs went anyway, grumbling something under his breath.

Heller wasn’t sure at first what was bothering him about the kid, but now that he squinted his eyes in the rain and got his light full upon her, he saw all right. Just a little thing, a little girl with fine blonde hair…only there were great empty patches on her scalp and her face looked like wax melting off a skull. Just distorted and hideous, punched with two black holes for eyes.

But Miggs did not see that with the rain in his face.

“Gimme your hand,” he said, reaching out to her.

“I’m cold, mister,” the little girl said and her voice was congested like her lungs were full of leaves.

“Miggs!” Heller cried.

But it was too late. Miggs took hold of her hand and you could see that as he did so, his entire body tensed. Maybe he felt the coldness of her flesh or maybe he saw her face. But what was for certain was that when he took her outstretched hand in his own, gripping it, it was like pulp. It came apart in his fist, black juice squeezing out between his fingers.

He let out a scream and Heller fell back and over at the sound of it. When he came back up, there was nothing but Miggs’ flashlight being carried away down the street. Nothing else. No Miggs. No little girl.

“MIGGS!” Heller shouted. “MIGGS! MIGGS! MIGGS!”

But there was nothing but his own voice echoing out, empty and morose.

Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus Christ.

That wasn’t a little girl, a voice shrieked in his head. That was a dead thing, a living corpse…

Heller’s mind just went blank and he stumbled through the flooded streets, splashing and falling, his eyes drawn into narrow slits against the rain which hit him in sheets of needles. He kept moving, things bumping into him, his throat constricted down to a pinhole so that he could not even cry out. Then there was a building in front of him. A tall building that had been a hotel. He pulled himself up the steps and through the door and it was just black inside, black but dry.

Breathing hard, he pressed himself against the wall, trying to get his bearings.

Okay, okay, he had to find a door, find a room to hide in. It was the best he could hope for.

He still had his flashlight and that was something. He held it in his hand, ready to thumb the button…but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t dare. But then he knew. The light. Part of him was afraid that the light would be seen. And not just by that awful little girl, but others like her.

For there was no getting around one thing: the dead were in the streets of Witcham now. And some of them weren’t lying still.

Heller stood there, soaking wet and shivering. He had the flashlight in one hand and his 9mm Beretta in the other. He knew he had to find a place, a place he could hide. Though his mind was certainly not firing on all cylinders, his instinct was nearly electric. It told him that he must find a little hidey-hole, a corner he could push himself in. One that was defensible. There he would wait until first light. For surely the living dead had to crawl back in their graves when the sun came up.

Christ, the hotel was so unbearably dark.

It was like being shut in a closet. He had to take a chance. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight. He saw a few doors set in a corridor winding off to his left. Okay. That was a start. He clicked the light back off. He moved down there, opened the first door. Inside, mops and pails, boxes and shelves of cleaner. No, that wouldn’t do. Barely enough room to stand. He tried the next door. Shoving his 9mm into its holster, he gripped the knob and opened it. He put his thumb on the flashlight switch…and paused.

He heard a sound in the lobby. The sound of someone…or something…brushing against the walls blindly as if they were looking for him.

No time.

He stepped inside the room and-

The floor fell away beneath him and he was tumbling, slamming into steps and cracking his elbow and then his head, galaxies born in his brain in great nebular explosions. And then water. Sinking into it, plunging down into midnight depths, his face brushing a muddy bottom.

He came up like a rocket, gasping and clawing and sending waves rolling in every direction.

Stupid goddamn idiot…you’re down in the cellar.

It was so incredibly dark. Just one rolling shadow and you couldn’t see where the water stopped and the air began. Just that darkness that was thick and creamy and oddly suffocating. The water was up to his chest, his nostrils filled with its rank odor. Trying to make sense of it all, Heller made for the wall, figuring he could guide himself back to the stairs, extricate himself from this nightmare.

He had his gun, but the flashlight was gone.

This was not good. He’d made a lot of racket in his descent. Whoever had been in the lobby must have heard him. Knowing this, Heller just froze up and listened. He could hear nothing up there. Nothing at all. But behind him, there was a splashing sound. He wheeled around with his gun. God, the darkness. Like trying to see through a tarp. Another splash off to his left. He absolutely panicked this time, smelling dead things around him. He jerked the trigger on the 9mm, shooting blindly. In the muzzle flash, he saw that the stairs were quite a distance away.

Okay, make for them.

Heller moved through the water, pushing aside a couple floating boxes. No more splashing save his own, just that cutting silence. The noise he made struggling through the water was like thunder. It unnerved him so much that he stopped. And the splashing stopped just after he did. And that meant, that meant…

Somebody was following him.

Somebody was standing right behind him, dogging him in the water. He swung around, bringing his gun up and an odor like spoiled meat blew into his face, warm and sickening. Hands touched his face, his gunhand…hands that were soft and terribly moist.

He pulled the trigger, catching some hulking thing standing there in the muzzle flashes. Something reaching out with gnarled hands, ribbons of flesh hanging from them. He screamed and lost the gun and those hands were on him. Half out of his mind, Heller fought back. Clawing with his fingers, going almost instinctively for their eyes. His fingers hooked into empty eye sockets that slopped with something like mud and tore into mucid flesh that had the consistency of raw pork fat.

Then he was in the water, half-swimming and half-stumbling. Something bumped into him and he realized it was his flashlight. He came up with it, clicking it on and the light showed him a man standing a few feet away. His eyeless, ruined face was grayish-white, swollen, set with numerous holes from which water trickled. A couple black beetles emerged from his eye sockets and ran down his face. He grinned at Heller with blackened teeth.

And it wasn’t just him.

A dozen other heads came up out of the water now, strands of hair hanging in cadaverous faces. Grinning faces.

“Jesus Christ,” Heller heard his own voice say.

Then a woman vaulted up out of the water right in front of him, spraying him with stagnant slime. She was dressed in rotting cerements, her face little more than a skull grown with fine green moss. She reached out and took hold of him, pulling him in close and then her mouth opened in a contorted oval like that of a lamprey and she vomited a stream of black silt into his face, blinding him, making his skin burn like it was rubbed down with lye.

Screaming, he fell back in the water.

And she went with him.

They all did.

Ten minutes later, just silence and dripping in the cellar. That and a few ripples. Heller’s flashlight floated around in a lazy circle, the light gradually dimming.

5

Amongst the wreckage floating along Angel Street, there were dozens of white, nameless things that until quite recently had slept away the ages in jars of serum and formaldehyde. What was in the rain and in the water saturated them, filled them, overflowed them. The things-unpleasant and grotesque to the extreme-bobbed in the waters, puckered and pickled and bleached of color. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: in those dead, dreaming husks, there was activity. Eyes like peeled grapes opened and malformed faces grinned, fingers like scratching sticks reached towards the sky along with other things that were not fingers at all. There was motion and movement and a dread awareness.

And in that shadowy organic soup that flooded River Town, things were born and lived that were never intended to see the light of day.

6

In the thick, listening darkness, Meg waited.

Waited there in the empty house, something unwinding inside her. She felt loose and rubbery, held together by sheer force of will. She was trying to remain calm. Trying to keep herself steady, trying not to panic. But with what she had been through, that was like standing ground zero in a blazing building and trying not to singe your fingers. Her heart was pounding and her nerves were frazzled and there was a curious rushing sound in her head that she figured were her nerves, fully aware and fully electrified like they had never before been in her life.

Alan was gone.

Yes, Alan was gone and she was hiding upstairs in their bedroom with a gas lantern burning on the nightstand. Maybe the light would attract attention, the wrong kind of attention, but she could not bear to be without it. Bear to be alone in the darkness in the great empty house, listening to the rain fall and the water lapping against the walls.

She was petrified.

Just drawn deep into herself now that Alan was gone. Now that Alan had opened the door…and some malefic long-armed shadow had pulled him into the night.

She kept trying to breathe like they’d taught her in birth classes. The baby wasn’t coming yet…thank God…but there were other breathing exercises they’d taught her to stay calm. And she needed to stay calm. She needed to stay calm for baby. Because if she got herself too overwrought, it would effect baby. They were one now and she had to remember that. She had to stay calm, she had to-

Oh dear God, what’s happening here? What’s this all about? What happened to Alan? What was that that grabbed him? What dragged my husband out into the night?

Easy.

She had to take it easy.

She was thinking many bad things now. Not so much thinking them, but feeling them, knowing them to be true. Knowing that there were things out in the water. Awful things. Faceless, hungry nightmares like that crazy shit she read about in those horror paperbacks she could never seem to get enough of.

Meg tensed.

Tensed again.

Downstairs. A noise. No, not just a noise. Not a board creaking or something rattling in the wind. Something far beyond that. This was the sound of invasion: somebody was in the house. Somebody had come in from out there. Somebody that was now standing at the bottom of the stairs, just breathing. But not breathing like they were out of breath, but breathing with a congested sound like an old man with pneumonia. Yes, a clotted, wet breathing.

Meg tried to calm herself.

But it wasn’t working. She tried to tell herself that this individual might have been somebody that had come to rescue her, but she didn’t believe that for a minute. Because whoever had entered her house in the dark of night was not a person, but a thing. Something dirty and dripping and evil.

Oh please, God, make them go away, please make them go away.

But they were not going. They were standing down there. She could hear the water dripping from them. It sounded like blood dripping from a slit artery. Yes, they were standing down there, knowing she was here, just not where exactly. So they were perhaps smelling for her, casting about like a dog for scent.

And now they had it.

They were coming up the stairs. Yes, very slowly and maybe even painfully, dragging their feet from one step up to the next. When they pressed those feet down they made a squishing sound and water ran from them.

Oh yes, closer…and closer still.

Yes, they knew where she was and the trod of those feet was quicker now. Meg could smell her uninvited guest. He or she or it smelled of night and rank earth, rotting things pressed in oblong boxes, cocooned in black soil and rancid silk. Something that had lain in a pool of drainage from a backed-up pipe.

Meg knew she could not scream.

But neither could she move or do anything else. She could only wait as everything inside her withered away and tears rolled silently from her eyes and she held her swollen belly in her hands, praying and praying.

The door began to open.

In the lantern light, she saw a hand grip the edge of the door, spidery fingers slip around it. Gray water ran from them. The hand was white and puffy, the flesh almost transparent and set with a tracery of livid purple veins.

Then a voice, waterlogged and full of slime: “Looks like I got a live one.”

Meg started to scream and she could not seem to stop. At least until that grim form towered over her, dripping foul water, and a terribly moist and flabby hand was pressed over her mouth.

FLOATERS

1

The rain was falling and the dead were rising.

At least, that’s what the crazy bastard on the radio was saying. The guy was calling himself Brother John and inviting everyone to make “offerings of flesh and blood to the Holy Father”…though never saying exactly who that was. Maybe God and maybe the Devil and maybe Dr. Suess for all anyone really knew. People were complaining about old Brother John, but he was broadcasting on a pirate station at odd hours and the FCC were having trouble tracking him. Particularly since his station seemed to be a mobile one.

But what the hell? The city was losing its mind and Brother John was just another symptom.

Sighing, Mitch reached over and parted the shade, got a good look at the streets of Witcham.

Yes, even at midday the world was gray and misty. The rain was still falling, water sluicing along the curbs and filling the gutters, carrying leaves and sticks and garbage down to the iron-toothed mouths of stormdrains, which themselves had backed up now, creating lagoons of whirlpooling water and clotted debris.

The rain was falling and the dead were rising.

Jesus, of all things to say.

Well, he was half-right, Mitch decided, pulling off his cup of coffee and going back to his paper. The rain certainly was still falling and according to the Weather Channel, it wasn’t about to stop. For nearly a week it had been coming down like piss from a leaky pipe and from what they were saying, it would go on until the end of the week. Already, parts of Witcham were underwater…or nearly…and what was another seventy-two hours of this deluge going to bring?

“Mitch.”

He started, spilled a few drops of coffee in his crotch and swung around. Lily was standing there. Her red hair, always so fiery and brilliant, looked like old coals barely holding their heat. Her face was pinched from sleep and her green eyes no longer sparkled. The luster was gone from them, worn away by time and tribulation. But that was Lily these days, a reflection of the beauty she’d once been, but just a reflection. It had been that way ever since-

“Mitch,” she said again. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what that guy on the radio said?”

He pretended he hadn’t. Pretended he didn’t know that Lily had been listening to the radio in the other room just as she had been pretty much since the rain began. Listening to that especially irritating Jesus freak prophesying doom and gloom.

“No,” Mitch said, “what did that nut say now?”

Lily blinked her eyes rapidly. “He said…he said the rain is falling and the dead are rising. Why would he say that, Mitch? Why would he say something like that?”

“Because he’s about three plates short of a picnic, honey.”

“I don’t like it.”

She had enough going on in her head, she didn’t need that idiot making things worse for her. Mitch only wished he could get his hands on that sonofabitch. He would’ve kicked his ass on general principles.

“Shut the radio off,” he told her. “Or switch stations. Christ.”

“But what he said-”

“I don’t give a shit what he said. Last night he was talking about the righteous building a fucking ark for chrissake. You want me to get some two-by-fours and plywood, start making one?”

“But, Mitch…Mitch, Chrissy’s out there,” Lily said very slowly. “She’s out there in that…that rain.”

Mitch swallowed.

Chrissy was fifteen. She could handle herself. These were the things he wanted to say to Lily, but didn’t dare. He was almost afraid of how she might respond. Well, she’s not your daughter, is she? She’s mine and I worry. I can’t help it, I worry. Lily might have said something like that. Now and then she could still get up the gumption to be hateful, to be cruel, but when she did, Mitch knew, you had to grin and bear it. All those anti-depressants the docs had her on, they were doing funny things to her head. Mostly, she was withdrawn and glassy-eyed, but now and then she’d have mood swings so severe they were almost scary. You’d want to call the priest before her head started spinning and she puked up the green stuff. Almost like all those drugs were bottling up everything inside her, all the things you should be letting out when you were grieving. And now and again, they got out, all right. And when they did, cover your head and hope for the best.

Jesus Christ, Mitch, he thought, she lost her twin sister two weeks ago. There’s a connection between twins you can’t begin to know. It’s pulled the rug out from under her and shit down her throat. Be patient, just be patient. She’ll come back. Sooner or later, Lily will come back to you.

Sure, and that’s all he really wanted. Way he was feeling, the rains could wash Witcham right off the goddamned map if Lily would just get her feet under her again. Lily before her sister’s death was full of piss and vinegar. That red hair burned hot right down to its roots. She was a very passionate, energetic woman who took no shit from anyone. Now she was quiet, almost submissive, all that hot blood sucked right out of her and replaced with something tepid and watery. Mitch wanted the old Lily back, needed her back. He would have given his left nut and most of his right to have her suddenly snap out of it, to see those green eyes blazing and her mouth set sharp. Jesus H. Christ, Mitch, look at this place, will you? I drop the ball for a few weeks and you throw in the towel? Get off your dead ass and give me a hand cleaning this place up. You’re not in the Navy anymore and you’re not out on the boats, so let’s snap to it.

Mitch looked at her, wanting to tell her things, but he didn’t. Lily was gone and this frightened, shivering thing had taken its place.

One look in those eyes of hers pretty much stripped your gears. Lily was afraid of everything these days and if you looked in her eyes or listened to her long enough, that fear, that rampant paranoia, could almost be infectious. Yeah, certain parts of the city were flooding, just as certain parts of the Midwest were, but Chrissy was a sharp kid. She’d be fine. Maybe Chrissy was his stepdaughter, but he loved her like she was blood. And nobody could dispute that.

Mitch sighed. “You want me to go looking for her?”

Lily hugged herself, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she sighed. “Yes…no…I don’t know, do you think you should?”

“Sure, why not. She take her cell?”

“Yes, but she’s not answering.”

“Don’t worry about that. Lot of the city is out of service now. We’ll probably be next, way this storm is going.”

Chrissy had taken off early that morning with a couple friends of hers, Heather Sale and Lisa Bell. They were going sightseeing around the city, seeing if the low-lying areas really had water up to their windows like people were saying.

“Mitch, it’s just, you know, the things people are saying…all those stories. I start thinking those things and I can’t seem to stop.”

Sure, all those goddamned rumors and that idiot on the radio was the black icing on a very ugly cake.

Mitch stood up, pulled on his rain slicker. “Don’t worry, Lily. I’ll find her.”

2

The rumors.

Well, they were flying hot and heavy, of course, and the conspiracy theories were rife. The facts of the matter were that an unprecedented storm system was sweeping over the Midwest and the main rivers-the Ohio and the Mississippi-were swollen and bursting their banks. Not that any of this was much of a surprise, for so many smaller waterways emptied into them. In Wisconsin, you had the Fox and Wolf Rivers, the Menominee and the big old Wisconsin herself. All of which either drained into the Mississippi or the Great Lakes and all of which were either past flood stage or quickly approaching it.

A little closer to home-Witcham, that was-you had the Black River which had already overflowed its banks and attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to suppress those turbulent waters with sandbags and dike systems were only partially successful. The Black was flooding and Witcham just happened to lie in the Black River Valley. About five miles outside of town, the Black had been dammed to form the Black Lake reservoir which powered a hydroelectric dam run by Wisconsin Electric which in turn supplied not only the city and outlying areas with power, but cities as far south as Madison and Eau Claire. In an area where the average rainfall was roughly 28 or 29 inches, some sixty inches had fallen in the past four days and the Black Lake reservoir was near to cresting. Even diverting water into the elaborate series of nearby spillways had only lessened the danger minutely. Back in the old days before the dam was built in 1934, Witcham, which lay in the Black River floodplain, was swamped regularly from heavy springs rains and snowmelt. Particularly, River Town and Bethany, both which sat roughly dead center of the city on opposite sides of the river itself.

And now those days had come again.

Just two nights ago, a huge section of the cement wall that contained the Black River had utterly collapsed, sending a huge wave of water into River Town that had washed away houses and Hillside Cemetery to boot. That was ugly business. Some thirty people were missing over there. Drowned, sunk in the mud, who really knew? But the real unpleasant part of that was that when Hillside went, some three hundred graves were swept into the city…along with what they contained.

And that was bad. Just horrible.

But it was none of these things that fed the rumors cycling through the city like cold germs making the rounds. It was something else. On the opposite side of the valley, tucked away in a heavily-forested hollow, was the Fort Providence Army Reservation. It had housed a cavalry battalion in World War I, been transformed into a POW camp for captured German soldiers in WWII, passed to the Army National Guard in the 1960’s, and then around ’78 or ’79 been absorbed into the Army Medical Command and became a high-security installation that the Army claimed was involved in “advanced battlefield medical research.” To locals that meant everything from germ warfare to genetic engineering to alien autopsies, depending on who you asked and how much they’d had to drink. No one really knew what went on there. You couldn’t get with a quarter mile of the fence without MPs all over you.

The third day of the rains there had been a tremendous explosion at the base. The boom was heard and felt in nearby Witcham where it was said the impact actually knocked people out of their chairs and birds right out of the sky, if you could believe that. Mitch’s Barron’s next door neighbor-a pensioner and all-round fussy prick named Arland Mattson-claimed that the explosion felt like God himself had picked up the valley and shook it out like a dusty rug. But Mattson did have the gift of exaggeration.

Mitch himself had felt it roll right through his house and rattle his windows. But he wasn’t about to give the explosion more than that.

The Army claimed a fuel tank had exploded out at the base and there was no need for concern, as it was being handled by the base fire brigade. The blaze was under control within an hour, end of story. The explosion made the local and state news, was even briefly mentioned on CNN.

Right after the explosion, Mitch stepped outside in the pouring rain like everyone else and even in the gray haze of the storm he had seen an odd yellow-green cloud hanging over the direction of Providence. Some people said it sparkled like wet quartz, though Mitch had not seen that. The rain had dissipated it almost immediately. But one thing was for sure, an acrid and sulfurous stink had blown through the town for hours afterward. And Mitch had told Lily that it had not smelled like fuel oil, but the world’s largest rotten egg fart.

And here, then, the rumors and wild tales got their footing.

The explosion was not from a fuel oil tank, but a mishandled tactical nuke and that yellow-green cloud had been a mushroom cloud seething with radioactive fallout. When mention was made of that awful stink, the story changed. It wasn’t a nuke, but a tank of lethal weapons-grade chemical agents that had gone up, maybe phosgene or chlorine gas. And that really got people going in Witcham. They claimed to see rains coming down that were either red or luminously yellow directly after the explosion. Mitch hadn’t seen any of that either, but he had noticed a peculiar almost ochre tint to the sky for several hours afterward.

The night following the explosion, Mitch tramped out to the alley through the spreading puddles with a couple bags of garbage and Arland Mattson had been standing in his garage.

“C’mere, Mitch,” he said. “Got something you’re gonna wanna see.”

He was standing there in hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat, an old green cap with ear flaps on his narrow head making him look like a yak herder. Sitting on the concrete slab around him were dozens of mason jars full of water. Mitch was figuring he didn’t want to know anything about it, because since his wife’s death, Arland had gone from being casually annoying to a full-blown eccentric.

“You see what I got here? In all these goddamn jars?”

Mitch swallowed, shaking rain off himself, hoping it wasn’t urine. “No…what do you got?”

“Water,” Arland said. “Goddamn rainwater what fell from the sky.”

“Oh,” Mitch said, not wanting to follow that particular thread because Arland was the world’s oldest conspiracy theorist. He said there were holes in the ozone because NASA kept shooting rockets through it and that the neighborhood cats ritually broke into his locked garage and pissed all over the tires of his Buick Century just to spite him. Mitch never did ask him how those pussycats handled the lockpicks.

Arland was proud of his jars of rainwater. “Full of contaminates, Mitch. Stuff from those secret experiments at that goddamned Army base. See, I got it from a reliable source that the Army is using Witcham as a guinea pig, spraying us down with chemical warfare stuff to see what happens to us.”

Arland wouldn’t say who his reliable source was. He only pressed a finger to his lips so Mitch would know it was all strictly hush-hush and that you never knew who might be listening. Arland said that a tank of that goo had exploded and that was why it was raining so much. Mitch didn’t bother pointing out to him that it had been raining for like three days before the explosion.

“They been working that goddamned shit into our water drop by drop, spraying us down with it. That explosion was an accident, you know, but it plays right into my hands. Now the air is saturated with that shit and it’s coming down in the rain. I’m going to take these jars to a guy I know, then we’re gonna sue the goddamn government.”

Mitch believed that part because Arland was always trying to sue somebody. He’d tried to sue Mitch twice. Once because Mitch’s leaves were blowing into his yard and another time because the limb of the big oak out front was overhanging his yard and dropping acorns all over his freshly-cut lawn.

“No sense in running away,” Arland said. “We’re all contaminated now. Every one of us.” He proceeded to open his shirt and expose his sunken, white-haired chest which was set with a half-dozen blotchy looking sores. “See them? That’s contamination. At night…at night, them bumps, they move. And when I took a shit this morning, I saw things crawling in my turds. They were like…hey, where the hell you going, Mitch?”

But Mitch was already vaulting through his yard, the rain finding him and drenching him. Arland called out to him that it wasn’t too late to get in on the class-action suit, but Mitch decided he’d pass.

So, those were a sampling of the rumors making the rounds. Some weren’t that crazy and others were considerably more so, but in general they formed the absurd folkloric tapestry of the city as the rain continued to fall and fall.

3

Mitch toured the city in his Jeep Cherokee, taking in the wreckage.

The wreckage of his hometown which was considerable.

Witcham was a mill town of about 80,000 people, a good chunk of those not there for the industry but because of the campus of North-Central U downtown. It was split into some five neighborhoods?East Genessee, Crandon, Elmwood Hills, Bethany, and River Town. The latter two which occupied the lowest tracts of land abutting the river and were now flooded. Mitch lived over in Crandon, about four or five blocks from the house he’d grown up in. Crandon was up high, but given that the entire city lay in the Black River Valley, it was probably only a matter of time before even the high ground was underwater.

He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, the rain coming down so hard at times he had to pull over. Even when it wasn’t hammering down, it still fell in sheets of gray mist. A lot of streets were now blocked off by orange-striped sawhorses with attendant flashing battery lights and even old flickering smudgepots in some locations. And these streets invariably led down into the lower lying areas of the city where the standing water came right up to the tops of porches and sometimes even windows, the roofs of cars and cabs of abandoned trucks poking from the murky pools which were clotted with leaves and branches and all manner of debris.

Mitch paused at a few of these streets-Cobb and Huron and Ripley-and actually climbed out into the rain to view the flooding firsthand. It was amazing. You could hear about it and read about, but until you actually saw it you could not appreciate what had happened to Witcham. If he hadn’t known the city was flooding, he would have thought it was sinking. Standing behind the sawhorses that blocked off the entrance to Cobb Street, he followed the pavement with his eyes downhill until it was lost in a filthy lagoon of water. Down there, it looked dark and dirty and desolate. Rows upon rows of neat whitewashed houses slowly submerging, trees and flagpoles and high fences jutting forth like the masts and prows of ships sinking into some great stagnant sea. And farther down, all those closely-crowded tall and narrow brick buildings lining Cobb were going under, too. Being three- and four-story structures, it would take time, but Mitch could see it happening inch by inch. Even now, storefronts advertising videos and dry cleaning and fried chicken were washed by a dark lake of rising water.

It looked deserted down there and it was for the most part, but people were still living in the upper stories, a few lone rowboats moored to roof overhangs and canopies. He could even see a few people standing on roofs. Some smartass had nailed a couple of signs to the newel posts of his porch. HOUSE FOR SALE, CHEAP, one read and the other said, INDOOR POOL, NO XTRA CHARGE.

Even in the face of catastrophe, people still had a sense of humor.

This made Mitch smile, but the actual flooded neighborhoods wiped that smile away real fast.

Curious and knowing none of this was getting him any closer to tracking down Chrissy-who was probably at the West Town Mall on the other side of the city, no doubt, sampling some stuffed pizza at Sbarro’s or trying on skimpy tops at Pac-Sun while her mother chewed what remained of her fingernails to the very nubs-he started down the hill towards the rising water. Its surface was scummed with leaves and garbage and grass clippings, the bloated bodies of a few dead cats and dogs bobbing in the swill along with shingles and sections of vinyl siding stripped from houses by the wind. Now and again, he saw a few snapped-off tree limbs floating along with an odd assortment of junk: car tires, plastic garbage bags, a pink flamingo or two, a child’s plastic swimming pool…dozens of other unknown, leaf-caked items.

If and when the water did recede, it was going to be a real mess.

Cobb Street led away underwater into River Town, being the oldest part of the city and one of its most low-lying. All those quaint Victorians put up by the pulp and mining barons back in the 19^th century had been turned into trendy restaurants, high-end apartment buildings, and museums. Now they crouched in an oily sea of black, stinking water, slowly rotting away. The seagulls-which usually clustered along the riverbanks and held court at the town dump-crowded for space on rooftops with pigeons, liking the rotten smell of that water and all the dead things coming to the surface. In the far distance where the land dipped towards the Black River, Mitch could see the gables, weather vanes, and sooty chimneys of structures completely sunken in the mire.

And seeing this, he had to wonder how many bodies were out there.

The bodies of those lost in the flooding and all the bodies disinterred from Hillside Cemetery. Christ, it was like some floating graveyard down there from what he was hearing.

And how many of those submerged rooms were peopled by swollen, waterlogged corpses which circled sightlessly in the darkness and bumped along ceilings or pressed white fish-nibbled faces up to sunken windows? And how many would there be before this ended?

He stared out at that rank tidal pool which was a secret, foul ocean filled with secret, foul things dredged up from the river bottoms and cellars and dark places. He had an ugly feeling that there were going to be things in that water that people were not going to want to see. Things left stranded by the receding waters that were not going to be pleasant to look upon.

Something shifted beneath the floating carpet of leaves about ten feet out like a log rolling over. The leaves piled up, but would not part to reveal what it was. Slowly then, the hidden shape began to move in Mitch’s direction, gliding along just beneath the surface, leaves rising in a swell with its motion.

Mitch did not wait to see what it was.

He climbed back up the hill and jumped behind the wheel of the Jeep, hitting the gas and fish-tailing in the slick streets, almost hitting a parked car. But he did not slow down until he was well away from the flooding. And only then did he realize how hard he was breathing or that his heart was hammering.

What was moving under those leaves?

He didn’t know, but he had an ugly feeling in his belly that he was going to find out. Sooner or later.

4

Two hours later, Mitch had not tracked down Chrissy.

He cruised the lots of the West Town Mall and the chic shops and game emporiums near the University, but saw no sign of Heather Sale’s little VW Bug. Despite the rain and wind, people were still out, still shopping and still spending money. But Mitch reminded himself that these were people from Wisconsin, the sort that rode out the blizzards and subzero chills of January and February. As children, they’d grown up as he had with ice skates in one hand and a sled in the other, shoveling paths through hip-deep snow just to make the street. They were a tough and healthy lot that did not fold-up very easily. And if you could survive winter in the far north, rain sure as hell wasn’t going to stop you.

Mitch almost felt like some kind of stranger as he toured the neighborhoods. The city he had known his entire life just, well, it simply felt different. Try as he might, he could not dismiss that rather absurd idea from his head. The city did not feel inviting, did not feel familiar, it felt tense somehow, as if its hackles were raised and its muscles were bunched. Like it was expecting something, bracing for the worst case scenario.

He could not shake the feeling.

The sense that something bad was about to happen, that the engine of catastrophe was even then idling, waiting to crank up to full rev when the time was right.

Even though he had not smoked in nearly three years, Mitch found himself reaching for his cigarettes. Wanting something, needing something that would put his nerves back in orderly rows.

Whiskey, a voice told him. A taste is what you need.

He began to feel a little better when he got back into Crandon, saw all the houses lined up on the streets, Chatterly Park and the water tower, Franklin High and the rain-swept football field behind. In the distance, he could see the stacks and chimneys of the mills and foundries that kept Crandon and much of Witcham alive.

On a whim, he hung a right on Michigan Avenue and cruised The Strip, the local designation for Crandon’s business district. Bowling alleys and hamburger joints, furniture stores and office buildings. Lots of little neighborhood bars tucked in-between with Pabst Blue Ribbon signs hanging out front.

He pulled to a stop in front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus and mainly because he saw a familiar vehicle parked out front-a green Dodge Ram pickup with a bumper sticker that read I BRAKE FOR

STRIPPERS.

Mitch covered his head, running through the rain and into the long sheet metal Quonset that housed Sadler Brothers.

5

Inside it was warm, smelled of wood smoke from the massive wood boiler in the back which Chum and Hubb Sadler had burned long as Mitch could recall and mainly because they were too cheap to pay for gas. There were canoes and little duck boats dangling from the walls, racks upon racks of hunting clothes, fatigues, raingear, winter boots set in-between. Portable ice shanties crowded next to ice augers and racks of fishing poles, glass cases filled with everything from Israeli flags to Russian canteens and paperweights made from. 50 caliber shells.

Sadler Brothers had been sort of a landmark in Crandon since long before Mitch was born and being that was forty-four years before, that was saying something. There was something about the place he’d always liked. It made him feel calm, helped him get his feet under him. He supposed it had something to do with all the hours he’d spent there with his old man when he was a kid. Sadler’s was always the first place they went when they were planning a camping trip or getting ready for deer season or the annual guys-only fishing trip up in the cabin on the Wolf River.

Mitch caught sight of Tommy Kastle leaning up against a rack of snowshoes, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his dirty and raggedy Milwaukee Brewers cap cocked at a rakish angle on his head. Tommy had bought the cap ten years before and claimed he wouldn’t buy another until the Brewers took the pennant. He was chatting it up with some old man who was apparently trying to read the instructions for a flashlight he was buying.

The old guy looked over at Mitch. “Believe this crap? Goddamn instructions are in Chinese or some shit…what the hell’s this country coming to?”

Tommy didn’t seem to hear a word he said. “So they want both forties I got up on Pullman Lake Road. I go, well what do you got in mind? The paper mill guy, he goes, well, we’ll log off both forties and then replant ‘em both for you. I go, with what? I got hardwood up there. You boys clear-cut oak and birch and you re-plant fucking jackpine. He goes, sure but we pay you for your hardwood and we seed pine in there. I go, I don’t want no fucking scrub pine on my land. He goes, well that’s our offer. I go, well, shit, sounds more like rape than a deal to me. If you want to fuck me, how’s about kissing me first?”

Mitch laughed under his breath. Same old Tommy.

The old man went on his way, muttering about the goddamn Chinee strangling the whole country.

Tommy turned and saw Mitch. “Well, Jesus Christ, look what the frigging cat dragged in. How you been, Mitch?”

“Hanging in there. Saw your truck out front.”

“Well, what’re you thinking about this business, Mitch? Goddamn flooding? Ain’t it just the pisser?”

“Sure is.”

Tommy said that it wasn’t about to get any better, if what they were saying was true. Way he’d heard it, people were already pulling up stakes and getting the hell out of the Valley…not that you could blame them.

“Not you?”

Tommy laughed. “I ain’t going anywhere. I got me a boat and if worse comes to worse, I’ll be living on it. Got room for you, too, Mitch.” He pulled the unlit cigarette from his mouth and then put it back in. He looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Mitch. Christ, I heard about Lily’s sister and what happened. Damn, now that’s a tough spot. How’s the old girl doing?”

Mitch had a mad urge to lie. To lie his ass right off. But when he opened his mouth, all he could say was: “Not so good, Tommy. She’s having a hell of a hard time with it. You wouldn’t recognize her.”

Tommy just nodded. “They were tight, man. Even for twins they were tight. What was her name? Marjorie?”

“Marlene.”

“Right. Jesus, what a thing. I feel for you and Lily.”

That was followed by maybe ten seconds of uncomfortable silence. Poor old Tommy, he didn’t know how to handle things like this. He was your average blue collar guy with your average blue collar guy’s sense of compassion. It wasn’t that he was some hardassed redneck with no sympathy, it was just that he’d spent most of his life keeping his emotions on a high shelf in the closet where they wouldn’t cause any trouble and when he did take them out, they were damn rusty and he was damn clumsy trying to put them to work. Like pulling a car out of a garage every few years and turning it over, expecting it to pull a smooth and sweet idle when what it invariably did was sputter and shake and miss, cough lots of blue smoke.

But that was okay. Tommy Kastle was the salt of the earth, in Mitch’s opinion. He’d do anything for you. Give you the shirt off his back or an extra kidney, whatever you needed. Mitch could see it in his eyes, the warmth and empathy that just couldn’t get past his lips. And that’s all Mitch had to know.

Tommy cleared his throat. “All I can say is that I’m sorry about that mess, Mitch. And that’s all I’m gonna say. We go any farther with this, we’ll have to break out the fucking Kleenex and hold hands, watch goddamn Oprah together or something.”

Mitch burst out laughing. “God, but you’re an asshole.”

Tommy grinned, back on ground he knew well. “My mother said to go with your strengths.”

Mitch was feeling better. Those creeping heebie-jeebies seemed to have crawled off his spine now. He felt okay. He felt hopeful and wasn’t entirely sure what had been squeezing his nuts in the first place. It was good to be with Tommy. They’d grown up together. Traded skinned knees and Little League baseball for long hair and Black Sabbath records and then traded them again for the trappings of the working class: callused hands, mortgages, and middle-aged paunches, all that wonderful childhood idealism buried in the same hole with plans to be rock stars and NFL running backs. Maybe that stuff was buried, but if you looked real close at Mitch and Tommy, you could still see it twinkling in their eyes when they were together. There was a connection between them, an understanding. They’d grown from the same roots and all these years later flowered the same buds.

Tommy asked Mitch how things were going over at Northern Fabricators where he worked. Mitch was a machinist, a C amp; C lathe man.

Mitch just laughed. “Well, you figure that one. Northern is over in Bethany and we’re closed until things dry up.”

Tommy said it was the same at the wireworks out on Junction Road. Goddamn flooding. Closed until further notice. “I’m just glad I’m a single guy. No mouths to feed. All I got is me.”

Mitch just nodded. Tommy liked to say things like that, but underneath you could almost hear the sorrow of his existence echoing out like a slow and distant thunder.

“Lookit goddamn Hubb over there, will ya?” Tommy said.

Mitch did.

Hubb Sadler was the last remaining Sadler brother, Chum having dropped dead behind the counter almost fifteen years before from a coronary occlusion. Hubb sat on a metal folding chair behind the long glass counter, sucking off a bottle of oxygen to ease his emphysema which was greatly acerbated by the fact that he went in at over three-hundred pounds. Not a good thing when you were on the downside of seventy. His eyes were gray marbles pushed into narrow draws, his head shaped roughly like a jar and capped with a crewcut that was startlingly white. His face was seamed and deeply-etched with diverging lines. The only time the oxygen mask came off was when he needed to reel out a string of profanity at someone.

The Sadler brothers had done well for themselves, yes, but they’d both been miserable, evil-tempered sonsofbitches every day of their lives. A legacy Hubb kept alive.

Some college girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, was working the cash register. She had brilliant blue eyes and a head of long, curly black hair that hung over her shoulders. Her breasts were large and high, pulling her shirt up even as her jeans rode low on her hips. Every man in the place was getting an eyeful of her flat belly and pierced naval.

“Jesus, lookit that shit, will ya?” Tommy said. “I don’t remember ta-ta’s like that when I was young. Bet she makes her own gravy. Look at Hubb! He’s just eating that up, sitting back there while she shakes her can in his face.”

Hubb did look pleased. But Mitch was thinking it wasn’t because of the girl, but because of the sales he was racking up. People were standing in line with raincoats and boots, lanterns and freeze-dried food packets, sleeping bags and plastic tarps. Old Hubb hadn’t made a killing like this since Y2K.

“What would you say if I told you I was taking her out tonight?” Tommy said.

“I’d say you were a lying sonofabitch.”

“And you’d be right.”

Hubb sat there, holding court with a couple other old-timers: Hardy and Knucker. Both in their seventies, they were regulars at Sadler Brothers. Hardy was probably one of the finest bullshit artists in Crandon and Knucker, well Knucker was just Knucker. For many years she’d been known simply as “Knucker’s Old Lady,” but after Knucker himself-Pauly Knuck-had passed on, she inherited the coveted crown.

More people came through the front door, a blast of wet chill coming in with them. They joined the twenty or so that were already mulling around, ready to spend their money and flash their plastic.

Some guy neither Mitch nor Tommy even knew came right up to them, rain dripping off the brim of his bright yellow baseball cap. He looked worried, his eyes darting around. “Phone’s are all dead,” he said. “TV’s off the air. What the hell’s going on? Is it the weather?”

“I’m thinking so,” Tommy told him.

“Well, I’m not liking it,” was all he said to that.

He marched past them, going for the bins of freeze-dried food. He grabbed a couple boxes of packets, then took a hatchet off the shelves, stood there staring at it. Everyone who passed by got to hear how the phones were dead and the TV was off the air. It was to be expected, Mitch figured, but you could almost see the panic threading through the store.

“Radio’s dead, too,” some teenaged kid announced, a waterproof poncho tucked under one arm.

Hubb pulled his oxygen mask off. “Try that fucking radio,” he told his college girl. “Go ahead for chrissake, turn the cocksucker on.”

Nervously, she tried the radio on the shelf above Hubb’s head. Then she tried the phone, shook her head.

Hubb scowled. “Well, what in the fuck next? Jesus H. Christ!”

“Yup,” Hardy said, “seen this shit before. The Red October of fifty-two. Weather got funny like this. Summer was hot. Wicked hot. Fall was too cold. By Sept the fifteenth, we had an inch of snow on the ground. Then that Red Rain came. It was ugly, by God, it was ugly.”

The college girl was intrigued. Possibly a bit naive, too. “What happened? Did it really rain red?”

“Ahhhhhh…don’t encourage him, honey,” Knucker said. “He’ll go on all day if he has an audience.”

Hardy ignored her. “Sure did, missy. Pissed outta the sky red as blood. Poisoned wells and rivers and killed twenty people. That was nineteen-fifty-two.”

“Ahhhhhh…forty-nine that was,” Knucker said, not looking up from her crossword.

“Fifty-two.”

“Forty-nine!”

“Fifty-two, you stupid old bat! I should know! That was the fall my kid brother got electrocuted up on the roof.”

“Ahhhhhh…your brother lives in Sauk City.”

Tommy laughed. “Goddamn Hardy. What a guy. Red Rain, my ass.”

Hubb looked over at college girl. “What’re you fucking standing there for, sweet cheeks? We got cocksucking people here! Chop! Chop!”

Back on went the oxygen mask.

Tommy shook his head. “That silver-tongued devil. He just has a way with the ladies.” He laughed and turned back to Mitch. “Least that radio’s off the air. You been hearing what Brother John’s been saying?”

“Yeah, I heard all right.”

“Last night it was build your own ark and today it was something about the rain falling and the dead rising. How you like that shit?”

Mitch said he didn’t like it at all.

But what he was thinking about was Lily. How was she going to be handling this? Christ, she wasn’t holding herself up these days with much more than a wet straw and with no radio and no TV, phones down, she might just lose it completely.

“I should be getting back home,” he said.

“Sure,” Tommy said. “Don’t want to be leaving your family, not with all this shit happening. Especially Lily, you know.”

Mitch was going to leave, but he didn’t. He wasn’t exactly sure why. His wife was probably needing him and if Chrissy had come home, there was every possibility they would start fighting. Chrissy was a good kid-smart, witty, and oddly urbane for a fifteen-year old-but she was still a teenager. And if God had ever created a more self-serving, sassy, and selfish tribe than teenagers, Mitch didn’t want to know about them. Lily wasn’t up to putting on the gloves and knocking Chrissy down to size the way she needed from time to time. Not these days. And Chrissy? Well, her teenage drive of self-pity and vanity had amped up to full power these days and it was very hard for her to sympathize with her mother sometimes, particularly when she had trouble seeing anything not reflected in her hand mirror.

So, Mitch should have left and made ready to play referee, but he didn’t. He stood there, almost wishing Tommy would volunteer to come home with him.

“It’s that goddamn Army base, that’s what it is!” somebody said. “That’s what this is all about!”

Tommy and Mitch turned, both saw the woman doing the talking. She was maybe forty, her hair dyed so blonde it was white and set in a spiky ‘do like summer grass baked dead and dry. She had to go in at an easy two-hundred but had decided to squeeze herself into a cherry-red skintight set of Capri’s and matching sleeveless terrycloth blouse. An outfit like that might have looked spectacular on the college girl behind the counter, but on this one the profile was that of an over-nourished gourd.

Tommy, ever the mature adult, started giggling soon as he saw her. “Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.”

Her face was going about as red as her outfit as she stabbed the air with one straining, pudgy finger. “The government’s behind it all! That explosion with the nuke or the poison gas out there at Providence! You think they want word of that getting out? You think they want you people here telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there about these funny rains? Course they don’t! That’s why they’re locking us in here!”

Tommy laughed at her. “Jesus Christ, lady, that was three days ago! You think they’re just getting around to clamping down on us?”

“Who asked you?” she said to him, jabbing the air in front of his face with that finger. Her face was flushed almost purple now, sweat beading her brow. “Why don’t you just stay the hell out of it?”

Tommy laughed again.

“Guess she told you,” Mitch said.

“Guess so. Fucking Hot Tamale.”

Another doomsayer, just what the goddamned city needed, Mitch thought.

But people were ringing around her, their common sense telling them to laugh it off, but something else telling them to listen, that this woman had something important to say. People maybe claimed to despise suffering and atrocity, but they loved things like that, Mitch knew. If it disgusted them or frightened them or disturbed them, well, dammit, that was a pie they wanted a piece of and they intended on cutting into it for seconds, thank you very much. It was the same sort of thing that made children ring around some older kid as they described in graphic detail the maggots in that dead dog’s head at the side of the road or what their sister’s hamster had smelled like after they dug it up a week after it was dead.

“They’re loving this shit,” Tommy said.

And they were.

They had suckered their mouths to the soft white underbelly of dread and were feeding on it, on the horror and dark prophesy that crazy fat bitch was slinging like grisly leftovers.

Tommy shook his head. “I had a cousin like that. Linda. Everything was death and doom with her. She’d get worked up about any old thing. She had a gas pain in her stomach, she thought it was cancer. A plane flew too low, it was crashing. She smelled smoke, her house was on fire.”

“What happened to her?”

Tommy shrugged. “She got leukemia, I think. But then a plane crashed into her house and she burned up with it.”

Mitch just shook his head.

“The phone’s won’t work,” Hot Tamale said, “because they’re not supposed to work! Can’t any of you see that? This goddamn valley is full of death and the Army don’t want us leaking it! So you know what they’re doing? They’re shooting stuff into the air, signals and vibrations that screw-up your TV and radio and phone signals, they’re, they’re-”

“Jamming frequencies?” someone suggested.

“-that’s it! That’s it exactly! Jamming our frequencies so we’re cut off while all that crap they sprayed in the air or blew up settles down on us and makes us all sick! If you’re smart, you’ll go to your families and get out while you can! Because by tonight, there’ll be no way out! Nothing to do but wait here to die! Do you hear me? Wait here to die!”

She made a mad rush for the front door, leaving a heady and slightly nauseating wake of strawberry perfume. Three or four others followed her. The others just sort of stood around foolishly, feeling silly, and dispersing gradually like an offensive odor.

Tommy said, “Jamming our frequencies, my white ass.”

He made a big show of looking around on the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mitch asked him.

“You smell that perfume? Christ my eyes are watering and my nuts have shriveled up. Just checking the floor to see if she left a puddle.”

They both laughed, but there was something almost nervous about that laughter. Tommy was looking a little tense like maybe he would have felt a lot better right now if he had just drilled Hot Tamale right in the face and been done with it.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mitch said.

And that’s what they were about to do when they heard the sound of squealing rubber and somebody screamed and a Dodge Intrepid came vaulting the curb, knocking the front end of Mitch’s Jeep aside and slamming right through the front of the store.

And then all hell broke lose.

6

Some distance from Crandon, in the flooded and smelling byways of River Town, the corpse of Meg Sheeves had been adrift for almost two days. What had come into her house that night, a dripping and faceless thing freshly exhumed from a watery grave at Hillside Cemetery, had been quite merciful, all things considered. There were many things it could have done to her as she began to scream her mind away in a shriek of black noise. Many horrible things. But what it did, it did almost instinctively, and this just to silence her. It placed a single moldering and oozing hand over her mouth and held it there until she stopped moving. Until there was only the slushy sound of its own breathing and rain striking the windows.

Meg, quite dead, sat there in bed, her blue eyes wide and panicked and lifeless. And what had been growing in her womb these eight months died with her.

Then, for no other reason than sheer amusement, Meg’s corpse was tossed out the window and into the water. Where it had been drifting ever since. Bathed in the peculiar amniotic waters that had taken River Town and were even then spilling into the city at large. Fish had been at her, as had other nameless things, and most of the flesh been stripped away from her back and throat. Birds had pecked her face down to a grisly deathmask.

And although she was very much dead and would not reawaken, her corpse began to move. It shuddered in the water, shook itself like a wet dog, and then went still again. She floated spreadeagle, her mauled face, breasts, and swollen belly like separate islands breaking the surface. The largest of these islands began to shake, began to pulse with almost rhythmic undulations as something wriggled its way out of her birth canal. Threads of tissue and slime coagulated in the water like egg whites and then something hairless and pale emerged. Water and blood glistened atop its bulbous head. It opened its gray, cloudy eyes. Shaking and gasping, it coughed out a flux of liquid and jelly and pulled itself atop its mother’s corpse like some fleshy and puckered monkey.

Then without further ado, drool hanging from its seamed mouth, it began to feed.

7

“Well, fuck me,” Tommy said.

The Intrepid had buried itself into the front of Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus like a torpedo spearing into a submarine. The store was, after all, nothing but a sheet metal Quonset held together with screws and rust that shook in the wind so it wasn’t surprising that the car slammed right through it. Right up to the driver’s side door as a matter of fact, taking out the front entrance, flattening a display of rubber rafts and sending a couple mannequins in fly fishing gear pretty much airborne.

Mitch was one of the first to the car, followed by Tommy and a dozen others, all talking at the same time, all asking what the hell had happened here. What was going on? This guy drunk or on drugs?

“Probably crack,” said the guy in the yellow baseball cap, the one who’d announced that the TV and phones were out.

The guy behind the wheel was a kid of sixteen or seventeen with a pierced eyebrow and a Social Distortion T-shirt on. The Intrepid had barely stopped rolling before he was trying to kick his door open. But it was wedged in a snarl of mangled sheet metal. There was rolled insulation hanging all over the roof of the car like the Quonset had vomited it out in its death throes.

“Somebody get a goddamn crowbar over here!” Mitch called out.

The kid was trapped in the car, blood all over his face and necklaced at his throat. He was just out of his mind, kicking at both doors and pounding at the windows, leaving bloody fist-prints on the glass.

“Take it easy, son,” Tommy told him. “We’ll get you out.”

The others gathered were talking about calling the police and 911 until someone reminded them that the phones were all dead.

“I got a CB in my pickup,” a guy with a beard and a ponytail said. He made for the back exit.

A crowbar appeared and by then the kid behind the wheel had settled down a bit. He was just sitting there with a glazed look in his eyes, staring forlornly ahead. Tommy kept talking to him as Mitch bent the sheet metal back. You could say a lot of things about Tommy Kastle, Mitch figured, and most of them would have been true. But when somebody was hurt or needed help? He was always there, not a smart comment or salty crack to be heard. That’s the kind of man Tommy Kastle was.

“Oh my God,” said Mindy, the college girl, her bosom heaving. “Oh my God, oh my God…what happened to him?”

“Ahhhhhh…I’m guessing he ain’t having his monthly, honey,” Knucker cracked and there were a few nervous chuckles.

It went right over her head and Mitch was figuring most things probably did. She looked like a sweet kid-honestly concerned about the driver of the Intrepid-but most there had already drawn the conclusion that this girl wasn’t much sharper than your average dessert spoon. Someone else told her to get out of the way, called her Malibu Barbie, and she told them her name wasn’t Barbie at all, it was Mindy.

Mitch worked with the bar, bending back the sheet metal which groaned and snapped. The wind started pushing a wet mist through the aperture the car had created. All around him, the crowd that had gathered was pulling back, some leaving altogether and there was a good reason for that: Hubb Sadler was on his way over.

“What kind of cock-knocking clusterfuck is this?” he wanted to know, suddenly very spry for an old man dependent upon oxygen. He came over with the aid of his cane, his face red and popping with gnarly-looking purple veins that made his white hair look almost luminous. “Holy H. Jesus Christ! Lookit the front of my cocksucking store! Who in the diddly-hopping, mother-raping Christ is going to pay for this fucking mess?”

He looked pretty much like he was about to suffer the same malady that put his hot-headed brother in the ground. He kept swearing and spitting and wheezing, using every form of the word “fuck” he could think of. And when the old well ran dry, he started making up new ones.

“Take it easy for chrissake, Hubb,” Tommy told him.

Hubb turned on him, slapping a pair of helping hands out of the way. “You shut your cock-fucking mouth, you know what’s good for you. Ain’t this my mother-cocking store? Ain’t I got a fuck-sucking right to wonder whose gonna pay for this mother-cunting damage?”

Mitch just ignored him. He was figuring not much save a towel shoved in Hubb’s mouth would shut him up. That or a good old-fashioned coronary. He kept ranting and gesticulating and wanting to know what kind of dick-shitting driver this slit-cocking kid behind the wheel was anyway.

Mitch was wondering a few things himself as he freed the door.

There was a whole heaping helping of blood on the kid and Mitch was thinking it wasn’t from the impact with his Jeep or barreling through the front of the store. Sure, the Intrepid’s front-end was smashed pretty good, the gold paintjob scratched and gouged up from the sharp sheet metal, but that was about the only damage. Something had happened to the kid and he was thinking it wasn’t from the crash. And whatever it was, it hadn’t been good.

Mitch finally got the door open and the kid pretty much fell into his arms. He half-carried and half-dragged him into the store, laid him out on the floor. What people remained finally got the picture. They brought over a sleeping bag and wrapped the kid in it.

“Hey!” Hubb cried out, more veins popping on his brow. “Who’s going to pay for this cunt-fucking merchandise?”

The kid was breathing real hard. His mouth kept opening and shutting like a fish gasping for air. His eyes were wide and unfocused. He was drooling and shaking and weird spasms ran right through him from time to time like he was getting irregular jolts of electricity.

There was a siren whining out in the distance and somebody said help was on the way, but it seemed to be getting no closer. A few seconds after it first shrilled, five or six gunshots rang out. It sounded like they came from only a few streets over.

“What in the hell’s going on out there?” somebody said.

“Christ…are we under attack?” Yellow Baseball hat asked.

Tommy looked over at him, said, “Shut the hell up already.”

The kid was coming around now. Mindy had brought a first aid kit and Hubb wasn’t happy about that either, because those cunting bandages cost money. Mitch used alcohol wipes to clean up some of the blood, then a hot washcloth Mindy also provided. She was on her knees next to the kid, an arm around his shoulders. He was still shaking, but he wasn’t having the fits anymore.

Mitch got most of the blood off his face and discovered that there were scratches that began at the kid’s forehead and were scraped right down his cheeks. If he didn’t know better, Mitch would have thought a human hand had caused them. Four scratches that had thankfully missed his eyes.

Sure, he thought, like some maniac with sharp fingernails had tried to peel his face off.

The kid shuddered, looked at Mitch and then at Tommy. He swallowed and shook his head, looked over at Mindy and then at Hubb, Yellow Baseball Cap, and the three or four others gathered around. “We…we were over near River Town, me and my mom…we were over there,” he started saying, eyes going real wide and lips hooking in a sneer. “Our place, man, it was flooded out…but not real deep…me and mom, we waded down there to get some things. Water was up past our hips and…and they came out of the water! I saw them, I tell you I saw them! They came right out of the fucking water! Three of ‘em, just came right out of the fucking water, stinking and muddy and they took mom! They just grabbed her! They were smiling! They…they didn’t have any faces…they didn’t have any fucking eyes!”

He started crying and Mindy held him, held his face tight against her chest and Mitch was figuring there were more than a few jealous men standing there. He kept sobbing and shuddering and nobody was saying much. What the hell could they say? Somebody came out of the water, he said. Three of ‘em. Three people and they didn’t have faces, didn’t even have any eyes.

“Kid’s fucking overwrought, that’s what,” Hubb said. “No faces…what kind of campfire fuck-wongling is that? Jesus and his ugly sister, what the fuck is that?”

Tommy looked at Mitch and they held each other’s gaze a moment. Something might have passed between them, but neither really wanted to acknowledge that or what they were thinking.

When the kid had calmed, Tommy said, “Those people, they scratch you like that?”

The kid started panicking again and it took Tommy, Mitch, and Mindy to keep him sitting down. He told them in a high, whining falsetto that those things had come out of the water. And he emphasized things, made sure they realized he wasn’t talking people here. Those things came out of the water and just took his mom. She screamed and they pulled her under. The kid fought, got scratched, and then two more came after him. He barely got into his car and away before they got him.

Operative question here was: what were they?

“Police’ll be here soon,” Tommy said. “Just take it easy.”

“I bet they’re not coming,” Yellow Baseball Cap said.

This guy was starting to get on Mitch’s nerves. They had some real problems here, they didn’t need this doom and gloom shit. Not now. But he did think about what Baseball Cap said. What if the cops weren’t coming? Jesus, what then? Course, they had to be coming. That dude with the ponytail went to call them on his CB.

Hubb had retreated back to the safety of his counter, joining his posse of Knucker and Hardy. They were trying to get a radio station in and getting nothing but static.

Mitch was getting that bad feeling he’d had earlier. You could put a lot of that down to the stress of the flooding and the mad bullshit with the kid here, but he was thinking there was more to it than that. Sometimes, sometimes you just knew in your guts when things were going south and his guts were wrapped tighter than a fat lady’s corset.

Maybe it was his imagination.

Then something thudded into the side of the store.

8

Everyone jumped.

It came again and sounded roughly like fists pounding out there, dozens of fists. Except it wasn’t at the walls, it was at the back door. The fists kept beating. And then, for no reason, they stopped and what came next was a scraping sound like several hands out there were trying to scratch their way in.

Hubb picked up a baseball bat. “Stay away from that fucking door,” he said.

No problem there. Nobody had moved an inch.

“Is that door locked?” Mitch asked.

“Damn straight it is.”

That scratching sound picked up intensity.

The kid let out a helpless giggle. “I think…I think they’re here.”

Mitch was staring at him, wanting to say things, but unable to find his voice. He looked from the kid to the door back there to where the car had opened up the wall. If, say, somebody was out there and they wanted in, well, it would be real tough to keep them out. He realized this as the cool, damp wind from outside sent a chill up his spine.

Just a dog out there maybe, he found himself thinking, grasping at straws that evaded his fingers. That’s all it is, just a goddamn dog. Why are we acting like this?

Then at the front of the store there was the sound of feet running, people shouting. Before anyone could so much as move, a few forms pushed their way in, bending aside the sheet metal flap Mitch had wrenched with the crowbar. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting. Maybe people without faces or eyes, but what he got was almost comic relief.

Hot Tamale was back.

She’d brought her boyfriend or husband who was a skinny little guy in a powder-gray cowboy hat with silver cleats around the shaft. There was a stunned blankness to his features.

“What the hell gives here?” Hot Tamale said.

“Kid had a breakdown or something,” Yellow Hat said. “Drove his car right through the wall.”

The scratching at the rear door had stopped now and Mitch let out an audible sigh. A few others did, too.

Tommy and Mitch got up and went over to the flap Hot Tamale had pushed open. They pulled it back and looked out into the streets of Crandon. The rain was coming down harder than ever, drumming on the sheet metal shell of the Quonset. It fell in blowing curtains, pooling in the road, flowing off the smashed driver’s side quarter panel of Mitch’s Jeep like a river. It brought a dirty mist with it and between the two you could barely see the storefronts across the street.

“I guess…I guess we’ll wait until it blows over,” Tommy said. “Then we can get the law over here and you can get back to Lily.”

Mitch nodded automatically. Despite all that had happened, his mind kept coming back to Lily and Chrissy, hoping they were together even if they were pulling out each other’s hair. The thought of Lily alone without her beloved TV or radio or even the phone was scaring him. And what was maybe scaring him worse was the idea that Chrissy was out in the city somewhere. She was with two other girls, but…

They were about to turn away from the flap when Tommy said, “What’s that…that somebody out there?”

Mitch craned his head closer to get a look. The wind threw rain in his face, but he blinked it from his eyes and saw…saw a couple forms standing across the street. It was coming down pretty hard, but it looked like there were two people standing on the sidewalk across the street. Just standing there in the torrent, getting drenched, but not seeming to be bothered by it. They were facing towards Sadler Brothers and Mitch had the crazy idea that they were staring at him.

“Don’t know enough to get out of the rain,” Tommy said, but there was something lodged in his throat that made his voice sound squeaky, something he couldn’t seem to swallow down.

“I wouldn’t go out there if I were you,” Hot Tamale said.

Of course, everyone was looking at her. Hubb and his posse. Mindy and the kid. Yellow Hat and a young couple who’d come in for battery lanterns, Jason and Gena Kramer, and stayed. Even Tommy and Mitch. Hot Tamale liked to be looked at, liked to be noticed. She liked to be the center of attention and here she was yet again, gathering the faithful around her like an old lady preparing to preach hellfire and damnation.

Mitch saw that cord twitching in Tommy’s neck. When Tommy started losing patience, he generally didn’t get angry; he got mouthy. He pulled off his cap, ran fingers through his sparse graying buzzcut. “Yeah? And why shouldn’t we go out there? C’mon, give us your wisdom, you nutty bitch.”

“Tommy…” Mitch muttered.

Hot Tamale turned on him, her lips pulling back to reveal very nice, very even teeth that were just as yellow as piss in a snowbank. Lots of coffee and cigarettes there. Her left eye narrowed and the right was wide like a shiny new quarter. “Listen, Mr. Mouth, if I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head. So do us both a favor and shut the hell up.”

Tommy grinned. “And if I want any lip out of you, tubby, I’ll rattle my zipper. No, on second thought, I’d chew off my own dick before I’d let it near you. So why don’t you do all of us favor and quit preaching the death gospel. We got enough problems here. Shut your pisshole or I’ll shut it for you.”

Mitch almost burst out laughing.

Jesus, they were facing off now like a couple of kids on the playground. Hot Tamale’s face was redder than her outfit and she was sweating again. Tommy just smirked at her. She’d pegged him right, though. In school, Mitch remembered, he’d been called The Mouth. He was always smarting off and often to the wrong people. But you could never shut him up. You could kick his ass on Monday and on Tuesday he’d been telling you to go fuck your sister. Tommy was slow to anger, but if you pushed him into a corner, he’d come out swinging…sooner or later. Mitch had never known him to hit a woman, but he was guessing that Tommy had already decided Hot Tamale was not of that gender.

Maybe she saw that, too. She looked at her man, gave him a little shove. “Herb? Herb, are you going to let him talk to me like that?”

Herb jerked like he’d been slapped. His eyes were glassy and bovine under the brim of his hat. He looked senseless and numb like he’d just been shot up with Seconal. “Whahuh?” he said.

Mitch stepped in-between Tommy and Hot Tamale. “Okay, lady, tell us why we shouldn’t go out there.”

“Cops’ll be coming,” Hubb said. “That hippie with the ponytail went to get ‘em.”

Hot Tamale laughed, but it was a low, evil sort of laugh. “Oh really? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, people, because he didn’t make it very far. I just saw him. He’s laying out there next to his truck and something chewed half his face off.”

That landed and hit hard. Everyone seemed to suddenly be moving a little closer together like kids around a campfire that have just been told an especially unpleasant horror story. There was an almost communal dread slinking through them as it occurred to each and every one that maybe the cavalry wasn’t coming after all. That Hot Tamale had been right in the first place and they were on their own.

Even Tommy kept his mouth shut.

“You don’t believe me?” she said, vindicated now. “Then step out there and have a look. While you idiots were chatting it up in here, that guy was dying out there. Something got at him and I’m willing to bet that something had teeth.”

Yellow Hat had pulled in closer to her now. He was her kind of people and he went to her like a metal filing to a magnet, falling right into her orbit. Chances were, he would never break the gravitational pull of her big ass and bigger mouth. And probably didn’t want to. But that was fine, that was to be expected, Mitch figured. Yellow Hat was one of these guys who do not look for the silver lining behind clouds, they looked and expected to find misery and often did. And with that in mind, his despairing little brain was easily assimilated by that of Hot Tamale. They went together like dirty bellybuttons and lint.

“You’re talking bullshit,” Mitch said, knowing nobody else was going to.

Way he was thinking, maybe she was right about a few things, but she’d have to prove it. She wanted to sling the shit? Okay, fine and dandy, but Mitch wanted to see what color it was and how bad it stank.

“Oh, am I? Why do you think we ran back in here, bright boy? You think we missed you and your brilliant conversation? We came back because we had to come back! Our car wouldn’t start two streets over and when that rain started hammering down, when it started to fall those things started coming out like goddamned earthworms. I saw ‘em. Herb saw ‘em. And they weren’t people. You hear what I’m saying to you? They weren’t people!” She was breathing real hard now and nobody dared interrupt and she liked that just fine. “You tell ‘em, Herb. You tell ‘em what we saw.”

Herb swallowed something. Maybe a wad of gum the way his throat bobbed. When he started to talk, he spoke in a very calm and controlled matter like he was just reading from a cue card. “The rain started coming down real hard. We got to our car and it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t turn over. And I was thinking, boy, now we’re never gonna get over to the Wal-Mart. And I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart because they had the Moundses bars on sale. You buy one pack of Moundses bars and you get the second pack free. But the car, she wouldn’t start and then I see the lady. The lady was standing right next to the car in the rain, just looking in the window at me. She was dripping wet, the water running off her. Her face was white like a clown and there were holes in it. She was smiling, too, and she had black teeth like them wax Halloween witch teeth. She was…she was real scary-looking, you know?”

Despite the droning narrative, Mitch was picturing it all and it made his flesh crawl. First the kid and his faceless people and now this. Now this. What the hell did it mean?

The rain is falling and the dead are rising.

That passed through his mind at almost hyper-light speed and he let it go, would not take hold of it and look at it, because he could not let himself think things like that.

“Tell ‘em what else, Herb,” Hot Tamale prompted. “Tell ‘em what else.”

Herb cleared his throat. “That lady…she slapped her hands against my window and they sort of splattered. When she pulled them away, there were strands of goo like snot stuck to the glass from her palms. It was like cheese, I thought, like hot pizza cheese hanging from her hands…except, well, I don’t think that stuff was cheese at all. Then, well, we got out the passenger side and we run back here where there was people.”

“Did…did that lady follow you?”

But Herb said he didn’t know. He never looked back.

Now this was the time where somebody would laugh in Tamale’s face, Mitch thought, but nobody was laughing. They had drawn even tighter together, it seemed. Herd reflex. Like a bunch of gazelles sensing a circling lion. They were all looking panicked except for Tommy who just looked irritated. Mitch almost expected them to bolt and run, but when they did, he figured they would do it together. In a herd.

Mindy was sobbing now and the kid-they still had no idea what his name was-was making a funny, almost choking sound in his throat like maybe there was a scream down there that wanted to come out. If you had to peg the atmosphere right then and there, you would have said it was one of confusion. Maybe some fear and uncertainty, too, but definitely confusion. Even Hubb didn’t look like he had the heart to start swearing about it all.

Tommy stepped away from the rest of them. “Well, I’m not listening to anymore of this bullshit. Halloween ain’t for over a month yet and I’m not in the mood for it. So leave me out of this crap, girls.”

“You think it’s that easy, Mr. Mouth? You think you can hide behind your big mouth?” Hot Tamale put to him and her words were sharp enough to amputate fingers. “Because that’s what you’re doing and we all know it! You’re scared yellow and you want to think we’re all crazy, eh? Well, we’re not crazy, you stupid moron, we’re not crazy at all! But, go ahead, be a big man and go out into that rain! Go ahead! I dare you! I dare you!”

“All right, that’s enough,” Mitch said before she double-dared him.

Tommy laughed. “If you don’t shut your fucking pisshole and shut it real soon, bitch, I’ll shut the fucker for you. You and that pussy boyfriend of yours.”

Mitch pulled Tommy away from the pack before things got ugly. The others stepped back farther into the store and they went over to the damaged wall. They stood there, asses up against the hood of the kid’s Intrepid. And for a long time they did not say anything.

“Soon as that rain lifts,” Tommy said, “I’m making like the sheep and getting the flock out of here.”

“I’m with you,” Mitch said.

Tommy pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. Hubb right away started reprimanding him about smoking in the store and Tommy popped him a bird. “You leave these monkeys alone long enough,” he said, blowing out a column of smoke, “and real scary shit’s going to start happening, Mitch. That pig in red hots, she’s the rotten apple in the barrel. She’ll have these stupid bastards looking for a witch to burn, you give her time.”

Mitch nodded. “I can’t wait here much longer. Lily’s probably out of her head as it is.”

“I’ll go with you when you leave. About time I stopped and said hello. Besides, your Jeep ain’t going anywhere.”

Mitch felt better. And not because he had a ride, but because maybe like the others, he wasn’t fancying the idea of being alone out there…not that he believed any of that hoodoo bullshit, of course.

Tommy pulled off his cigarette and yanked aside the flap. “There’s more…people out there, Mitch.”

Mitch saw them standing in the rain, those same gray and dire forms. Except more now, maybe five or six total. And though he did not honesty believe all that Stephen King bullshit he’d been hearing today, he knew looking at those people that there was something definitely off about them. They were standing funny, the rain running right over them, like mannequins somebody had left out in the storm. Too intense, too fixated on the store and the two men watching them. That kind of patience was disturbing.

Tommy said, “Shit.”

Those people, they were crossing the street now.

The waiting was over.

9

Mitch smelled them before they arrived.

Their odor seemed to flood the store in a vaporous stench: a weird, heady smell of rotting garbage and dank sewers, something maybe worse. Something secret and dark and vile.

“What the hell do they want?” Yellow Hat said.

“They want us,” Hot Tamale informed him.

And that was it. The floodgates of panic were opened, because even those that didn’t squeeze up to the sheet metal flap with Tommy and Mitch knew that what was about to happen was going to be really, really bad. Hardy started praying under his breath and Mindy let out a long, shrill scream. Yellow Hat ran to the back of the store and then ran right back. Hot Tamale stood there defiantly like she was enjoying it all and Herb stood there with her like he did not have a clue about any of it.

Hubb, who had gotten most of his left knee shattered in the Korean War, seemed to realize that battle was about to be joined. “Those cockfuckers want to break up this party? Well, fucking peachy, let’s tan their hides.”

He wasn’t worrying about his merchandise now. He had his baseball bat and although he did not sell firearms, he had just about everything else and with the help of Tommy and Jason and Gena Kramer, weapons were passed out: axes and hatchets, machetes and British Army police billyclubs. Mindy took the kid over behind the counter because he and she were in no shape to do anything.

But the others, they stood their ground-Mitch and Tommy, Hubb and his two elderly chums, Hot Tamale and her boyfriend, Jason and Gena Kramer, even Yellow Hat. They stood in a loose half-circle like some kind of savage gauntlet, scared but cohesive, ready to kill anyone or anything that made it through the rupture in the store’s front wall.

Mitch waited at the flap, watched those people come on.

They moved with a slow and deadly intensity, drenched and ragged things with hair hanging in their faces. Like Tamale’s boyfriend said, those faces were bleached white like floaters pulled from rivers. Even their lips were colorless. But their eyes, dear God, they were just black and glistening like glass eyes dipped in India Ink. They did not blink. They were glaring and set and merciless. You could not reason with eyes like that or the fathomless murky brains which compelled them.

“You come in my motherfucking store and you’re dead!” Hubb called out to them, not seeing them from his position, but no doubt feeling their odious presence. “You better stay out there, you cocksucking hippies!”

Mitch felt a manic laughter bubble in his throat. Hippies. Now that was rich. You could buy the whole bank with that.

Mitch pulled away from the flap when they were only feet away.

He stood there with the others, amazed at how perfectly the Intrepid had penetrated the front of the store. The sheet metal had been pushed in, bent, but it had not been torn apart really. It had just conformed itself to the intrusion of the car. And except for the piece Mitch had bent to get the door open, you could not see outside unless you yanked that flap back.

And was that a good thing or a bad thing?

There was a great thud as the things hit the front of the store. It was as if, in those last few feet, they’d decided to rush the building and see if they could simply burst through the front like the car had. They hit the outer sheet metal wall and just began to pound and scratch at it with an almost idiotic glee. Mitch had seen their eyes, had seen what was behind them, and although there was nothing in them remotely human, there was cunning and craft and a cold, almost mechanistic sort of intelligence. He had seen it there like sputtering candlelight in a dim, webby attic. The sense that while these people probably would never write a great sonnet or design a suspension bridge, they understood tactics just fine.

Of course, at that moment, they were not practicing any.

More like pissed-off children trying to force their way into the candy cupboard. To hell with subtlety and logic, let’s try brute strength here.

The sound of those fists hammering on the sheet metal exterior boomed like thunder and in combination with the rain pounding on the roof, the inside of the store was just a hive of echoing noise. But then as quickly as it had started, it stopped.

No more hammering.

No more scratching.

Just the rain and even that had lessened a bit. Somebody let out a gasp of air and somebody else cleared their throat. That silence from outside was not just loud, it was screaming. They could hear the rain dropping into puddles, an occasional finger of wind rattling the roof. Nothing else.

Tommy looked over at Mitch and Mitch just shrugged.

Had they gone? Mitch didn’t think so. They were out there, all right. He could feel them somehow and he thought he could hear one of them breathing with a gurgling sound like backed-up drainpipes. Sure, brute strength had failed, now came subtlety. They were waiting out there with an almost inhuman patience, just waiting for somebody inside to peel back that flap and then they’d grab whoever was fool enough to try it.

Tommy looked like he was considering it, but Mitch shook his head.

“Wait,” he said.

“Is there any other way in here?” Jason Kramer asked.

Hubb told him there was not. Only the locked back door and the front door where the car now had inserted itself. No windows. No nothing.

Mitch tried to swallow, but there was no spit left in his mouth. He was feeling that cold rain blowing in around the car and shivering, thinking about Lily at home and what she would do if some of these things came knocking like trick-or-treaters.

Nobody had relaxed, it was too soon for that, and that was a good thing because the things out there were trying again. A single bare arm pushed aside the flap and began searching around like a blind man looking for his cane. That arm was dripping wet and just as white as tombstone marble, set with tiny round perforations like somebody had been pounding nails into it. As white as it was-and it was white, a bloodless white lacking any pigment-it was also mottled gray in spots with tiny bumps like clusters of minute toadstools and you could clearly see a dark purple vein tracery beneath the skin.

“Shit,” somebody said.

Another arm joined it and another and another, until there were no less than six of those anemic-looking limbs pushing aside the flap, white fingers searching around like albino spiders for something to fasten on to. Mitch could just imagine them pressed up together out there like a bunch of kids reaching through a hole in the fence, trying to find their ball on the other side. Now and again, he caught a glimpse of the bodies they were attached to, saw a distorted blur of a face or the whipping, wet hair of a woman.

A couple more hands joined in the fun now, only these hooked around the flap of sheet metal and began trying to widen the hole. The metal began to groan. If these individuals just stopped and used their beans for a moment, they would have quickly realized that you could have indeed gotten into the store one at a time and very easily. But the hole just wasn’t big enough for seven or eight bodies at once. But there was greed at work here like piglets all trying to squeeze in on the same nipples at the same time.

One of the arms was slit open by the jagged edge of the flap and Mitch saw that no blood came out, just a trickle of something black and watery that the rain instantly washed away.

It was enough, by Christ, it surely was.

Mitch and Tommy in the lead, everyone waded in. People were grunting and swearing and shouting, swinging axes and machetes and clubs at those snaking arms. They recoiled with the impact, but kept coming back, flaying and clawing and scratching. Tommy brought down his axe, caught one of those hands between the car door and his axe-blade and severed three fingers. The hand pulled away, stumps spitting that black goo. The fingers themselves landed on the hood where they wriggled like white worms. Mitch laid open an arm from wrist to elbow and nothing came out but that inky sludge. A spray of it struck Jason Kramer in the face and he screamed like he’d been scalded by acid. He tripped and fell, red welts rising on his cheeks where that liquid had struck him.

Most everyone fell away as more of that blood flew and one grasping hand darted in and grabbed Tommy by the wrist. And with enough force that his own hand flexed open and he dropped his axe.

He tried to pull away, an almost hysterical cry coming from his mouth: “Mitch! Mitch! Get that fucker off me!”

Mitch brought his axe down with an overhead swing as the arm tried to pull Tommy towards the opening. The blade caught the arm right at the bicep and cleanly severed it, the axe head traveling right through it and shattering the driver’s side window of the Intrepid. The arm let go and dropped to the floor and everyone jumped away from it because it was not at all dead.

Tommy fell back, rubbing his wrist and you could see the indentations of those fingermarks.

The arms retracted and then came in again. Mitch and Hubb kept pounding away at them and they were pulled away and then there was just silence out there. Mitch thought he heard those things running off through the puddles, but he could not be sure. The flap was bent wide open, though, and there was nothing out there but the falling rain.

Everyone was breathing hard and shaking their heads, but they did not speak.

Those fingers had finally stopped wriggling and just looked dead.

The arm was still thrashing, though, fingers waving and scraping, muscles and tendons standing taut beneath that horribly white flesh. It flopped and jumped in a pool of that black filth and then went still.

Hot Tamale looked about as pale as that arm and Gena Kramer looked ready to throw up. She held her husband as he held his face and then she turned and did throw up.

Hubb opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then just closed it again.

Everyone was pulling back into the store wordlessly, giving that arm a very wide berth. There was not a biologist among them, but they did not need any scientific training to tell them that a severed human limb could not live after being cut off. There might be few shudders as its nerve endings pissed the last of their electricity into the muscles, but that was about it. But this particular arm had been alive, very alive. Disconnected or not, if it had found a throat to strangle, it would have done just that.

Tommy lit a cigarette. “Think…think I saw that movie about the living arm,” he said in a dull monotone. “Except it was set in the Arctic.”

“And it was an alien arm,” Hot Tamale said.

“Got ripped off by dogs,” Herb added.

Mitch looked at them and burst out laughing. Not everyone joined him, but most were smiling at the very least. Hubb laughed so hard Mindy had to wheel his oxygen tank over so he could grab a few puffs.

But the good humor, which was really just some hysterical after-effect of the shock and horror, died out when Yellow Hat opened his yap and said, “What the hell is going on in this town?”

Which, Mitch thought, was the first intelligent thing he’d said.

Nobody answered him, so Hot Tamale took the bait. “Just like we saw out at our car,” she said. “All white and dead-looking…you know what that means, don’t you?”

“What?” Mitch said.

“Zombies. Those things are zombies.”

10

Mitch waited for Tommy to say something smartassed, but he didn’t.

Zombies, for chrissake. Of all things. Mitch wasn’t ready to swallow that one, but then on the other hand, he sure as hell did not have a better explanation. Zombies. Sure, he’d seen the movies. They dragged their dead asses around, munching on people. But they were slow, dull-witted, and almost comical. These things had not been slow nor comical. They had been fast and able to use rudimentary logic. In those movies you just shot them in the head and that was it. Mitch had an uneasy feeling that a bullet to the head would not be enough this time around.

Listen to yourself! You’re acting like those…those people were the walking dead! You can’t honestly believe something like…can you? Well,

CAN YOU?

But he wasn’t sure. Not sure of anything. He walked over to the severed arm, stared down at it. It looked just like a dead arm. It was almost phosphorescent it was so terribly, unnaturally white. He could see the fine black hairs curled on the forearm, the matting of lines on the palm. He kicked it and it flopped over with a slapping sound.

“Be careful,” Hot Tamale said. “It might be alive still.”

Mitch jabbed it with the handle of his axe. The flesh gave like normal flesh. He jabbed it a couple more times and it did not move. Then he prodded the palm and the entire arm flexed obscenely and the hand grabbed the axe handle. Not just grabbed, but held on tightly. He could see the tendons straining at the wrist. He was horrified, yet fascinated. It could not be alive, not really. This was some grotesque reflexive action and nothing more. He tried to shake it loose, but it held. At least for a moment or two, then it relaxed and thudded to the floor.

Mitch just stared at it.

Maybe he needed this, needed to see that this dead arm still had life in it when it couldn’t possibly. Maybe the idea of that unlocked something in him and let him accept the idea that, yes, the rain was falling and the dead were rising. Sure, and the dish ran away with the fucking spoon. Disgusted as he was, he could not look away. He felt like Alice peering through the looking glass and seeing a distorted, impossible world on the other side.

“Fuck this shit,” Tommy said.

He came over with his axe and started swinging it and pretty soon Mitch was joining him. They chopped the arm to white fragments, sweating and grunting, but feeling that it had to be done. The arm was just an arm, just so much meat they had chopped up. It had muscles inside and bone.

When they had finished, all those scattered bits of meat began to move, they trembled and squirmed and the bone thudded against the floor. It was like it wanted to put itself back together again.

Mindy saw the whole thing and just kept shaking her head. “No, no, no, this can’t happen,” she said, her eyes wide and filled with tears. “This can’t happen! This isn’t possible! No, no, no, no, no-”

She went down to her knees, wailing a thin and strident scream. Hot Tamale went to her, pulled her to her feet and shook her roughly, turning her away from the remains.

“Get a hold of yourself!” she shouted in her face. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better!”

Hubb had had his fill. He came over with a can of Coleman lantern fluid and liberally drenched the remains. He struck a stick match and tossed it at the mess. There was an eruption of flame and the flesh bubbled and blackened, issued plumes of greasy smoke. The stink of burned meat was nauseating. When the flames died out, there was just a lot of black and crusty remains.

“Somebody get me a cocksucking shovel and a pail,” he said.

Outside the rain had subsided now to a drizzle. Mitch went over to the flap and wrenched it open further. Nothing out there now but the fading light of day and puddles spread over the street several inches deep.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Tommy said.

A car came rolling down the street then and they saw it was a police cruiser with the emblem of the Witcham force on the doors. It passed right by the store, then braked and backed-up.

“Well, it’s about fucking time,” Hubb said.

The cruiser stopped in the middle of the street and two cops got out wearing blue rain slickers and plastic bonnets over their caps. They just stood there in the flooded street looking at each other and the car jutting from the front of Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus.

“Well, how are we going to explain this mess?” Jason Kramer said. His face was red from where he’d been struck by the black goo, but his wife had swabbed it with burn cream from the first aid kit. He looked like he’d be all right.

“In here,” Mitch called out through the wide-open flap.

The cops started over and that’s when Mitch noticed that the sky was looking funny. Strange. Something. That peculiar ochre haze was hanging above the town just as it had after that explosion out at the Army base. And at that moment, the rain started coming down again.

“Oh shit,” Tommy said.

The rain that was falling now was not normal rain. It was yellowish and sparkling and as it struck the two cops out in the street, they began to dance around like they were standing on a hot plate. They jerked about like marionettes, trying to cover their faces as if a swarm of hornets had descended on them. One of them cried out and fell right in the street. The other tried to make it to the cruiser and fell against it.

Mitch saw his face.

He clearly saw it.

That rain was no ordinary rain, it was more like some kind of toxic acid rain. For as it struck the cop’s face, it actually burned holes in it and the flesh went almost liquid like hot wax. The cop’s outstretched fingers were…were melting, the skin hanging off in strings.

He slid down into the puddles and stopped moving.

And as quickly as it had come, that bizarre yellow rain stopped. You could see it sparkling in the puddles for a moment or two and then it dissipated. Just the drizzle falling now. It had come with a sharp, acrid stench and now that was gone, too. Nothing else.

“Don’t go out there!” Hot Tamale said.

But Mitch did and Tommy followed him. The drizzle falling was just a drizzle, chill water and nothing else. They went over to the cops and they were both dead. Their faces were pitted from the rain, contorted and misshapen like they’d spent the night in a tent full of hungry mosquitoes.

“Hell is going on in this town?” Mitch said.

But Tommy just shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m thinking were in some very deep shit.”

11

There was no sense in rationalizing what they had been through as they drove away in Tommy’s Dodge Ram. Rational thinking seemed to have no place in Witcham now. In the past few days, it seemed, the city had suffered some sort of cataclysmic nervous breakdown and there really was nothing left to do but cross your fingers and hope it regained its sanity.

And with what Mitch and Tommy had just witnessed, it didn’t seem like that was going to come to pass. Insane things had happened and they both had the nasty, unsettling feeling that they were going to continue happening.

On the drive over to Mitch’s house, Witcham bore no signs of the abnormal psychology it had so freely exhibited at Sadler Brothers. And maybe “exhibited” wasn’t the right word here, maybe flaunted was more like it. Sure, the streets were steadily flooding and the sewers were backing up and the rain continued to fall, but it had not been reduced to a graveyard. Bodies were not bobbing in puddles nor corpses splayed wetly on the walks. There seemed to be many more abandoned cars then there had been when Mitch set out from home earlier that day, some left deserted right in the lanes with their doors open, but that did not necessarily mean anything. People-living people-were in the streets, walking around, viewing the rising water.

But they did not seem panicked.

“I don’t get it,” Mitch finally said. “If that yellow rain fell all over town, there should be some evidence of it…am I right?”

“Maybe it wasn’t all over town. Maybe it was spotty.” Tommy suggested, seeming to like the idea. “You know how it is, you’re in the middle of a downpour and three streets over its bone-dry.”

That had to be it. Because if that rain had hit the entire town, there should have been bodies. And the people in the streets would not be strolling about in rainboots, with kids in tow. They would have been hiding or driving out of town to beat hell.

Tommy lit a cigarette, turning onto Ames Boulevard and navigating through about two feet of standing water. “You think there’s any chance that what we saw today…that any of that could have been an isolated incident?”

“I’m thinking not.”

Tommy pulled off his cigarette and sighed.

But that was it, wasn’t it? The bottom line to this whole mess: if insane shit like that had happened once, then surely it would happen again, Mitch figured. It was a little hard to swallow the idea that all that horrible business had been some kind of nightmarish fluke. That wasn’t just stretching reality, it was tying it in knots. Whatever those things had been, they had come out in the heaviest rain. Hot Tamale had said something about when the rain started to hammer down they came out like earthworms. And the kid who had driven his car into Sadler Bothers said he’d been over in River Town and those things had come out of the water when they grabbed his mother.

What was that saying? These things were in the water? They only came out in downpours?

All Mitch knew was that those things had shown in Crandon which was very wet, but not truly flooded yet. And what about River Town and Bethany, places that hugged the river? Places that had as much as five feet of standing water in the streets or were almost entirely drowned? What was it going to be like there tonight when the lights went out? How many doors would be knocked on in the dead of night and, better, what would be doing the knocking?

Mitch sighed, thinking about all those stiffs that had been washed out of Hillside Cemetery. River Town was full of them. And what if not just a few came back from the dead…but all of them? Good God. “Gimme one of those cigarettes,” he said.

“No, Mitch. I don’t believe in corrupting the nation’s youth with the evil weed.”

“Gimme one, you knothead.”

Tommy did and Mitch stared at it before he put it in his lips. He’d quit four times now. This last time had been for almost three years and here he was, ready to hand himself over to the monkey again. “Fuck it,” he said and put in his lips. He fired it up and almost coughed out half a lung on the first pull. Two drags later, he was fine. His body had accepted the filth he was sucking into his lungs again. That easily.

“You’re nothing but an addict,” Tommy told him. “They ought to lock up freaks like you.”

Mitch pulled off the cigarette, studying the gray world of Witcham and looking for something unusual, something out of the ordinary, anything that would tell him he hadn’t hallucinated this afternoon. But he saw nothing. Lots of water, lots of dripping trees, lots of saturated lawns bordering wet houses, but nothing else. Nothing truly peculiar.

Tommy had not mentioned any of it beyond that weird rain and Mitch knew he was having trouble with it. No surprise there. The flooding and now the walking dead. Jesus, like starring in The Night of the Living Dead as directed by Irwin Allen.

“Hell’s going on over there?” Tommy said all of a sudden, slowing the truck.

A sheriff’s cruiser was parked at the edge of the road. A culvert emptied into a drainage ditch which wandered through a high-grassed field and down towards River Town and the river itself. Two deputies in rain slickers were down the embankment working at something with long metal poles. They didn’t look happy about it.

“Let’s see if they need a hand,” Tommy said.

And Mitch was going to tell him that he had to get home to Lily, but suddenly he was feeling in no hurry. Over on The Strip it had been a nightmare and five blocks away, just a rainy day. Nothing more.

They got out and some kid was standing up on the road chewing a mouthful of bubble gum and watching the proceedings below.

“Got a body down there,” he said like it was no big deal. “And it’s moving.”

Mitch tensed inside. It was what the kid had said. Got a body down there…and it’s moving. Not that there was somebody injured down there, but a body and it was moving.

Mitch led the way down the muddy embankment, trying not to slide on the wet grass. He knew this drainage ditch, it was one of many hooked to the rainwater sewers under the city. It was about three feet deep and maybe four wide. In the summer there was maybe a foot of water in there coursing amongst the rotting foliage and cattails, crickets chirping and frogs chortling. A dark and boggy place. Even in the spring it was never more than three feet deep. But now it had burst its banks and then burst them again, had to be an easy six feet deep. As they got nearer, Mitch could smell a dank sewer smell and then something far worse…the stink of a dead dog that had burst open with gassy decay and maggots.

It’s another one, isn’t? he started thinking. Another dead thing that ain’t exactly dead?

“You need a hand?” Tommy called out.

One of the cops turned and looked at them. His eyes were wide and his lips were trembling. He looked angry, sickened. “No, what we need is a fucking psychiatrist.”

There was a body lodged in the ribbed mouth of the culvert and they were pulling it out. As Mitch and Tommy looked on, they brought it to the bank with those long hooked poles, managed to pull it up into the grass like an especially large and especially loathsome dead catfish.

“Oh my Christ,” one the deputies said, turning away.

Mitch felt his guts trying to sneak their way up his throat in a tide of bile.

“Sonofabitch,” the other deputy said, wiping rain out of his face. “It ain’t got no legs. It’s dead…gotta be dead…but it’s moving.”

“Won’t be the first one today,” the other said and his partner shot him a look.

“What’s that?” Tommy asked him.

He shook his head. “I didn’t say anything.”

Like hell you didn’t, Mitch thought.

The body was bloated and bleached fish belly white, the remains of a camouflage fatigue shirt hanging over its mottled torso in rags. There was nothing but dirty, fleshy ribbons beneath its waist and where the skin wasn’t white, it was black and singed as if it had crawled bodily from a blast furnace. There were burnt blotches all over its chest and it had been slit open from belly to sternum. Inside that gaping wound, you could see its organs and the jutting staves of ribs. And what was most shocking of all was that it appeared to be female. It had breasts…or at least one of them which looked like a ghostly white mound with a gray nipple. The other was squashed just as flat as a flower in a book.

“Fuck is going here?” Tommy asked them.

But they had no answers. No more than they knew what they were going to do now that they had landed their trophy fish here.

She should have been dead.

Should have been dead about five times over, but she was not. Her chest was rising and falling with a bubbly, syrupy sound like Jello forced through bellows. Her right arm was intact, the hand flexing, the fingers scratching in the grass like white pencils. Her left arm, however, had been cremated down to a gnarled stick that was flaking away. A down of filthy black hair trailed down the right side of her head, but was completely burned away from the other side, the crown crushed and laid open with a gash so wide you could have put your fist in there. Inside, you could plainly see her brain, all those gray-white and bloodless convolutions nested together like pale worms.

But Mitch wasn’t looking at any of that.

He was looking at her face. The meat had been peeled or burnt from her eye sockets on down, a flap of white flesh that should have covered one cheek was tossed to the side, hanging there by threads of gristle. She looked like some hideous anatomy specimen, her face just a sculpture of red meat and pink muscle, teeth jutting from puckered gums. And her eyes…dear God…like twin black mirrors, shining and wet.

“Push her back in,” Tommy said, not trying to be funny, just absolutely offended by her…or it.

And it almost looked like the deputies were considering it.

She was looking up at Mitch with those terrible eyes, her lower jaw pulling to the side in what might have been a grin had she any skin or lips around her mouth. He felt his stomach flip over as something like an oily black teardrop rolled from one of her eyes. Rain streaked down her face. Look at the way she’s dressed, he thought, the remains of that shirt. Camouflage. Sure, could be just a fashion statement, but I’m thinking this lady was a soldier. Just what exactly happened out at Fort Providence? What exploded out there and what were they working on to create a monstrosity like this? He was not a man given over to fainting spells or dizziness, but right then he felt as if he might swoon, go right down to his knees and then face first into the grass. Rainwater had gathered in the troughs under his eyes and he wiped it away with trembling fingers.

The woman…whatever she was…opened her mouth, or at least her jaws pulled apart with a wet and sticky sound, more of that black juice running out. She was making sounds, trying to form words really, but what came out was more of a low choked growling than anything else.

And maybe Mitch was losing his mind-he was pretty sure he was-but a wild and irrational horror rolled right through him because he was almost certain that as she stared at him, she was trying to speak his name. Trying to tell him something and he had a pretty good idea that whatever it was would send him right over the edge.

“Mrrrrsshhh,” she intoned with a sound like tearing, moist cloth. “Mrrrrsshhh.”

“She’s…she trying to talk,” one of the deputies said, a crooked smile passing over his lips as if the absurdity of that had finally hit him.

And Mitch thought: Yes, I think you’re right. And she’s trying to speak my name.

She could have been trying to say a lot of things or nothing at all. There was no way to know, yet Mitch was certain she was trying to say his name. And that was the true horror of it, wasn’t it? The fact that she stared only at him and knew his name. As maybe the dead knew the names of all the living on sight, knew their secrets and pains, all those things denied them in life. Just as this woman did. And Mitch had a disturbing idea that she not only knew his name, but had things she wanted to tell him about…like maybe how he was going to die and when, or what some of her friends had done with Lily while he was gone.

He turned away as she tried to speak again, pretty certain that he was going down this time as fluttering wings filled his head. He scrambled up the embankment and held onto the guardrail, almost losing his lunch right there and maybe his mind, too.

Down at the ditch, he heard Tommy say, “What’re you gonna do with her?”

And one of the deputies said in an almost hysterical voice: “Do with her? Well, we’re gonna get her to the ER, see if they can patch her up.”

His partner uttered a sharp laugh that was just this side of a scream.

Then Tommy was coming up the embankment and Mitch felt his hand on his shoulder. He recoiled from his touch. The idea of being touched by anyone or anything was akin to violation at that moment. The kid was still standing there, jaw hanging open, gum forgotten. Rain dripped off the brim of his baseball cap.

“You live near here?” Mitch asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, pointing towards a row of old company houses up the road, each one exactly the same. “Over there.”

“You better get home then.”

“I was watching, I was-”

“Get your ass out of here now!”

The kid took off running, splashing through the puddles, tossing a few fearful looks over his shoulder.

“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy asked.

“No,” Mitch said. “I’m not. Now take me home. I have to get home right now.”

12

Well, it was raining, goddamn yes, it was raining, but that did not mean the mail would not go through. Craig Ohlen had been delivering for twenty-three years, thank you very much, and neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night was about to stop him. And that included a very temperamental God with an especially weak and leaky bladder that was drowning Black River Valley like a bag of kitties.

Take more than some rain to keep me off my route, Craig told himself. If the blizzards of ’84 and ’96 didn’t stop me, rain sure as hell will not.

Craig was taking his job even more seriously since the flooding began and had even suggested to the assistant postmaster-that uppity, ass-kissing squeeze of hot shit Wally Morrow-that just because Bethany and River Town were flooded, did not mean the mail should not get through. Because people were living down there by the river and that goddamn water would have to rise pretty damn high to wash them out. The National Guard had tried. Many went. Many were already gone. But some? No, they refused to move. And it was to these people Craig had been speaking. All I’m saying, Wally, is that if these people are still there, they have a right to their mail. You get me a rubber boat with a motor on it and a bullhorn and I’ll see to it that they get it. Of course, Wally Morrow had looked at Craig like his fly was unzipped and something was dangling out in the wind.

No surprise there.

Wally had gone to hell ever since he took the assistant’s job and quit the union. Now he wore a suit and a brown little nose, had his head so far up postmaster Hebert’s rosy-cheeked bunghole that every time Hebert smiled, you saw Wally’s goddamn dentures grinning at you. Craig’s suggestion of getting the mail through was promptly-and not necessarily politely-shot down.

And Hebert, of course, wasn’t much better.

He was a hell of a taskmaster and universally despised by members of the Postal Worker’s Union, not only for his stinginess and his radical attempts to cut jobs and pay and benefits, but for his constant spying and route changes, and his encouragement of union members to tattle on one other. Hebert was pushing sixty and maybe, God be praised, he’d retire, but that was probably wishful thinking. Adlar Rose, the former postmaster, had been practically senile before he was put out to pasture-pissing his drawers and picking his nose with the tip of a pen (leaving plenty of telltale pen-marks at the edges of his nostrils) and then, of course, there had been the legendary incident of the turd on the floor of the office Men’s Room. Adlar-who had shit his pants more than once, usually when he sneezed-had heard about the mystery turd (a big one, too, Bobby Frieze had said, about the size of toilet paper tube and evil-smelling), had gone straight in there, sighted the offending log through his bifocals and picked that sucker up with a tissue. And, also according to Bobby Frieze, had said, “Must be fresh…kind of warm and squishy.” So, there was little doubt who had shat out that particular brown bomber, given that most people have a taboo about handling adult turds. But the burning question at the time, one that was even broached at the monthly union meeting was this: How could a turd that size roll out your ass without you being fully aware of it?

Anyway, Craig was thinking that if tradition held, they’d have to wheel Hebert out.

About the time Tommy Kastle and Mitch Barron were hearing from Hot Tamale and Herb about the weird and possibly dead woman outside their car that had sent them running right back to the Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus, Craig Ohlen was on Kneale Street, making his rounds.

Kneale was a pretty good run. There were more than a few nuts, but that was part of the job. The rain was coming down hard and it didn’t seem that you could hear much else. Craig kept going, stuffing letters and circulars in mail slots and wishing that leaky bladder overhead would take a breather already.

He cut through the Fisher’s yard and into the Boyne’s.

The Boyne’s weren’t bad people, when you got to know them. Margaret Boyne was a pissy old bitch who regularly reported people in the neighborhood for not cutting their grass or fixing their fences, and when she wasn’t doing that she pretty much liked to sit on her dead ass and feel sorry for herself. She had herself a job at a factory downtown, claimed she was some kind of production manager, but Craig had heard firsthand that the only production she managed involved a dustpan and a broom. She was too damn stupid and too damn lazy to do much else. Even so, word had it she had a hell of a time figuring which end of the broom you held onto and which actually moved the dirt.

Still, Craig figured, she wasn’t a bad sort.

Her son Russell lived with her. He had a kid somewhere, was pushing forty, but didn’t work on account of his bad ticker. Funny, that, because Russell smoked like a chimney and was one hell of a bowler, could throw a curve like you wouldn’t believe.

As Craig came up to the Boyne’s, he began digging through his bag, getting the delivery ready. When he reached the roof overhang, he dug out the Boyne’s mail. A gas bill from WisCon, a letter from Margaret’s sister in Clintonville, a big manila package from International Correspondence Schools for Russell-he was learning animal husbandry or mortuary science or something in his spare time, something he had a lot of-and a Priority Mail envelope from some law firm in Madison. Craig knew what that was all about. Frank Boyne, Margaret’s deceased husband, had gotten his arms chopped off from a sheet metal guillotine at Wisconsin Tool amp; Bearing over in Bethany, bled to death long before the ambulance arrived. The safety mechanisms were faulty and Margaret had promptly sued the manufacturer, Quisby Manufacturing Equipment, Inc. She received a nice fat check twice a year from them and would until the day she died.

As Craig made to stuff the mail in the box, he saw Russell watching him through the screen door. “Come on in,” Russell said.

Craig did, stepping into the screened-in porch after shaking the water from his slicker.

“You feel like a cup of coffee?” Russell asked.

“Can’t and you know why.”

Russell did. It was Hebert, the postmaster, he sent out spies to see if his letter carriers were working or screwing off. Craig had told Russell and more than once that he felt like he was being watched all the time.

Russell was sitting there, leafing through a magazine. It wasn’t Thursday, so he wasn’t off to pick up his mother. He never missed on Thursdays. Thursdays were paydays and Russell liked to help his mother spend her paycheck.

“What you reading?” Craig asked him.

“One of those Watchtower magazines.”

Sure, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were out in strength since the flooding began, prophesying the end of the world as they did every few years. Those damn JoHo’s. Craig had had to order them off more than one porch when they got in his way.

Russell was very enrapt by the magazine. “Says here, says right here how them UFO’s people see aren’t alien ships or any of that.”

“No? What the hell are they?”

“Says here they’re angels riding in the sky, keeping watch over the flock.”

“No shit?” Craig said. “Well, I’ll be damned. Them angels better start identifying themselves or the Air Force is going to shoot one of ‘em down.”

Russell, who usually got a kick out of Craig’s mouth, didn’t say anything. He was in a mood. Lots of people were in moods these days and lot more were finding religion now with the rising water. People were saying some nut was even talking on the radio about how to build your very own ark, of all things. But Craig was not surprised by any of it, not really. It followed the usual cycle; he’d seen the same damn sort of crazy thinking as Y2K approached. People started losing their heads when the weather got funny, when there was doom and gloom in the forecast. Craig had been hearing all kinds of wild shit since the flooding began.

He bid Russell good-bye, wondered if he’d get sucked in with the JoHo’s and start knocking on doors. Wouldn’t have surprised Craig a bit. The Boyne’s were okay, but they were soft upstairs. Whole family was like that.

Craig moved off down the sidewalk through the rain. He delivered to the Chambers and the Proctons, the Brietenbachs and the Sepperley’s. That last stop was a quick one, being that Wanda Sepperly was in her nineties and all her friends and family were long dead. About all she ever got were political fliers and JC Penney sale brochures. Sometimes, in the summer, Wanda would sit out on her porch, yellowed bones held together by the thinnest veneer of cellophane, and start talking about the ration books during the war or how that heat wave back in ’38 had been so bad that yards started on fire. But mostly she just sat and stared, barely casting a shadow, mumbling things that Craig could not hear and from the despairing, wizened look on her face, he always figured he was glad of that.

But now and again, she would scare him.

Sometimes her eyes weren’t rheumy and distant. Sometimes they would be far too bright and clear and it was on those days, sitting in that antique wicker rocker, that she would scare Craig. Scare him because those eyes seemed to know far too much. It was like she could look right inside your head and your greatest worry and your darkest secret were known to her.

It was not a pleasant thing at all.

Three years before, one hot July afternoon of yellow-baked lawns and whirring grasshoppers, Craig had stopped, dropped a few letters and she’d been looking that way at him. Not just looking at him, but into him.

“Hello, Mrs. Sepperly,” he’d said, the spit just drying up in his mouth. “How…how are you today?”

Wanda sat there, not rocking, just staring holes through him, a funny little smile on her narrow mouth, her eyes lit like ghost lights. That burning gaze almost made Craig take a step back and fall down the steps. He told himself it was probably heat exhaustion, heat stroke, that he needed to lie down, grab a cool drink. But he knew better. Because this was Wanda Sepperly staring at him, the old lady people called “Mother Sepperly” or “Gramma Sepperly” and very often, “that crazy gypsy fortune-teller.” The latter, of course, never to her face. Because although Mother Sepperly probably didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds and her mind was very often neither here nor there, but someplace else entirely, she still inspired a certain respect. And maybe that was because of her age and maybe it was because more than not were a little uneasy around her and possibly even frightened.

And Craig understood that fear that hot July afternoon. For Wanda would not stop staring at him and when she did speak, her voice was not cracked with age but lucid and smooth as that of a thirty-year old woman: “Craig, them pains you got in yer stomach, they ain’t gonna go away. You should see the doc before you start passing too much blood.”

Thing was, Craig had been having pains. And when he went to an internist, a bleeding peptic ulcer was discovered. Had it gone on much longer, the doc told him, he would have needed surgery. How Wanda Sepperly had known that was beyond him, but since that day Craig was more than a little intimidated by her. And a year later when Wanda told him he should be keeping a tighter reign on that wife of his, it turned out that Jean was indeed having an affair.

But how did you balance any of that out with logic or modern scientific reasoning?

You just didn’t; you accepted as Craig accepted. The old crones about town claimed that Wanda was what they had called “sighted” in the old days. But Craig didn’t want to know about that. He was nosy as nosy got, but there were some things even he didn’t care to know. And if the kids in the neighborhood claimed that she was a witch, Craig figured he didn’t need to know about that either.

Today Wanda was not about, probably inside waiting to die. As he dropped a flier from the Price County Democratic Party into her mailbox, Craig hoped that, God willing, he’d never get that fucking old.

Next stop was the Zirblanski’s, home of the twin pre-teen terrors of Rhonda and Rita. Twin sisters who were legendary ass-kickers that tormented their fellow schoolmates with great zeal and had been both expelled more than once. When they weren’t intimidating others or knocking the shit out of some young tough who thought he was their equal, they were going after one another. One summer, Craig had approached the house and Rhonda came running up the walk, her hair on fire, and another time, he’d got there in time to see Rita thrown through the screen door, her face gashed and bleeding. All Craig could get out of her was that Rhonda had used her head to break the little window on the stove. Then she stormed back inside to give back what she had gotten. They had parents-Mike and Sheila-but they were wisely absent most of the time and tended to keep their heads down when they were home.

Craig deposited the mail here, mostly bills, and got off the porch as quick as he could. The last time he’d seen the girls a few weeks before, they’d been sporting matching red devil tattoos on their forearms…they’d been the temporary kind, but nobody could convince Craig of that.

Those girls weren’t nothing but trouble, he often told his wife over dinner, and it’s only a matter of time before they kill someone and end up in prison.

The next house was the Blake’s.

Well, Miriam Blake actually, now that her bulldog of a husband had finally gone toes up. Roger Blake had been a crazy, drunken NRA freak who liked to play with guns because-word had it-his own pistol had been out of powder and shot for years. He’d been with the Marines in Tarawa or Iwo Jima or one of those awful places and loved to talk about it, loved to show the sword he’d taken off a dead Jap. Now that he was gone, there was just Miriam, but Craig figured that was enough. She still hadn’t taken down the THIS HOUSE PROTECTED BY SMITH amp; WESSON placard on the door.

Craig liked to sneak up on the porch and drop her mail before she heard him. Because when she saw him coming, she couldn’t help but saunter out on the porch and say something smart-assed like, Well, what do you know? A thousand trucks in a row, they didn’t fire your ass after all! or Lookee here, the eagle has landed and what a sorry effing sight he is indeed!

Craig slipped onto the porch, equally as sneaky as old Roger had been on Iwo Jima when he defeated the entire Japanese Imperial Army. He quietly dropped the letters in the box and had almost made it back out to the walk when Miriam knocked loudly on the picture window so he would know from that sour look on her old puss that he had surely not pulled one over on her.

“Old bitch,” Craig said under his breath.

Craig worked his route and the rain fell and sometimes it lightened, but mostly it did not. The world was wet and gray and seeping, a chill mist in the air. A lot of houses looked empty and Craig was glad for this. He delivered to the Gendrou’s (their son Stevey was queer) and the William’s (a couple welfare bums who sold pot) and the Marlick’s (their oldest daughter had gotten mixed up with some black guy over at the college and that just showed you where the world was going).

Not that any of these things were Craig Ohlen’s business.

But truth be told, Craig wasn’t real big on minding his own business. As one of his Kneale Street customers, Miriam Blake, put it, “The day that nosy sonofabitch falls off somebody’s porch and breaks his effing neck is the day I throw an orgy for the neighborhood. Probably steams open the letters before he delivers ‘em.” And if the consensus of Craig Ohlen wasn’t quite so severe in most cases, it was well-known that he often looked through people’s mail before he deposited it. And rumor had it he also looked through a few windows when the opportunity presented itself. Truth was, Craig was nosey. Maybe it was the profession and maybe it was just heredity, but Craig liked to know about his customers…whether they liked it or not. There were some, of course, who didn’t care for it and weren’t above confronting him about it. And when they did, what could Craig really say? Being a federal employee he wasn’t in a position to argue with the taxpayers. Such things were discouraged and nearly all conflicts of that sort were settled in favor of the taxpayers.

That’s how things like that worked.

Craig was the veteran of a few of those conflicts and in the end, he had to back down. The only recourse for him was to indulge in a bit of spite from time to time. Letters might get lost or opened or they might end up in the bushes (wind blew ‘em there).

But such guerrilla activities could easily cost you your job, so you had to be careful. All routes had their share of nuts and you just had to smile as they told you what a useless fuck you were.

And speaking of nuts, here was a real beauty: Arland Mattson.

He lived in the trim ranch next door to Mitch Barron’s brick two-story, a retiree with nothing better to do than work his yard. In the winter, he scraped his driveway down to the concrete and liked to redistribute the snow is his yard with a snowblower so it would melt evenly. In the summer, though, is when Arland reached his peak cutting his grass and edging the walks and shaping the bushes, taking after offending weeds with a passion. He watered his lawn so much the sidewalks in front of his house had turned the color of rust.

As Craig came up on him, Arland was sweeping the water off his walks. Pushing it into the grass where it inevitably drained right back onto the sidewalk again. No big surprise, because yesterday he’d been trying to rake the rain out of his lawn as if you could possibly squeegee it out like water off your windshield.

“Afternoon, Mr. Mattson,” Craig said as he passed him.

Arland swung around like he’d been caught doing something unpleasant and possibly illegal. “Oh, it’s you. Saw your uniform and thought it might be them other ones come to talk me out of it.”

“Oh? Who’s that?” Craig asked, rain dripping off the brim of his white pith helmet.

“You never mind that,” Arland said. “Just believe me when I say they’re not flooding me out of my house. No, sir.”

“Yeah, don’t let ‘em,” Craig said, as he dropped a few letters into the mail slot.

Arland stood there looking positively absurd in his green gumrubber hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat. “They think I don’t know what they’ve been up to out at that Army base. But I know, just as all of you will soon know. They’ve been manufacturing horrors out there, the most awful things! Tonight we’ll all know about that! I saw it in a dream…things like men that are not men! Long-armed things with pale faces! They’ll be hunting the streets tonight! You mark my word!”

Craig told him he’d sure keep on the lookout for them monstrosities.

He got away from Arland and made it to the Barron’s doorstep. Now the Barron’s were good people. Mitch always had time for a chat when he was home and come Christmas Lily always remembered Craig with a plate of cookies. Home-baked, too, not that store-bought crap. Mitch’s Jeep wasn’t in the driveway, but Craig knew he wasn’t at work. Mitch ran a lathe at Northern Fabricators over in Bethany and they were under water now, so Mitch was laid-off presently. Craig liked Mitch. Mitch was a union man, a steward, and a good one from what he’d heard. He was okay.

Craig dropped some magazines and letters in the box and right away felt eyes on him. Lily Barron was standing there at the window, looking haunted and lost, staring right through Craig like he was made of plexiglass.

Craig swallowed.

He knew what that was all about. It was some kind of tragedy, all right. Lily had herself a twin sister named Marlene who, it was said, wasn’t much more than a barfly living off the state. Once she’d been married to some rich guy over in Elmwood Hills, some real estate mogul named Bittner. Even had a kid out there somewhere. Swam with the uppity-ups. But that was ancient history. Story was, her husband decided he liked men better than girls and Marlene started hitting the sauce and spreading her legs for anything with a dick and that was that.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, as Tammy said.

Since then, nothing but booze and drugs and all the wrong sort of men. Went right down hill. People said she’d been institutionalized more than once and that was just a damn shame because her sister Lily was just the salt of the earth. But that’s the way it ran with twins sometimes, just like on TV: one good and the other…well, not so good. Like maybe there’d only been enough eggs to make one really good omelet and the other was kind of runny, wouldn’t set right. Marlene had cracked up for good, though, laid open her wrists with a paring knife and then called 911. Word had it that when the cops got there, they found her on the back porch in a rocking chair, covered in her own blood, just as dead as dogshit. Word had it she was still warm, that the rocking chair was still moving when the boys in blue stepped up onto that porch. Some said she was smiling, too.

Craig sucked something into himself and knocked on the door. Lily answered right away. She was looking thin and her eyes were just vacant.

“Mitch went to find Chrissy. He hasn’t come back yet. Have you seen Chrissy?”

Chrissy. Sure, that was Lily’s kid, Mitch’s stepdaughter. Truth was, Craig had not seen her in some time. She was a teenager now, fifteen or sixteen, he figured. Sometimes, in his job, you could just about mark a kid’s age by the magazines they got. Ranger Rick, My Big Backyard, and Highlights gave over to Mad magazine, Game Player, and American Girl, depending on the gender. Soon enough those were replaced by Sports Illustrated for the boys and Seventeen for the girls. So, yeah, Craig was picturing Chrissy closing on sixteen or so. Course, it was the same with parents. At first, they subscribed to everything under the sun. But soon enough, as the kids got older, the subs to Family Fun and Parenting ran out as they just wanted to pretend they didn’t have children.

“No,” Craig finally said, “haven’t seen her. You better stay inside, though, Lily. They’ll be back anytime now.”

The door shut and Craig, who was at times not the most sympathetic creature in the world, felt something inside him sink without a trace. Christ, Lily was a wreck. She had been, up to a few weeks before, the most outgoing person in the world. And now she had not only crawled back into her shell, she had closed the lid after her.

Craig started down the rainswept walk, noticing offhand that the rain itself had lightened up a bit.

He passed two vacant houses, was glad to see that he had no mail for the Darin’s because Lou Darrin, who happened to be the district school superintendent, was probably the biggest dickhead on his route. Craig wasn’t alone in his thinking. Mitch Barron had once described Lou Darrin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. Which was a very colorful way of saying that most pit bulls had warmer personalities.

Craig scratched his nose with his middle finger as a tribute to Lou Darrin.

Only one more house on Kneale Street and that belonged to Cindy Lee Mayhew, who was just as prime a peach as a man could imagine picking. And Craig was certain of this because he’d done an awful lot of imagining about Cindy Lee Mayhew. She was maybe 24 or 25 with legs up to her neck and high, sleek tits like cruise missiles anxious to bust out of their silos. Her house was flanked by Kneale Street and Court Avenue and the ladies on the block often called her the Countess of Court Avenue, that being “Countess” spelled without an O. No matter, she had long dark hair and flashing blue eyes and she flirted shamelessly with anything that had a dick, knowing as she had since her thirteenth year and her garden had bloomed, the wonderful magic she could work upon the opposite sex.

Cindy Lee had a little red Dodge Probe that she liked to tease Craig about. As in, Oh, I just love the feel of my shiny red Probe or a girl can’t get quite enough of a Probe like that. In the summer, she liked to wash her Probe in the driveway wearing jean shorts cut off almost to her crotch so you could get an eyeful of those long, muscular tanned legs. She completed the picture in a halter that barely held her bountiful charms in place, her hard and flat belly on luscious display. When she did that, she knew and knew damn well that every set of male eyes in the neighborhood were watching just as she knew that every set of female eyes were hating.

Yesterday, when Craig brought up her mail, she’d looked him dead in the eye, said, “Oh, you always deliver things wet like this?”

Oh, Jesus, it had been almost too much.

Today, unfortunately, she was not home. At least she didn’t come to the door as usual and this was a great disappointment for Craig. But his testosterone-charged imagination stepped in and saved the day. It showed him that, yes, Cindy Lee was home. In fact, she was in there lying on the couch, just as naked as naked could get, oiled up, tits glistening, one leg thrown over the back of the couch, busily sliding a finger into herself as she waited wet and ready for a certain postman to come and deliver the mail.

Craig stepped off the porch, keeping his letter bag in front of his crotch because he’d just popped a boner hard and straight as a walking stick. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the rain had diminished to a drizzle or that the sky had taken on a weird ochre haze.

He rounded the wild rose bushes on the Court Avenue side of Cindy Lee’s house, studying those windows and hoping for a glimpse of her. When that sparkling yellow rain began to fall, he was caught out in the open. The first drops hit him like scalding water that he recoiled from and the next were like acid.

He dropped his bag almost instantly and looked up in the sky, thinking for one crazy moment that he was being drowned in lemonade.

But that was about all he had time to think, as that most peculiar and very corrosive rain ate holes in his face and hands and he tried to scream as his lips went to sauce. Steaming and making a gurgling sound in his throat, he stumbled over Cindy Lee’s rosebushes and fell dead on the other side. As he did so, one hand that had been covering his face pulled away and dropped to his side. Most of his face came with it. The rain stopped almost as soon as it had started and Craig laid there, his flesh oozing off the bones beneath like hot tallow.

He was the only one on Kneale Street who was caught in it.

Even Arland Mattson had gone in five minutes before it fell.

Given his essential curiosity, Craig died wondering what the hell it was all about. But that was one question he never did get an answer to.

13

When Tommy Kastle pulled his Dodge Ram into the Barron driveway, Mitch felt something grow inside him, spread out in his belly and take hold of him like it never wanted to let him go. He could have labeled it as fear or unease or a real ugly case of the whammy-jammies, but the truth was, although he felt it just fine, he could not necessarily put a name to it. Just a nasty sensation like needles growing in his guts that told him that not only would the worst things happen now, they would happen with a frightening regularity. And you had to be ready.

“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy said.

Mitch just nodded. “We better go in.”

On the porch, at the door, he hesitated again, picturing the most awful scenarios that waited him inside: Lily dead and Lily dismembered, white-faced horrors perhaps feeding upon her. All of it only grew worse when he tried the door and found it unlocked.

Then he threw it open and Tommy was right behind him and the silence greeted them, a heavy and almost unnatural silence. But maybe it was just his nerves because Lily was sitting on the sofa, waiting.

“Did you find her?” she asked.

Mitch shook his head. “Checked the mall and the usual locations, but I didn’t see her. But you know how those kids are. Always on the go.”

Lily just blinked at the information. “I don’t like her out in that storm, Mitch. It’ll be dark in a couple hours.”

The idea of that chilled Mitch, too. Was Lily hinting at something or was she just being her normal paranoid self?

Tommy looked from Mitch to Lily and then back again. Mitch couldn’t read his mind, but he could almost guess what he was thinking. Jesus H. Christ, you sure this lady is Lily? Looks like something thrown together out of twine and pipe cleaners. And her eyes, Mitch…you noticed her eyes? They’re just vacant. They look, but they don’t see. Just as empty and sterile as the eyes in old paintings that follow you around the room. Mitch was figuring it was something like that. Outside, he’d been the one who was tense, but in here it was Tommy. He looked nervous and ansy like some kid hauled before the principal for peeking into the girl’s showers.

Mitch said, “I got pretty much sidetracked. Had an accident.”

Something moved in her eyes then. “Accident?”

“Yeah, not me exactly. But some crazy kid piledrived the Jeep out on The Strip. It was parked at the time.”

Lily nodded, losing interest.

“Did anybody stop by?” Mitch asked, still standing there next to Tommy like he was at somebody else’s house, waiting to be invited to sit down.

Lily just shook her head. “No one…just the mailman, whasisface.”

Sure. Craig Ohlen. Goddamn nosy gasbag. Mitch was willing to bet that he’d went out of his way to talk to Lily, to gauge the level of her dementia that the neighbors had no doubt faithfully reported to him. Yep, she’s nuts, Craig would say, flakier than dry skin. Better hide the knives, ‘cause I’m getting the feeling she’ll be following her nutso sister.

“Mitch?” Lily said.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to go out again. I want you to find her before dark, do you understand? You have to. The phone’s out and the TV and radio are down-”

“Just the storm,” Tommy offered.

“-and I think there’s something that’s going to happen. Something real bad and I don’t want Chrissy out in the streets when it hits. Go to the police and check Heather and Lisa’s houses. Maybe she’s over there.”

“Okay, I will,” he said. “But just try to relax.”

“I can’t relax. I’m afraid to relax.”

“Just try and take it easy. You know what the doctor said, don’t get yourself worked up. Everything will be fine.”

“Just find her.”

“Sure.”

“Promise me that you’ll find her.”

“I’ll do my best.”

14

Inside Edward Stokley’s guts there was a furnace blazing.

It boiled white-hot where his stomach should have been, making things bubble and liquefy and go to rivers of molten flesh. The heat rose up into his chest, became a smoldering dust of ashes that filled his lungs until he could only gasp, could not seem to speak. It was like trying to draw a clear and crisp breath from the mouth of a foundry oven.

“Eddie?” Dave Rose said to him. “Eddie? Are you all right?”

Stokley nodded that he was, though he certainly was not.

They were standing in front of their patrol car on Pennacott Lane, just off Main downtown Witcham, at the outer edges of Bethany. The University was only three blocks away with its cheerful and synthetic gaggle of coffee shops and salons and snack bars, but here on Pennacott you would not have guessed it. For if Upper Main Street and the sprawl of the University were shiny new pennies, then Pennacott was a tarnished dime worn by many hands and plucked from a gutter. Pennacott was a dirty and decaying run of old company houses, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and late Victorian tenements that had been thrown up to lodge the massive influx of immigrant workers-mostly Poles, Irish and French-that had come to work in the mills and factories of Bethany and Crandon…at the time, separate entities that would, by the time of the First World War, be absorbed bodily into the swelling anatomy of Witcham. At one time, the squalor-which had been known locally as Guttertown or The Narrows-had extended to Main and beyond, for Witcham was essentially composed of five industrial enclaves, but by the 1950’s, North-Central University had absorbed much of that old territory of rooming houses, saloons, and brothels. And the Uptown Mall had taken the rest. Gone were the smelly community wells that had once spread outbreaks of cholera and typhus, the rows of high narrow warehouses and the Chicago-Northwestern train yards, the stables and stockyards whose drainage turned the Black River red and stinking at high summer. Gone too, were the linen mills and ironworks that stamped out everything from sewer lids to sections of railroad tracks, and whose high, filthy stacks belched out black clouds of smoke twenty-four/seven that settled back over the area like coal dust.

So now there was just Pennacott Lane which had been withered down through the years to a mere four blocks of dirty brick tenements and factory houses, many condemned and many more boarded-up and slouching on weedy lawns or behind rusty wrought-iron fences. Pennacott had once been the very heart of Guttertown, crowded and noisy, but now it was nearly deserted. You would no longer see the flapping, overloaded clotheslines strung building to building in such profusion that sometimes the sky seemed barely visible or the gangs of children chasing balls up the wooden walks, the street cars and bustling traffic of wagons and carts, the crowds of workmen lingering outside taverns and lunch counters. And you would not hear the scream of foundry whistles marking shift-change or the smattering of European dialects and sub-dialects echoing in the streets. And you would not smell the crowding, the horseshit, the reek of the mills themselves.

Pennacott was but a tombstone to that colorful, desperate past, a rawboned cadaver seeking a shallow grave to while away eternity. But, sometimes, if you closed your eyes and opened your mind, you could still feel and hear the echoes of those ghosts, the impressions they had left and the memories bleeding from dirty brick and cracked foundation like tired blood from narrow arteries.

Stokley stood there amongst those haunted streets, knowing that even now the city fathers had their eyes on the final remnants of Guttertown and how they would finally raze it, brooming away the nasty residue of Witcham’s seedy proletariat past and the poor that squatted there…many of whom were direct descendants of those long-gone laborers.

Just as he was.

He swallowed down some rain, hoped it would cool the firestorm in his belly that had absolutely nothing to do with what this place had been or what it was now, but a most disturbing feeling that told him today was going to be a very bad day for him indeed. He’d felt it all morning and most of the afternoon, of course. Had woken up at six that morning, a full thirty minutes before the alarm clock chimed, sweating and trembling, his eyes peeled white in his strained face, a terrible knowledge of impending doom laying over him just as heavy and eternal as six feet of graveyard earth. The rain had been tapping against the windows and he had felt it inside, too, flooding him.

“What?” his wife had said, suspecting the steak and lasagna from the night before, but then looking into her husband’s blanched face and knowing better. “Eddie? Eddie? What is it?”

He told her in an airless squeak that it was a dream, just some crazy inside-out dream about his dead brother and a cat they’d had. He wasn’t even sure why that lie had leaped onto his tongue so completely unbidden. But he wasn’t awake yet and his subconscious-which was full to brimming as any man’s with half-truths, un-truths, and complete fabrications-was still open, the lid askew, and this was the pearl it had vomited onto his tongue.

At his side, rain running down his face like teardrops, Dave Rose said again, “You okay, Eddie? Look like you seen your own ghost.”

Stokley could have laughed at that one.

Lots of cops on the Witcham force could have. Not Dave Rose, though. Dave Rose had just come in yesterday night after two weeks of vacation and he had missed all the fun. He only knew the clipped versions of the explosion at the Fort Providence base and the flooding and the bodies over in River Town, all those awful, dark matters that hid in the cracks between those incidents. Unlike him, Stokley had seen ghosts. He’d seen several. He’d seen dead people walking and it was this knowledge that had settled into his guts like a tumor, eating and eating. But Dave Rose had not seen any of that. Yet.

But soon, soon…

“I’m all right,” Stokley said and, God, did that sound hollow or what? Like having your hand crushed to pulp in a vise and saying it was just a scratch, get me a Band-Aid, will ya?

Maybe all of it was laying on him. Those things with the white faces he’d seen yesterday disappearing beneath the dirty waters of Bethany and that awful certainty he’d woken with this morning. The certainty that told him, sorry, Eddie, really and truly sorry, old shoe, but today is the last one for you. No more Australian-rules football on ESPN or late-night lasagna and steak parties. It all winds down today and in this place where your Irish grandfather came a-squatting, pockets empty and eyes bright, from that slum in Londonderry.

“Full circle,” Stokley said. “Full circle.”

Rose looked at him and then just looked away. “Listen, we gonna answer this call or do we stand here and get soaked?”

The rain kept falling, trying desperately to wash that pile of dirty tenement clean, but failing miserably. The tenement-some three stories of filthy brick with a mangled, rusting fire escape clinging to its side like the abandoned web of a spider-was high and shadowy in the grainy light of this rainy day. Shadows pooled at its windows and crawled over its roofs. Water spilled from a rainspout into the alley.

“Let’s go,” Stokley said, feeling that windy noose that had dogged him all day finally dropping over his throat and tightening.

They stepped into the tenement and right away that stink of age and generations past fell over them…mildew and rotting plaster and garbage. This mixed with more recent odors of cat piss and seeping damp. There were three kids waiting for them. Two girls and a boy. The oldest couldn’t have been more than six or seven, the youngest still in diapers. They were smelly, thin, and unwashed.

“You kids the ones that called?”

The two girls would not speak, but the boy nodded and mumbled something. Stokley and Rose surrounded them, pegging them with questions and getting answers that made little sense. The girls were crying. The youngest had an overflowing diaper on. It had not been changed in days.

“Tell us what happened,” Stokley said.

The boy tried to, but he was having trouble. There was despair and pain that had no business in a kid his age. But it was there, especially in his eyes that were looms that could spin tales of desperation and ugliness without his mouth ever opening.

Stokley listened patiently as the boy tried to get it out, but it took time. It was not easy. The bigness of his dread would barely fit up the channel of his throat. Stokley heard something of the sort he knew he would hear. When he had arrived and looked up at the place his heart had hammered almost painfully, but now it had settled into a dull and disquieting rhythm. Even with what he heard, it did not so much as hitch.

The boy told him that his mother had been up in her room for three days and that she would not come out. She had in fact locked the door. He had been caring for his sisters and it was only yesterday that he had heard her moving around in there again.

“It smells funny from her room,” the boy said. “And she makes me go get her things.”

What kind of things? Stokley asked him and the kid said his mother had started whispering through the door that she wanted dead things. She said there were plenty of dead things floating around in the streets and that he was to bring them home. He brought her a dead cat, a dead cocker spaniel, and three dead rats. She told him to leave those things at the door and to not look when she opened it. The kid had not. He had never looked, even though a smell of warm, rotting things had wafted out. The kid said he thought she was eating those carcasses, that he heard her slurping and chewing on them. And then this morning, when she’d reached out to take a swollen rat corpse, he had dared to look. He said she was sick because her arm was bumpy and white and there were little things crawling on it.

“Davey,” Stokley said to Rose, “get these kids out of here. Get on the horn with Child Protective Services. Go, move, now!”

When Rose had ushered them out the door, a wild look in his eyes, Stokley had started up those creaking, ancient stairs. The banister rail was oily and smoothed by generations of grimy working hands. What struck him the strongest was the sheer silence of that building. He wondered vaguely if anyone even lived there besides the woman and her kids. The silence was so pronounced it reminded him of walking through a funeral home, seeing all the display rooms with their comfortable furniture awaiting grieving bodies. It was much like that.

Too quiet, like they said in the old movies.

Up Stokley went until he hit the third floor, his guts continuing to boil and froth in his belly. Even had he not known the number of the flat, his nose would have led him there. The stench wafting out the half-opened door was sickening. A raw stink of things slimy and putrid that had slipped out of waterlogged graves.

Stokley slipped his 9mm Beretta out of its holster and clicked it off safety. The gun had always made him feel strong and somehow invincible. But today, it felt entirely useless like a handful of peas he was going to toss at a hungry giant.

What’s waiting for you in there, Eddie, has crossed the barrier. It has crawled like a living, seething pestilence from the other side. Bullets will not stay it, will not put it back down again. It has risen and it is wise and evil.

Stokley saw old furniture with gaping holes, missing cushions, and stacks of books in place of chair legs. The wallpaper was yellowed and curling, fifty years out of date. Water dripped from the cracked plaster of the ceiling. Garbage was strewn everywhere with the remains of meals on dirty plates. Heaps of musty laundry fought for space with broken toys. There was a TV with a shattered picture tube.

“Mrs. Holmes,” Stokley heard his voice call out. “I’m Stokley of the police. We have your kids. I think you better come out and answer a few questions.”

There was only silence from beyond a soiled bedroom door for maybe thirty seconds and then a meaty, wet sound like bones being pulled from boiled chicken. Stokley knew then it was the sound of her moving. There was a creak as of bedsprings, then a sticky, slopping sound that must have been feet crossing the room.

Something thudded against the door. Something else dripped. And then a voice like mud spilled into a bucket: “You go away and bring my children back, you hear? You bring them back or I’ll come and get them…”

It was a threat and he took it as the same. The door began to open and something like a hand hooked around its edge…only it was gnarled and spidery, fleshed in a skin that was a translucent white like ectoplasm and pebbly, set with contusions and festering sores.

Stokley felt his heart drop away into some sucking, black hole within him as she shambled out of the coveting shadows, flyblown and crawling with worms.

Thing was, he had seen her before.

As a child, he remembered her. She was the witch from his nightmares. A pallid haunter of the dark with a crooked back and a mop of graying, oily hair. Her belly was filled with child-meat and her teeth had been sharpened on child-bones. She lived in moldering closets and dank cellars, always creeping forth when lights went out and the sound of his parents footfalls vanished down the hallway. She was here, reaching out for him with fingers like threshing hooks and an oval, drooping mouth filled with roofing nails.

Stokley stepped back, a very real terror blossoming in his belly like night-blooming orchids opening in a crypt. It was the sort of terror that made him feel loose inside like maybe he was unraveling.

Mrs. Holmes, or the thing she now was, shambled forth with a slushy, rubbery sound and Stokley noticed that she was leaving dark tracks in her wake, that bits of her soles were stuck in those prints. She brought a nauseous flyblown odor with her, the stink of what she was and what she had been chewing on in that moist, dark tomb of hers. She wore a dirty shift that might have been a slip or a nightdress at one time, but now was just as soiled as a painter’s dropcloth…stained with whorls and blotches of brown and gray fluids. Her flesh was baggy as if it was blown up from the bones beneath by gas. It looked viscid, spongy like some sort of cemetery fungi that had erupted from a buried box. There were tumorous-looking graying boils set in it and as she came forth, they popped like soap bubbles, black fluid leaking from them with a stink of rotting fish.

“Stay back,” Stokley told her, knowing how impotent that was, and wondering what might have happened here if he had just did as she asked. If he had brought her children back. Would she have stayed in that room? Would she have been content to eat the carrion they brought and leave them unmolested? Was it possible that, in that reeking hide, there still burned a flame of motherhood? That she had woken from death as something malignant, yes, but also something with the ingrained and instinctual need to protect her young?

These thoughts flew through his head at amazing speed, but not a one actually stuck for the fear and revulsion filling him was simply too overwhelming.

About four feet from him, she stopped.

Stopped, cocked her head, and looked at him with eyes bleached white as grubs. Her face was contorted and hanging, a mask stitched together out of rags and wrinkles, set with scars and gaping holes. Poison drizzled from her colorless eyes and things squirmed inside her mouth. Her fissured lips pulled back from those decayed teeth. And that voice again, still like poured mud, but sweeter and strident almost: “Do you remember me, Eddie? Do you remember your old childhood friend? Do you remember me giggling in the closet and scratching under your bed and scraping my nails at your window pane? Of course you do! Just as you remember what I said to you…how I would nibble your gizzard and chew on your guts and wear your bowels as my necklace! Hee, hee, you remember, don’t you? And when I was done, as your precious mommy and daddy slept but two doors down, I would hold your hot and pumping heart in my hand and set my teeth into it…”

Stokley almost fell over.

He could feel her hot and rancid breath in his face like swamp gas.

But it had to be in his mind. He did not doubt the revolting physical reality of this living corpse before him, but she could not know his name and his boyhood fears. She just could not know these things. Offended by the very idea of it, his finger began jerking the trigger of the 9mm. The slugs passed cleanly through her with very little give at all. She jerked, but no more. It was like shooting into a wet canvas sack filled with carrion…holes were drilled into her and dark meat splattered against the wall behind her, but it had no more lasting effect.

Stokley heard himself scream as one of her hands closed over his gun-hand, gripping it tightly, a stinking juice running over his fist as from a squeezed out rag. And as she gripped, the flesh at the knuckles of that fungous hand popped open and a black acidic slime sprayed into his face, burning him and blinding him.

Then she had him, bathing him in her cold light and the smell of violated tombyards. She yanked him forward into her waiting stick arms and he fell against her, enveloped by her, his clawing fingers sinking into her flesh which had no more substance than cold bacon grease. Then that oval, dripping mouth was descending to swallow his own.

“This is what happens to bad boys, Eddie!” she breathed in his face. “This is what happens to bad little boys who don’t say their prayers at night! Now I have you and I won’t let go! Now I’ll suck your yummy guts out through your mouth and fill my empty belly…”

Which is exactly what she did.

Burned and insane and offended by the feel of her, Stokley just let it happen. And as he was vacuumed clean, he could only remember waking that morning and hearing the rain on the window. It sounded very much like his own blood did now as it struck the floor.

15

Ten minutes after they left Lily, Mitch and Tommy stopped by a 7-11 and got the strongest, blackest coffee they could dredge up from that bottomless pot. They said they needed it to steady their nerves and keep themselves awake, but truthfully, with all that they had seen now and those worse things they imagined, it was unlikely either of them would be nodding off for some time.

It was four in the afternoon by then and Mitch was almost shocked when he realized this. All these awful things happened in the span of a single day and in just a few hours to boot. It was more than a little amazing.

He thought: I woke up this morning only wanting this goddamned storm system to pass already and now here I am believing in zombies and all manner of crazy Halloween shit.

Tommy took them over to the West Town Mall where once again, Mitch hunted for Heather Sale’s little orange VW bug in the parking lot. There were something like 200 stores at Westtown and this was reflected by the massive wraparound parking lot that, flood or no flood, was easily two-thirds full. Something that Mitch found amazing with the things he had seen now.

Tommy parked outside Kohl’s and just sat there staring at him.

“What?” Mitch finally said, stealing another of his cigarettes.

Tommy just shook his head. “How can any of this shit be, Mitch? I mean…we did see what we saw today, am I right? I didn’t imagine that shit at Sadler’s or that dead bitch they pulled out of the pipe?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Then how? How in the Christ can this be?”

He was like a little boy looking for answers about the big, brave world. How come the stars don’t fall from heaven or the birds know how to fly south, Uncle Mitch? Except in this case it was a little more along the lines of, how can the dead be walking and why are they so pissed at the living? How can a lady with no legs and half her body all burned up like she’d been slow roasted on one side, still be moving? And why does the yellow rain make people melt? Mitch wished he had some good answers, but all he had were a lot more questions.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Something’s gone to hell with the natural order of things and in the back of my mind I’m looking for a common cause.”

“Are you finding one?”

“It all seems to stem from that explosion out at the base.”

“I’ve been thinking that, too.”

Mitch pulled off his cigarette. “It makes you really wonder what they were working on out there. I mean, that place has been high security since I was in high school. You hear things about medical research and battlefield medicine, that sort of shit. I know it’s overseen by the Army Medical Command and the Army Research Office. That much has been in the papers…but what else? What the hell else goes on out there? What really goes on?”

“Depends who you listen to.”

Mitch nodded. “You ever know anyone who’s been out there since it became a research installation? I mean anyone at all?”

“No, nobody. They need work done out there-plumbing, boilers, electrical, whatever-they bring in outside contractors. Out-of-state, I hear. Outfits from out east somewhere. That’s what’s said anyway.”

“I’d like to get a look at that place, get some answers to all this.”

That made Tommy laugh. “You can’t get anywhere near it. You ever seen the signs on the road leading in? USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. Something like that. No, you’ll never get in there anymore than you’ll get in Area 51 or any of those places. If the Army says fuel tanks exploded, we’re gonna have to accept that. Unless you wanna write your congressman.”

But Mitch had already thought about that. With the shit happening, wasn’t some sort of investigation into that place justified? He’d thought about writing his congressman, emailing him or something. Maybe getting a couple thousand signatures demanding action. But that took time. Lots of time. And the way he was seeing it, they didn’t have much of that. Who really knew how deep the shroud of secrecy ran out there…it might be a wall of silence that even congress couldn’t penetrate.

“I’m thinking about the media, Tommy.”

“The news?”

“Sure.”

“I had a cousin who was a reporter. But he just handled pork futures.”

Mitch ignored him. “We got two fucking TV stations in this city, a big newspaper, and about a dozen radio stations. Seems like those people might be the ones to put on the pressure, maybe get some answers.”

But Tommy just shook his head. “Sounds good, but I’m willing to bet they’ll be handed some bullshit story and that they’ll accept it. Just blindly accept it. That’s the way it is now, Mitch. All those rich corporate assholes own the media at the highest level and if they don’t play ball, they start yanking advertisers, make sure that certain papers or TV stations don’t get access to the good stuff. They play ball and ride the company line or they’re left out in the cold. Look what happened over in Iraq for chrissake. That was the biggest shitstorm shoved down our throats since Vietnam…but the media played along. At least when I was a kid during ‘Nam, those journalists were asking tough questions and making those fuckwits at the top responsible for all their lies.”

Mitch knew he was right.

The media was in the pocket of the military and the politicians and that was because they were owned by corporations. It was sickening. That whole Iraq war was an atrocity, all those brave men and women losing their lives to support lies, corporate maneuvering, and political scheming. And the media just shrugged and said, oh well? We just report what’s given to us and that’s that.

Would any of it be any different here?

Not likely.

Greed was eating the guts out of the country and had been for years and people just didn’t give a shit. They paid their taxes, supported a government based on lies that threw away their sons and daughters, and believed everything that was handed them. And wasn’t that just peachy?

“I’m thinking if something’s going to be done here, Mitch, then we-me and you and every other little guy in this city-will have to do it ourselves. If any of this breaks, they’ll probably blame it on terrorists or whatever the flavor of the week is. You sure as hell can’t trust our politicians because shit always floats to the top.”

Mitch smiled. “Amen. Terror alert is indigo this week.”

Only thing was, none of it was very funny.

16

When they got to the precinct house downtown, Tommy was happy to see that George Lake, a shirttail cousin of his, was working the desk. He looked like he was really having some time of it. It was standing room only, people crowding around and cops rushing back and forth. Some guy with more tattoos than teeth was demanding his rights and some lady was crying that her husband was lost. Two burly cops came in out of the rain pushing three handcuffed gangbangers in front of them.

“Grand Central Station,” Tommy said.

George Lake, a husky guy with a bald head, said, “Wish I could say I’m happy to see you, Tommy, but I’m up to my left nut around here. Please tell me you’re not here to file a missing persons report.”

Tommy looked at Mitch and Mitch just shook his head. “No, I guess not.” He introduced George to Mitch and told him about Chrissy, that she’d probably turn up. George said they better take some particulars just in case. He handed them off to another cop who took Chrissy’s name and that of her friends. Just the basics.

“C’mon,” George said. “Time for my coffee break anyhow. Let’s go out to the garage where a guy can catch a few puffs without the tobacco Gestapo looking over his shoulders.”

He led them out of the pandemonium and into a parking garage where things were a little quieter. Cops were dragging perps from patrol cars or shoving them in for the ride over to the county jail.

“You see this shit?” George said, drawing off a thin cigar. “Last few days, this is what we got. Just a madhouse. We’re all pulling double shifts now. What a mess. Not only do we have a grade-A clusterfuck with this flooding, but we got all the rats coming out of the woodwork, stealing and robbing and looting. Jesus Jolly Christ.”

He told them it was just a mess. While a lot of people had abandoned the city and the Black River Valley in general, a lot more had stayed and simply refused to be moved. National Guard units had been in Bethany and River Town all day trying to get people out, but some of them just wouldn’t go.

“National Guard has itself a big tent camp set up outside of the city. Hundreds of people there. Most of the missing are probably out there. Maybe your kid is, too, Mitch.”

Mitch wasn’t so sure. “She’s just been gone since this morning, but my wife is having a cow about it, got me and Tommy pounding the streets.”

“She’ll turn up,” George said. “Most of ‘em will.”

“Not all of ‘em,” Mitch said. “Some of ‘em aren’t coming back. At least, not the way they left.”

Tommy gave him a look. “Yeah, it’s plenty bad out there.”

George sighed. “Tell me about it. We can’t handle this. Even with the other precincts and guys pulling twelve hour shifts, we can’t possibly handle something like this.”

“I suppose not,” Tommy said.

George looked around. “There’s shit coming down, cousin of mine, that you just wouldn’t believe. Last night, a minivan full of girls from over to the Holy Covenant Catholic school in East Genessee just up and vanished. Eight of ‘em ranging from seven to ten years old. A nun disappeared with them. You believe that? They were coming back from choir practice over at St. Tommy’s Cathedral.”

“And you can’t find ‘em?”

“No, not a thing. Oh, we found the van, all right. It was abandoned about six blocks from Holy Covenant, right at the edge of Bethany. It was sitting in about a foot of standing water, one of those flooded streets. Not enough to conk it out, though. Just sitting there, doors all wide open like that nun and her girls got out to look at something and never got back in.”

Mitch swallowed. Yeah, it was building now. There was no doubt of that. The worst of it in the flooded areas, but progressing along with the water into the rest of the city.

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “You been hearing any of this weird shit about some funny rain falling?”

“Yeah, that one’s been passing around since the explosion out at Fort Bullshit.”

“Anything to it?”

George was slow to answer. “I don’t know, maybe. We had a couple uniforms over in Crandon today got exposed to something. They took ‘em over to St. Mary’s. Word has it they’re flying ‘em to the burn center down in Madison. Least that’s what’s being said.”

Mitch swallowed down something dry in his throat. He’d seen those two cops. Only place they’d be flying them would be to a morgue drawer. There was absolutely no possibility they had survived that yellow rain. None.

Tommy looked over at him and then looked away real quickly.

George blew smoke out of his nose. “We’ve had nothing but weird shit for days and it seems to be getting worse. I’m guessing people are just panicking…but there is some bad shit coming down out there, boys, that’s for sure. We’ve had more than one cop suffer a nervous breakdown in the past forty-eight hours.”

“Why? What did they see?” Tommy asked him.

He just shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m figuring it’s plenty bad.”

Mitch noticed how he did not meet their eyes when he said this. He was probably lying or just concealing something and you couldn’t really blame him; cops were supposed to quell panic, not create it.

“You don’t have any kids, do you, Tommy?”

“Nope. Not a one that I know about.”

George licked his lips and looked around. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I guess…I guess that if you did, I’d tell you to pull them out of the city for awhile until things cool down.”

“Because of the rain?” Tommy said.

He shook his head. “No…not really. I don’t know. Just that there’s been a lot of crime. You got gangs of…of people out there that are pretty desperate. That’s all I’m saying.”

Mitch took the opening. “Yeah, I’ve heard there’s some weird ones out in the storm. People are saying some of ‘em look kind of funny, like maybe they’re-”

“Crazy or something,” Tommy broke in.

“Sure, lunatics. Some people just went nuts with what’s going on and others…well, there’s some mad shit out there, boys. Really mad shit. You just never know what you might run into out there. You just never know.”

Mitch was going to press it, ask what sort of things they might run into out there, but he didn’t have the heart. George Lake looked-as they said when they were kids-screwed, chewed, and barbecued. But Mitch was willing to bet he knew some things that he wasn’t about to put into words, at least not with a couple civilian johnnies. He believed George when he said some cops had seen things that made them suffer nervous breakdowns. He was willing to bet they’d seen things that had not just unhinged their minds, but turned their hair white. Maybe all the cops didn’t know what was going on here or refused to believe, but many of them did. And still they were out there, trying to reign in the madness and restore some sort of order. You had to hand it to them for that. That took guts.

“No, if I was you boys,” George said, “I’d beat those streets for your girl. We’re stretched pretty thin here. If you find her, then wait for daylight and get out of the city for a few days. If you don’t find her by dark, well, just hole up for the night. She’ll probably be doing the same somewhere else. But I’d get inside before dark.”

“Why’s that?” Mitch asked him.

George looked uncomfortable. “Just dangerous out there with the storm. And after dark…well, it could get a little wild out there after dark.”

Tommy said, “Well, I got a four-ten in the rack of my pick-up. I’m thinking that’ll be enough.”

But by the look in George Lake’s eyes, you could see he wasn’t so sure about that. “I’m just saying, you should get in by dark, that’s all.”

“She’s my kid, George,” Mitch said. “I just can’t leave her out there missing.”

George stubbed his cigar in an ashtray next to a green, peeling bench. “There’s gonna be lots of kids missing out there tonight, mister.”

17

Tommy drove over to East Genessee, which had become something of a bedroom community for the city. There had been lots of urban renewal there as the yuppies had flooded in with their minivans and modular homes.

Like Pennacott Lane getting devoured by Main Street and the University, Genessee had been similarly gobbled up through the years. It had worked pretty hard to erase its industrial past. Gone were much of the factories and machine shops that had marked its heart when Mitch was a kid and with them had left the saloons and strip joints, the sandwich counters and rows of seedy railroad hotels and freight yards where the bums used to live in their shacks. What was left were blocks and blocks of urban blight…empty storefronts and failed businesses, boarded-up dance halls and pool rooms, deserted tenements awaiting the wrecking ball. Those manufacturing plants and tool-and-die shops that still stood were gray, grim, and abandoned behind high chainlink fences, their sprawling parking lots sprouting weeds where once hundreds of cars were parked. East Genessee, like much of the city, had lost jobs by the hundreds in the past twenty-five years. Most of them had been sold overseas by the big corporations and their politico pals.

They could call it outsourcing all they wanted to, but when you put a guy in office and he allowed jobs to be shipped down to Mexico so that corporations could make obscene profits, then it was just a dirty shame. Rape was rape no matter what fancy tag you hung off it.

They passed through the remains of the industrial graveyard and then property values began to shoot up and you had lots of nice parks and schools, thriving business sectors, blocks upon blocks of ranch houses and prefab mansions. Things started to sink back the other way as you entered the surviving older sections of Genessee that sloped down towards the river. Where there had been but four or five inches of rain in the streets of yuppieville, down here where the old saltbox and two-story framehouses stood, there were a couple feet of standing water washing down the lanes. But it was no problem with Tommy’s Dodge Ram which was jacked so high you had to jump up into the cab anyway.

“Looking for four-oh-three Wilbur,” Mitch told him. “That’s where Lisa Bell lives.”

Tommy pulled onto Wilbur Avenue and studied the house numbers in the rain. It was still coming down, but not excessively. He moved the truck along slowly, leaving a foaming wake behind him that slopped into flooded yards. A few people were moving up the drenched walks in raincoats. They did not look as the truck passed.

“If I wasn’t seeing people,” Tommy said, “I would have thought this whole neighborhood was deserted.”

And there was that feeling, Mitch knew. He saw a few cars parked in the streets and a few more in driveways, but nowhere near the amount of vehicles you would have expected. There was that same feel you got here as you got over in the empty industrial sector, that sense of desertion and abandonment. While over there it was easy to see why, here…well, it was like driving through a ghost town and wondering what exactly had depopulated it.

Tommy said, “There it is.”

He touched the brakes a little too quickly and the truck jerked.

“What?” Mitch said.

Tommy brushed the back of his hand over his mouth. “Thought…thought I saw someone sitting in the swing on the porch. Nobody there now, though.”

Mitch looked at him, swallowed, and looked away.

Tommy pulled the Dodge into a driveway, just behind a parked Neon. Then they sat there looking up at that narrow L-shaped clapboard house with its high-peaked roof. There was the bracket for an old TV antenna up there that had bled rusty stains over the green shingles. Just a house like any other house you might stumble across in the Midwest…yet, as Mitch looked up at it leaning out at him, it was every empty house on every weedy lot he had suspected of being haunted as a kid.

He knew the very idea was ridiculous.

The Bell house was neither rundown nor shabby, shunned nor shadowy. The windows were not planked over and no rusty FOR SALE sign creaked on dry posts. It was actually a very nice house, old-probably late 19^th century like most of the older homes in that section-but well-maintained. There were flower boxes out front and neatly-trimmed hedges, a flagstone path leading up to the front door. Definitely not a ghost house of any sort and if it hadn’t been for the sullen, leaden hues of the day washing it down with a grim uniformity and giving it roughly the same coloration as a cemetery monument, it would have been very pleasant.

But it was not pleasant.

Mitch could not adequately express even to himself what he was feeling, just that the house inspired dread in him, filled his belly with shards of broken glass he felt would slit him open if he dared move. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was the knowledge that on days like this sundown could drop very fast and leave you groping. Maybe it was that and maybe something else.

“Cmon,” Tommy finally said, grabbing his Savage four-ten pump from the rifle rack and pumping shells into the breech. “Let’s get this done.”

“I’m not seeing Heather’s Bug around.”

“No, they’re probably not here…but I suppose we better check.”

They hopped out, Mitch in the lead. He went up the path to the porch, splashing through that foul-smelling water with his rubber boots. The rain was pissing down in gray sheets, stirring up a sluggish groundfog, and visibility was low. Looking in either direction down the block, he could not see anyone out and about. But he couldn’t see very far, either. He shook the rain off him and climbed the porch. There were a few flowerpots with withered plants in them. Nothing unusual for late September in northern Wisconsin. Most of the trees had already been stripped of leaves. Something which didn’t usually happen until mid- to late-October. Orange and yellow carpets of them bobbed in the street.

Tommy was looking at the porch swing.

It was wet like maybe a pile of soaking laundry had been set there. On the porch beneath it there was a puddle of gray water with bits of black debris floating in it. Kind of funny because the roof overhang had kept the rest of the porch pretty much dry. But Mitch figured rain could have been following a beam and dripping all afternoon.

Or maybe somebody very wet had been sitting there.

He let that go, went up to the door and knocked lightly. But there was no sound from inside.

“Maybe you should knock harder,” Tommy said.

So Mitch did and then thumbed the doorbell a couple times, hearing the ding-dong echoing from the depths of the house. Still silence. No approaching feet or anything. He supposed if someone got a look at them, particularly Tommy with his shotgun, they might not be so inclined to answer the door.

Mitch knocked a few more times and as he did so, a chill went right up his spine and spread over the backs of his forearms. He suddenly had the damnedest, most uncanny feeling that somebody was standing on the other side of that door, just waiting there like a kid playing hide-and-seek. The door itself was old hardwood with an oval glass panel set towards the top. A heavy cream-colored curtain covered the glass from the inside. You couldn’t see through that curtain exactly, but Mitch was almost certain that a form was throwing its shadow against it.

He reached down for the brass doorknob, but it was locked.

A second after he’d let it go, it rattled of its own accord like somebody was shaking it from inside.

“There’s somebody in there,” Tommy said.

Mitch knew it was true. He led Tommy off the porch and around through the sideyard, the water splashing up around the tops of their boots. The rain abated for a few moments, then came down heavy again. Off and on, off and on. They tried the backdoor and it was locked, too. All the windows were hung with sheers, so you could not actually see inside the house, but more than once Mitch was certain that a shadowy form passed by a window like somebody was watching their progress through the yard.

What the hell is this about?

They went back around front and stood at the bottom of the porch steps. The feeling that someone was standing behind the door watching them had not abated…it had grown to a near certainty.

18

“We could always go grab a beer and a burger, think this out,” Tommy said, his voice almost hopeful.

Mitch would have liked that very much. But as the minutes passed, he became more and more worried about Chrissy. Maybe she was home right now. Maybe this was all a wild goose chase. But he couldn’t let it rest at that. He loved her like his own flesh and blood and if getting some answers, or at least putting his mind to rest, meant he had to go inside this coffin, then he was going.

He charged up the steps in kind of a childish gesture so that whoever or whatever was in there would see he showed no fear, that he was ready to kick some ass. Without hesitation, he tried the knob and it was unlocked.

It turned easily in his hand.

He looked at Tommy and Tommy was starting to look a little pale.

“I ain’t liking this,” he said.

“Me either,” Mitch admitted. “But I guess…I guess somebody wants us to come in.”

“Don’t mean we have to,” Tommy said. “I tell you about my cousin Ginger? When she went in that house uninvited?”

“You got an awful lot of cousins, Tommy.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Mitch gripped the knob and threw the door open, stepped inside like he owned the joint and almost went on his ass. There was a puddle of water on the floor. Dark, dirty water like the run-off from a septic tank. And it didn’t smell much better, either. In fact, the whole house had a stagnant, vile stink to it like all the old pipes had burst, all the sediment and silt spilling out. It was the smell of seepage and old sewer lines.

“Smells like they got the rot in here,” Tommy said. “Got it bad, too.”

Blobs of water led from the doorway into the living room. Mitch could now make out distinct muddy prints in the blue shag carpeting. The smell was stronger in here. Tommy went over to a recliner. Its cushions, both bottom and back, were stained dark. He pressed the butt of the Savage into the ass cushion and water oozed out. A magazine-Newport News-was laying at the foot of the chair. The pages were mangled, streaked with dirty fingerprints like somebody with shit all over their hands had been leafing through it.

“C’mon,” Mitch said.

He led them through a dining room and into the kitchen. On the wall over the dinette table, somebody had scrawled a message in something like mud:

NOBODY’S HOME

The letters were more of a looping childish scrawl than anything and whatever material was used had dripped like horror movie print.

“That supposed to be a joke?” Tommy said.

Mitch didn’t answer, because as he came around the table he saw the refrigerator. It was a pearl white Amana and the door was standing wide open. The shelves in there had been pretty much cleared, eggs shattered on the floor, mixing in with the contents of a milk carton, a shattered orange juice bottle, mustard, mayonnaise, a glop of pasta. There were dirty handprints all over the door and smears on the shelves inside.

Somebody had been looking for something.

And then Mitch saw what it was. Where the kitchen opened back into the hallway, there was a ceramic plate and strands of shredded butcher paper that were pink with blood. Bits of hamburger were stuck to them. Somebody had torn it open, eating it raw and-judging from the trail of bloody hamburger fragments-had been walking away as they did so, clots of raw meat dropping from their mouth as they went.

“Not much on housekeeping, these Bell’s,” Tommy said, trying to be funny and failing.

A series of black, watery prints led away into the hallway. Mitch peeked into a bathroom and saw nothing. And right about then, Tommy let out a little surprised shriek.

“What?” Mitch said. “What the hell is it?”

Tommy’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. He had his Savage up and he was looking wildly from a mirror hung on the hallway wall to the stairs leading to the second floor. “Saw…saw a girl standing there,” he managed, his breath coming very fast and shallow-sounding. “Saw her in the mirror…girl just standing there in a dirty dress or something, hair stuck to her face. She was looking at me.”

There was no one there now.

Mitch, something tensing in his belly, looked into the mirror. It reflected the stairs, part of the living room. He went over to the stairs. There was a pool of water soaking into the carpet like somebody dripping wet had been standing there. More of those filthy prints went up the stairs.

“I’ve had enough of this spooky shit,” Tommy said, breezing right past him. “Somebody’s playing games and I got a new game they never heard of.”

He mounted the steps and Mitch was at his side. They were both frightened now, afraid of things they could not see and maybe more frightened of those things that could see them. They moved up the stairs slowly. At the top they could see part of a plaster wall and a painting of flowers in a brass pot, but nothing else. They could hear each other’s labored breathing and the rain striking the house.

Then above, the sound of a door creaking open followed by footsteps that were wet and mucky like someone was walking around up there with sponges strapped to their feet.

Somebody was up there, just around the bend of the corridor.

Mitch could smell them…the stink of things stranded by a tide, briny and noisome.

Then a door slammed so loudly from above, they jumped.

But they kept going, knowing in their hearts that if either of them had been alone they would probably have run right out the front door. More of those stinking, wet prints were in the hallway above as if their owner had been tramping through the black silt of river bottoms.

There was a long muddy streak along the wall like an oily rag had been dragged along it. But it hadn’t been a rag, Mitch knew, but a hand.

The dirty prints ended at a closed door. There were others shut or half-opened, but whoever was up there was behind this one. There were black stains all over its panels.

Mitch tried it, brushing muck from the knob.

It was locked. From the inside.

He looked over at Tommy and they understood each other. Tommy brought up the four-ten and Mitch made ready. At some unspoken, but understood moment, he brought up his size eleven boot and kicked out with everything he had, giving it the old Kwai Chang Caine treatment. It was just a cheap hollow door and the lock gave instantly, the door slamming right open. And then both Mitch and Tommy charged in there, becoming comically wedged in the doorframe as they tried to vault through shoulder to shoulder like Moe and Curly. Mitch pulled back because Tommy had the gun, a manic voice in his head saying, spread out, you knucklehead.

The room was probably the master bedroom. It was quite large with an oak four-poster bed and powder gray carpeting. There were muddy prints all over it, of course. As they stepped across it, standing water seeped up from the fibers. The embroidered coverlet on the bed was black with a foul, slimy stain like somebody especially grubby had laid there. And the stink was almost overpowering…pipes clogged with hair and grease and rotting scraps, heaps of decaying leaves…and maybe a worse undersmell of the noxious thing that had been laying in such filth.

None of this interested Mitch and Tommy, though.

There was a doorway leading to a bathroom and that’s where this person had to be. The closet stood open-more dirty smudges on the clothes in there as if polluted fingers had been sorting through them-and they could see everything in there. No room for the girl to hide.

She had to be in the bathroom.

Tommy started towards it. “You better cross your legs, you little bitch, because here I come.”

There was no one in there.

But there had been. The tiled floor was stained with crud and silt. There were black, muddy prints all over the mirror. The tub had been filled and there was a gray scum on the water…but nothing hiding beneath. A small square of window, about large enough for a little kid to squeeze through was standing open, the curtains billowing, a wet mist blowing in. The sill was absolutely black.

“She must’ve went out that window,” Tommy said like he couldn’t believe it.

Mitch started over to it, some slightly neurotic voice in his head crying out, what in the hell happened here? Some dead and waterlogged thing came into this house, sat in a recliner and paged through a magazine? Laid on a bed and drew a bath, rummaged through the clothes in the closet? It was madness. What the hell could it possibly be about? But maybe the dead clung tightly to the daily rituals of life and this thing, this girl, had just been going through the motions.

You can’t know that!

Yet, he felt this was as close to an answer as his brain could furnish him with. There were patterns, insane ones perhaps, that were still in play in dead brains. He wanted to think that this girl had been some living waif, but his heart and maybe his soul would not accept this.

“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.

Amongst the settled black goo on the windowsill, there was something fleshy and white curled like a bloated angleworm.

Mitch tried to swallow and couldn’t. “I think…I think it’s a finger.”

Tommy prodded it with the barrel of his shotgun and it moved, it unfurled like a sleeping caterpillar and dropped to floor, squirming. Mitch made a disgusted sound and kicked it behind the toilet. He looked out the window at the falling rain. Felt it in his face and it was good to feel connected to something real. This thing, this girl had certainly not been alive…she was filthy and rotting, spilling some festering black juice like the ink of a squid. And she had been so soft and pulpy, she had been falling apart.

He stuck his head out the window, certain he would feel two spongy hands wind around his throat. There was nowhere to jump. Just a straight drop to the wet grass below. Nobody was down there. Nobody at all. Mitch craned his head and looked up…well, there you go. There were greasy, ebony stains going right up the vinyl siding to the roof overhang like some mucky human spider had climbed right up its face. Rain blew into his eyes and he wiped it free.

And then he let out a little cry as he thought he saw a grinning white face peering at him from the edge of the chimney stack.

But then it was gone.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he told Tommy.

They both made for the stairs, moving at a good clip now. Mitch felt an almost physical wave of horror settle into him with a sickening weight. He almost expected every door in that silent, brooding house to slam open-particularly the cellar door-and things to begin creeping out. Faceless things and dripping things, crawling and slinking things. Yellow-eyed monstrosities that waited in webby, damp cellar corners to disembowel unwary children. A host of tenebrous and macabre horrors that had crawled from some crack in the floor of Hell.

Then they were on the porch and then slopping through the yard to Tommy’s truck. They practically threw themselves in the cab.

“Did you see something?” Tommy wanted to know as he reversed out into the street, spraying water in waves.

Mitch was nearly gasping for breath. “No…no I don’t think so,” he gulped. “But if I did…if I did, I think it’s up on the roof.”

19

Their house was empty, so like Craig Ohlen who lay seething in damp rot not so far away, the Zirblanski twins-Rita and Rhonda, aged eleven-decided that neither snow, rain, nor the gloom of night would stop them from kicking each other’s asses.

Rita started it.

When Rhonda stared forlornly around the wet yard, wondering where their parents were off to now, Rita stomped her in the ass and she went skidding in the water, landing face first. She popped right back up, leaves sticking to her face and launched herself at her sister like a lineman bursting into the pocket for the quarterback. She hit Rita full-bore and they both went down, rolling through the sodden grass.

“Bitch! Ugly, stupid, shit-eating bitch!” she screamed in her sister’s face when she had her pinned down. “What did you do that for? What did you do that for?”

But Rita wasn’t saying, so Rhonda grabbed a handful of wet leaves and mashed them in her face, kept rubbing them in while her sister writhed beneath her, swearing and hissing, globs of leaves working their way into her mouth. Something that Rhonda thought was funny as hell. So funny she broke up into laughter. Rita didn’t think it was so funny, though, and she fought and finally managed to work her sister off-balance. And when Rhonda went to regain her mount, Rita lashed out and slapped her across the face. It was sharp as a pistol-shot and Rhonda’s head jerked to the side with the impact.

Then Rita threw her aside and clamored to her feet.

“Witch!” Rhonda cried out. “You stinking witch!”

As Rita tried to make a break for it, Rhonda grabbed one arm of her purple raincoat, yanking it back savagely. But Rita, well accustomed to the tactics of battle, spun around and when Rhonda gave her coat another yank, it came right off, depositing Rhonda on her ass in the soggy grass.

“You’re stinking rotten dead!” Rhonda told her, getting to her feet.

“Bring it, bitch,” Rita told her, standing her ground now.

They launched themselves at each other, actually colliding in midair with a moist smacking sound and going to the ground again, swearing and scratching and kicking.

All in all, it was just another day in the life of the Zirblanski twins who verbally abused each other on a daily basis and generally got into one or two good fistfights a week. They were both small girls, eleven-years old and still nowhere near five feet, finely-boned, and oddly feminine despite their reputations and demeanors. But nature had been good to them, giving them both their mother’s high cheekbones, full lips, and angular bodies. There was something positively feline about them, hinting at the ravishing beauties they would someday become. Their eyes, which would one day be called fiery and sensual, were now just burning and starkly confrontational. Maybe in the future they would be comely creatures like their mother, but for the present with their assorted battle-scars-scabbed knees, bruises, and scratches-they were the toughest kids at Thomas West Elementary.

And if you didn’t believe that, all you had to do was cross them…or meet those eyes with your own on the wrong day and dare not look away.

So they were into it hot and heavy, rolling and thrashing, drawing blood and somewhere during the process a shrill voice called out: “Girls! Girls! You stop this right now! Do you hear me? You stop this effin nonsense right now!”

Rita and Rhonda finally separated. Caked with leaves and grass clippings, soaking wet, faces streaked with dirt, they pulled away from each other. Miriam Blake was standing on her screened-in porch dressed in an electric blue jogging suit with red piping up the legs and down the arms. She held a Remington pump shotgun in one sallow, blue-veined old lady’s claw.

The gun did not make Rita and Rhonda call off hostilities.

They had grown up next door to the Blake’s and seeing the old lady walking around the yard with a firearm was pretty much par for the course. No, what made them break apart was that regardless of the fact that they were known as “The Twin Terrors” or “Those Little Zirblanski Witches”, they had been raised to always respect adults and though many of those teachings evaporated in the blazing light of their tempers, this one managed to stand the test of time. Rita and Rhonda invariably did as adults told them…at least until said adult backs were turned.

Miriam, the shotgun looking much bigger than she did, just stood there on the porch in her blue jogging suit with the nearly-matching blue rinse in her hair. “Well?” she said. “What in the name of Peter, Paul, and Mary do you think you little vixens were doing?”

“We were fighting, ma’am,” Rhonda admitted freely.

“Yes, I saw that, Miss Sassy Mouth…but why? Good God, you’re sisters! And you’re twins! Mirror images of each other! You should be mad about each other! Simply mad! Not fighting and pecking and clawing like a pair of randy fighting cocks!”

Rita and Rhonda looked at each other when that last word was mentioned. Cocks? Did she just say cocks? Did she just compare us to a pair of fighting penises? They looked at each other, dirty water running down their faces, both hearing the same thing and thinking the same thing as was their way, and trying desperately not to laugh. It was very hard and they pulled their mouths into such tight, severe lines that their lips practically disappeared. But this was just another thing their mother had imparted to them: You do not laugh at adults. Sometimes they don’t make any sense and very often they did not have a clue, but you didn’t laugh at them. And particularly old people who more often than not were confused.

“Where are your parents?” Miriam wanted to know.

“Gone,” Rita and Rhonda said simultaneously.

“I might have suspected.” Miriam looked at the two wayward girls. “Well, come up here then. You heard me! Get up here both of you and make it snappy!”

To emphasize this, Miriam stomped her foot twice on the porch and maybe if that hadn’t worked, she might have clicked her heels and fired a round from the Remington.

Rita and Rhonda sullenly came up the steps and through the screen door, picking leaves from their short, dark mops.

“Come inside,” Miriam told them, stomping her foot one more time. “I’m alone and you girls are alone so we might as well wait together.”

Miriam made them deposit their wet things at the door and noticed with some disappointment that they were not dressed alike. Rita wore jeans and a T-shirt and Rhonda wore a skirt and a pullover sweater. In Miriam’s thinking, twins should always dress alike. It was one of those things you expected from twins.

She sat them on the sofa and fetched them both a hot chocolate which they thanked her for. You could say what you wanted about the Zirblanski twins, but they always remembered their manners.

Rita and Rhonda looked around, taking in framed pictures of old people on the wall and on the mantle shelf, most of them black and white. Which was pretty much to be expected, the twins knew, because old people had a thing for black and white. That’s how they liked their pictures and that’s how they liked their movies. There were also framed medals on the wall which must have belonged to Mr. Blake, because when he was alive he’d always been talking about all the Japs he’d killed in the war. There were a few paintings, too. Neither Rita nor Rhonda could say who they were, just a bunch of old men. Though Rita thought one was a painting of Ronald Reagan who’d been president a long, long time ago. She was pretty sure it was him because they’d made a big deal of it when he’d died and it had been on TV all the time. Just like when the pope died. Rita and Rhonda’s Uncle Johnny said that was ridiculous, because Reagan wasn’t much of a president anyway. He said Reagan had made movies with a talking monkey, if that was any indication of the sort of character he was. Just an actor playing a part, that’s all he was, Johnny said when Reagan died. Liked to talk tough about the unions over in Poland, but first chance he had he broke up the air traffic controller’s union over here. Goddamn hypocrite. Good riddance, I say.

Of course, the twin’s mother always told them not to listen to what Uncle Johnny said because sometimes he drank and when he drank he got mean. But their dad seemed to think Uncle Johnny was okay. Agreed with him on most things. Dad wasn’t real crazy about the Blake’s because they were Republicans and worse than that, they were conservative Republicans which he made sound like a disease you might catch off a toilet seat. Uncle Johnny said that the real problem with Republicans is that they were in bed with the Jesus-ers. Them Jesus-ers have their way, he liked to say, won’t be no more separation of church and state. Next thing you know we’ll be burning witches and starting the crusades again.

All of which meant very little to Rita and Rhonda.

The only thing that bothered them about being in the Blake’s house is that both their mother and father had warned them never to enter that house because the Blake’s were “gun freaks.” And guns and children don’t mix, they said. Which was something Rita and Rhonda pretty much believed anyway after Josh Denehew got hold of his father’s. 22 pistol and shot three of his toes off. Which their mother had said was “Getting off easy.”

So there they sat, Rita and Rhonda, across from Miriam Blake in that tidy living room with the trappings of the conservative Republican cult all around them, wondering just how and when they would be turned into “brainwashed flag-wavers” like Miriam Blake.

So far, they didn’t feel any different.

But both had noticed that unlike most people’s homes, the Blake’s had gun cases right in their living room.

Miriam said, “You know, I’ve been watching you two girls pound the beejeesus out of each other for years. And always, I’ve been wondering why. When my Roger was alive he said you two were always just too wild for your own good. But I told him you girls had a lot of wild oats to sow. And by the looks of things, you’re still sowing them. My goodness, you must have more oats sowed than Quaker Mills. But why, girls? Why do you fight?”

Rita and Rhonda looked at each other as if the question had never occurred to them before. “I don’t know,” Rhonda finally said.

Miriam shook her head. “Well, there you go, girls! Nobody in this country ever knows! Yet they fight and squabble and raise Cain on a daily basis! The whites don’t like the Jews and Jews don’t like the Chinks and the Chinks don’t like the coloreds. One nation under God! Hah! That’s a laugh! I think we’d all be getting along fine if it wasn’t for the liberals sticking their noses where they surely don’t effing belong. Are you with me on that girls?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, though they had no idea what she was talking about.

“If the liberals have their way, there won’t be any ‘God’ in this nation. Tell me something, girls. Do you pray in school?”

“No,” Rita said.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s for church,” Rhonda said.

“Oh dear God, now who’s been poisoning your brain with that trash?”

They just looked at each other.

“Do you go to church?”

They shook their heads. “No, ma’am.”

“And why not?”

Rita had to keep her mouth closed so she didn’t say the things her dad did. No child of mine is going to one of those places. I’m raising my girls to think for themselves, not let someone else do their thinking for ‘em. Of course, their dad said this to their mother, but both twins had overheard as they overheard most things. Just like they’d overheard their dad saying, you know what those old deviants are doing to altarboys…just imagine what they do to the girls.

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to?”

Rita, a bit of color touching her cheeks, said, “Nope.”

Miriam just shook her head, but sensing she was running into a wall here, one that might fall right on her head if she pushed too hard, moved right along. “See, girls. The problems in this country mostly stem from the Jews. See, it’s because of the Jews that all those nasty A-rabs don’t like us. We protect the Jews and they hate us for it. The Jews killed Christ. Did you know that?”

“Nope,” they said together.

“Well, it’s true, the Jews killed Christ and here we are protecting them and getting mixed up in wars just to save them when we ought to be throwing those Yids right to the dogs. That’s something they won’t teach you in effing school.”

Rita and Rhonda figured most of what Miriam Blake was telling them they wouldn’t learn in school. And something was telling them that that was probably a good thing.

Miriam went on to explain to them that, again, it was all the liberals fault. Because good God-fearing Americans didn’t have any truck with Jews. It was the rich liberals who forced the government into protecting the Jews and that’s where all the trouble stemmed from. Rhonda was going to point out that she thought it was the oil companies that caused all the trouble in the Middle East, but she kept her mouth shut.

“Now, girls,” Miriam said, “what I’m going to do now is for your own good. What with the flooding, it’s only a matter of time before things get out of hand. And, I’m thinking, they already have. Have either of you girls ever shot a gun before?”

“No,” Rita told her. “We’re not allowed to touch them.”

“Why for heaven’s sake?”

“Because they kill people,” Rhonda said.

That made Miriam shake her head vehemently. “Oh, no, no, no. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

“Guns make it easier, though,” Rita pointed out.

Miriam didn’t like that one and was pretty much suspecting by this point that the Zirblanski’s were nothing but a stewpot of bubbling liberalism. She took the girls over to one of her gun cabinets and pulled out a matching pair of small, sleek. 32 pistols.

“It’s very easy, girls. You take the weapon off safety, pull back the slide to work a round into the chamber, then pull the trigger.”

The twins were shaking their heads, knowing they couldn’t possibly hold those guns, yet, they very much wanted to. Miriam finally put them in their hands.

“We’re standing guard tonight,” she said. “Any of those effing weirdos try to come through that door, we shoot the bejeesus out of them. Do you understand?”

But the girls just shook their heads. Maybe they knew and maybe they were afraid to admit as much.

“I mean we point our guns at them and shoot!”

“We kill people?” Rita said.

“No, honey, not people, just the bad ones. The bad ones that are going to be coming.”

“The liberals?” Rita said.

Miriam just made a face at that.

The girls looked at each other, then at the guns in their hands.

“How will we know?” Rhonda said.

Miriam smiled. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll know them on sight.”

20

“The weirdest shit you ever saw,” Dave Rose was saying to Pat Marcus as they cruised East Genessee, the rain falling and falling, the patrol car’s wipers whipping back and forth madly. “Me and Eddie, we’re over at one of those tenements on Pennacott, right? Some call came in, kids were worried about their mother. So they send me and Eddie. Okay, what the hell? We get over there and these three kids meet us downstairs. Oh, shit, Pat, they were dirty and they smelled.”

Marcus chuckled under his breath. “That’s Pennacott. Lots of those kids over there are dirty and stink.”

“Well this is different. Me and Eddie we start talking to these kids and, holy shit, they start telling us this stuff. Man, it was bad. Their mother locked herself in her room for a couple days and didn’t come out. Kids thought she was dead. Then yesterday, they said, she starts moving around in there. She doesn’t come out, but she starts telling the boy that she wants things.”

Marcus slowed as they moved through a puddle that stretched across the street. “What kind of things?”

Rose swallowed. “Man…well, dead things.”

“Dead things?”

“That’s what the kid says. Mom wanted dead things, things floating around in the streets. Can you beat that? So the kid brings her a dead cat, a dog, some rats. Anything he can find. Just leaves them outside the door. Kid tell us that she was eating them. That this morning he saw her reach out to take a dead rat and her arm was all white or something, had things crawling on it. You believe that shit?”

It was Marcus’ turn to swallow and he swallowed hard, like he was trying to keep something down. “And this woman…they thought she was dead?”

“Yeah. Locked herself in her room and was real quiet for a couple days.”

Marcus sighed. He looked a bit sickened by the story, but he did not look surprised. “Listen, Dave…you just got back, right?”

“Sure. Yesterday. I was down in Fort Lauderdale with my sister. What of it?”

“Just that…well, been some crazy shit going on is all.” He pulled the patrol car to a stop outside a drug store, the grayness of the day seeping into him and making him think he needed some hot coffee to chase it out. “Go grab us a couple cups, will ya?”

Rose did. He was back in five minutes.

Shaking rain off himself and sipping from his steaming Styrofoam cup, he said, “Now, where was I? Okay, Eddie tells me to take the kids and get Child Protective Services on the horn. So I do. I wait outside with them for CPS to show, just twiddling my thumbs and trying to make conversation with them. Yeah, right. The little one is crying, the other two are just staring into space. CPS shows and we go through the whole nine yards before they take the kids. Meanwhile, where in the hell is Eddie? Another car shows, a couple detectives from Major Crimes. What’s their interest? They don’t say. Up we go to talk to Eddie. We get up there. No Eddie. No mother. No nothing. But, Christ, it smells bad in there. I mean just fucking rotten.”

“And that was it?”

“That was it. Jesus, Pat, what the hell gives here? Where’s Eddie? What the fuck is going on here?”

“Wish I knew.”

Rose wished he knew, too. You partner with a guy for three years, you get tight. You get so you start to care. Sometimes you start socializing outside of work. Cookouts on the weekend, maybe a little fishing or what not. That’s how it was with Rose and Eddie Stokley. They’d gotten to be good friends. There was a chemistry between them and now this. And even a real tough guy macho hardcase felt something like this right in the guts like a good kick when something happened to your partner. Especially when you didn’t know what, but your gut instinct told you it was bad. Plenty bad.

“He was a good guy, that Eddie,” Rose said. “A real good guy.”

“Quit talking about him in the past tense.”

“What? Hell’s that mean?”

“I mean, quit talking about him like he’s dead,” Marcus said.

Rose blinked and then blinked again like maybe something wet wanted to come rolling out of his eyes and he simply could not allow it. “Christ, Pat. Eddie was the best man at my fucking wedding. He loaned me five grand so we could make the down payment on our house. I’m his kid’s godfather. He was the best, just the best.”

“There you go again,” Marcus said, scowling. “Quit that past tense shit. You don’t know that anything happened to him. He’s just gone missing. That’s not good, but it don’t really mean anything.”

But Rose just shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, Pat. But Eddie…something happened to him and it’s something bad. That’s all I’m saying. I can feel it.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Don’t I know it.” Rose finished his coffee and rubbed his tired eyes. “I’ll tell you something, Pat. Eddie was acting funny all day. Just not himself, you know? Something was eating at him. He knew something was going to happen. He knew it, he felt it.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Pat, sometimes a guy knows. Remember Joey Hill over to the Crandon Precinct? Sure you do. That guy was a riot. An absolute riot. One joke after the other. Everybody loved that old sonofabitch. That day that fucking punk opened up on him with that shotgun and wasted him, old Joey was not himself. I know. Haines, his partner, told me so. Not just that day but for two days before Joey was not himself. He didn’t smile, he didn’t joke. He didn’t do much but stare. Acted like a guy that was waiting for a phone call that would tell him his mother had just died. He knew it was coming, Pat. He did. You think that’s bullshit? Well, Haines was with him when he died, poor Joey gutshot in the street, blood all over the place. You know what Joey told Haines before he rolled over? He said, ‘I knew it…I knew it was coming for me.’ And that’s right from the horse’s mouth.”

Marcus wiped a finger across his lips. “Quit it, will ya? You’re fucking depressing me here.”

And of all things, that made Rose laugh. A dead, dry sort of laughter. “You want depressing? Oh, I can give you depressing, Pat. You know where I spent the last hour before I came out with you? I was with Eddie’s wife. I was there with Peggy and you know what that was like? Not good, not good. I kept telling her that Eddie would show up, saying all the crazy bullshit you’re saying to me, but she wasn’t buying it. I told her he might have got fucking amnesia or something. Goddamn, you should have heard the silly shit I was coming up with. But she knew, she knew. She told me she knew he was dead. But she didn’t have to tell me that, now did she? She said Eddie was acting funny this morning. Not himself. All jittery or something and I saw it, too.” Rose wiped his eyes again. “No, Pat, he knew. He knew today was the day. Christ, it gives me the willies to think about it.”

“So quit thinking about it. He’ll turn up. We’ll find him.”

“I’m not so sure we’re gonna want to find him,” Rose said under his breath.

The radio squawked and Marcus was glad for the diversion. When cops got together, sometimes they started talking about shit like this. Omens and portents, all that jiggy superstitious nonsense. Some cops were just plain superstitious, but they would not admit it around anybody but other cops. That’s the way the brotherhood worked.

“Ten-four on that, Dispatch,” Rose said into the mic, replacing it on the dash. “How do you like that? We got to go over to the Hope Street boneyard. Vandalism or something. Jesus. Caretaker called it in.”

“It’s only three blocks from here,” Marcus said.

He pulled a U-turn in the street which was no problem because there was hardly anyone out. The rain had lessened to a drizzle. He took his time. They passed through the business district and onto 5^th Avenue which would connect them with Hope Street. A few people were out on the walks, but not many. Most of the houses looked buttoned-up and battened-down. On the lower end of Hope, the houses were few and far between. There was a baseball field and an Amvets lodge, a little park with a creek cutting through it. Vacant lots and then the cemetery coming out of the grayness at them, enclosed by a high stone wall.

Rose sighed. “I need this shit with the day I been having. A visit with the Cryptkeeper of all things.”

“Oh, shut up, Dave,” Marcus said, maybe a little more sternly than he had intended.

Maybe Rose had just gotten back to the cesspool of Witcham after two weeks in sunny Florida, but Marcus had been there since the rains started. Since that explosion out at the Fort Providence base and the flooding began and all the weird things had started happening. Dispatch said vandalism, but Marcus had seen enough bad shit by that point to be able to read through the lines just fine. Dispatch said vandalism, but what they meant these days was desecration. It had been reported in a couple other graveyards in the past few days. Graves opened, crypts defiled. Maybe it was the storm making people loony and maybe it was something else entirely.

He pulled the patrol car through the gates and slowed to a crawl. All those stones and markers winding off into the gray, wet haze made a chill run up his spine. Everything was colorless and almost surreal, tombs and monuments hung with wreaths of pale mist. The road thick with fallen leaves. Everything was so silent, so empty, they could have been the last two men on earth. And if that was the case, this was a hell of a place to pass the time.

“Hate these places,” Rose said. “Reminds me of when I was a kid and my Uncle Tony ate the gun. He got back from Vietnam and he couldn’t cope. Blew his brains out. It was bad, real bad. I remember that funeral. It was a day like this. Just rainy and misty, real creepy. Everybody crying at the graveside. God. After that, things were funny in our neighborhood. Real funny. Kids started saying crazy shit. Shit that scared the hell out of me.”

“What sort of shit?” Marcus asked, knowing he was going to regret it.

Rose shook his head, sighed. “Ah, you know how kids are. Make up things. Started saying how they were seeing Tony around the neighborhood. Just standing around in the vacant lot where we’d played ball and stuff. Standing there with his uniform on, smiling, most of his head shot away. One night, there was a knock on the door and when my mom answered it, there was nobody there. My brother started screaming, saying it was Uncle Tony, Uncle Tony. He’d seen him looking through the window at him. And our bedroom was on the second floor. How do you like that? One time, we heard footsteps coming up the stairs, only when we opened our door, there wasn’t nobody there-”

“All right already, Dave. Jesus H. Christ.”

“I’m just making conversation.”

Marcus looked over at him. “We’re in a cemetery and the best you can do is a ghost story?”

Rose chuckled. “I see your point.”

Marcus wheeled the patrol car past the chapel and a couple grim, lichen-encrusted statues of Jesus and Mary, following the winding dirt road over to the caretaker’s shack. It was set in a copse of big oaks, stripped now, yellow leaves floating in puddles and the hollows of sunken graves. Nothing out there but rows of tombstones, old ones mostly, worn and leaning and dripping. A collection of mossy crypts flanking them. A pick-up truck was parked next to the shack.

Marcus pulled the car to a stop. He grabbed the mic. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen. We’re at Hope Street Cemetery location. Leaving car. Standby.”

“Ten-four, Fifteen,” came the reply.

They got out into that chill mist which seemed immediately to go up the backs of their raincoats until it found their spines. A gentle rain fell. Fingers of ground fog slithered amongst the tombstones like snakes. You could hear the patrol car idling, water dripping onto the fallen leaves and the plastic rain-bonnets of their hats, but nothing more.

Rose knocked on the shed door. “Hello? Police here.”

There was no answer.

“Well, this caretaker can’t be too excited to see us. Vandalism. What happened? Somebody spray paint naughty words on the stones?”

“Stop it,” Marcus said. “Show some respect.”

“Respect, he says. After the day I had, you’d think you’d show me a little sympathy, Pat. Goddamn Eddie. Fuck am I gonna do without Eddie?”

“Don’t start that again.”

Marcus pushed past him and let himself into the shed. There were racks of tools and shovels, lawnmowers and weed-eaters, bags of fertilizer, the usual. There was a rich, dark smell in there of mown grass and black earth. A little desk was pushed against the wall. It was crowded with papers and a few magazines. A paperback western was opened as if it had just been set aside. On the wall above the desk there was a calendar with a blonde in blue-jean cut-offs exposing her impressive breasts.

This is what Rose was looking at. “Look at those jugs, Pat.”

But Marcus was not interested. He was not a religious guy really, but the idea of a young woman thrusting out her breasts in a place like this seemed sacrilegious or something. He bet that model never thought she’d be showing her goods in a graveyard shed.

There was a cup of coffee on the desk next to a Thermos. “Still warm,” he said. “I bet our boy hasn’t been gone long.”

Rose pulled his eyes off the lady’s charms. “Well, where the hell is he?” He walked over to a little window that looked out towards those old tombs. “Don’t see nobody around.”

Marcus didn’t either.

And that was starting to bother him in ways he could not adequately fathom. On the surface, it seemed to mean nothing: the caretaker had stepped out for a moment or two, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up about. But much deeper, in places Marcus did not wish to plumb, he was certain it meant something. That the silence here was trying to tell him something. Maybe it was trying to warn him away.

Knock it off, he told himself. You’re getting as bad as Rose. You start believing in omens and premonitions and that kiddie campfire shit, it’s time to hang it up.

Rose turned away from the window. “Let’s give it five minutes. He don’t show, we take off. To hell with this guy.”

Now Dave was talking sense. For what else could they really do? Marcus was going to tell his interim partner just that, but when he looked over at him, he saw something outside the window. Not something, really, but somebody. Just a glimpse of face looking in at them. But the effect was immediate. He gasped and almost fell over.

“Jesus Christ, Pat…you okay?”

Marcus licked his lips. “Yeah…I just saw somebody.”

Rose swung around. He peered out the window. Not only peered out, but pressed his face up against the rain-spattered pane and looked long and hard. Marcus felt his throat narrow to a pinhole. He wanted to tell Rose not to do that, not to get so goddamn close. That’s how thick the paranoia in him was. Like maybe he thought something might reach through the glass and take hold of him.

“Don’t see anybody,” Rose said. He shrugged and walked over to the door.

“What’re you doing?” Marcus asked him.

“I’m seeing if I can catch our caretaker,” he said. “Why? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

But Marcus just shook his head. That image…glimpsed for the briefest of moments…turned something inside him. Made his stomach tighten and a chill run down his spine. “It…I don’t think it was the caretaker.”

Rose stopped as he was reaching for the doorknob. He looked at Marcus, not sure what any of this was about. “You’re kind of freaking me out here, Pat.”

“Sorry. I guess that face startled me.”

“Why?”

He swallowed. Why, indeed? How was he suppose to answer that in any way that made sense? Was he supposed to tell Rose that that face was not right somehow? That it was too pale? Too skullish? The grin too crooked? That it was just wrong in every way imaginable?

In the end, he said nothing.

Rose just stared at him and at that precise moment when he was probably going to call Marcus a nut, there was a loud pounding on the door that made him retract his outstretched hand as if the door had suddenly gotten too hot.

“This is bullshit,” Rose said.

He took hold of the knob, opened it and threw the door open.

21

Marcus felt his heart skip a beat. He didn’t know what he was expecting out there, but there was nothing. Just the rain falling from the roof overhang, a few wisps of that mist. The graveyard beyond. Nothing else.

“You sure you saw somebody?” Rose said.

“I thought I did.”

They both went out the door and Marcus steeled himself, pumped up something inside him so he wouldn’t get the heebie-jeebies. He walked out the door feeling like the big tough cop of ten years he in fact was.

“Hey!” Rose said. “Somebody out here?”

Together, they circled the shack and looked in the pick-up truck. But there was no one and Marcus was beginning to think there never had been.

“This is just some day,” Rose said. “You know? Just some kind of day.”

“Tell me about it.”

They went back to the patrol car. Rose got in and Marcus circled around to the driver’s side. He was going to get in, too, but he suddenly felt a tingling along the back of his throat and had the oddest feeling that a hand was poised to touch him there. He swung around. Nobody, nothing.

Rose got back out. “Hey, look over there.”

Someone was standing in the road just up from the shack. The rain started up again, falling in a gray sheet, but they both saw someone there. Rose in the lead, they started in that direction. They could see it was a girl of all things. Maybe eight or ten, dressed in a little green plaid skirt and white knee socks.

“Hey, kid!” Rose said. “C’mere.”

The girl just stood there and the closer they got, the more certain Marcus became that hers was the face that had peeked in at him. She was just a little thing. Dead leaves were stuck to her dress. She had red pigtails. There was a crest sewn to the breast of her white shirt.

“Pat,” Rose said. “That’s a school uniform. That’s one of the missing girls from Holy Covenant.”

Yes, it had to be.

They were maybe twenty feet from her, close enough to see that her face was positively anemic. Just white. Her lips were black and there were gray circles under her eyes.

“Hey, little girl,” Rose said.

She smiled and turned away from them, taking off amongst the headstones.

“Hey!” Rose said. “Come back!”

And Marcus wanted to say, just let her go, but his voice didn’t want to come. He was smelling a rank, stagnant odor like something that might come from a drainage pipe. It was the girl’s smell.

At the perimeter of headstones they lost her. She was out there, they knew that much. Perhaps crouched behind a marker or hiding behind a tree.

Rose took off his hat and shook the rain from it. “This just keeps getting better. First fucking Eddie disappears, now I’m playing hide-and-go-seek with a Catholic schoolgirl. You see her face, Eddie? She looks sick or something. White like that.”

Or dead.

“Piss on it,” Marcus said, feeling like a bag of conflicting nerves. “We’ll call it in. I’m not chasing her in this downpour.”

“I hear you.”

It sounded good in theory, but Marcus knew it would not work. The girl wanted them to follow her. That was what this was about. She was one of those missing girls and she wanted to show them where the others were and he honestly did not want to know where that was. And, as if on cue, the girl’s head popped up from behind a headboard-shaped marker. She was smiling, rain rolling down her ghastly white face.

“Fuck,” Rose said. “All right, little girl, you wanna play, we’ll play.”

Marcus cut off to the left and Rose went to the right. They would circle around her, flush her out like a rabbit in a hedge, and catch her. See what this was all about.

You know what it’s about, Marcus thought. You know exactly what this is about. You can pretend otherwise all you want, Pat, but you know the shit happening in this city. Those girls disappeared because something got to them. Something you don’t want to think about. And now they’re back.

Here.

In this cemetery.

Where else would things like them go?

Marcus heard Rose on his walkie-talkie as he threaded through the monuments and stripped trees. He was telling Dispatch that there was no one at the Hope Street Cemetery location, but that they had sited a juvenile. Might have been one of the missing kids from Holy Covenant. The little girl was staying put, looking positively obscene as she hugged that marker, her pale hands encircling it and that pale face grinning lifelessly like a doll’s. Her eyes were black and deep. They did not blink.

Marcus looked over towards where Rose was and saw him pass behind a tree and that’s when he knew they’d made a terrible mistake. What they were doing was simply procedure. It’s what cops did. The powers that be were hot to find out what happened to those girls. Yet, even with that in mind and the knowledge that they were doing the right thing, he knew down deep that the right thing was not always the smartest thing. Because this was a trap. This girl was bait and she was drawing them in, perhaps as she had drawn the caretaker in.

Marcus could not see Rose now.

He’d disappeared behind some hedges. Too many stones out there and thick tree trunks.

And that’s when Rose screamed.

It was a quick, almost economical sort of scream that died away almost as soon as he’d heard it. The girl giggled and when he looked back at her, she was gone.

“Dave!” he cried out. “Dave! Where the hell are you?”

But there was no answer, of course.

Marcus went running through the stones in the direction of that scream. He vaulted hedgerows and slabs, circled around trees, the rain and the ground mist obscuring everything. He wiped water from his eyes and then skidded to a stop over a collection of wet leaves.

There was an open grave before him.

Perfectly squared off, it reached down and down into the black earth. He could smell the dankness of it. There had to have been three or four feet of standing water in it, leaves floating on the surface.

“Dave?” he said. “Dave?”

This could have been what happened. Rose could have fallen, maybe hit his head, was lying down in there drowning right now. Marcus stood on the edge, looking down. He had never felt so helpless in his life. If Dave was down there…what then?

You’re not really thinking of jumping in, are you?

But, no, he wasn’t thinking that. That water was black and oily, full of leaves and God only knew what.

He pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen! Officer needs assistance! Repeat! Officer needs assistance! Hope Street Cemetery location…”

There was nothing but a garbled static coming from the walkie-talkie.

Marcus thumbed it. “Dispatch! Dispatch!”

More static, rising and falling, then the voices of several little girls: “Eenie, meanie, miny, moe?”

Marcus felt suddenly hot and cold inside. His heart raced, his hand shook. “Clear this channel! Clear this channel!”

“EENIE, MEANIE, MINY, MOE!” came the voices, loud, chanting. “CATCH A NIGGER BY THE TOE! IF HE HOLLERS, LET HIM GO-”

“Clear this channel! Clear this fucking channel!”

“MY MOTHER SAYS TO PICK THE VERY BEST ONE AND YOU-”

“STOP IT!” Marcus shouted. “DO YOU HEAR ME? STOP IT!”

“-ARE NOT IT!”

Then more static and he could not get the radio to obey. Standing there, trembling and filled with a sharp, cutting silence, he knew that it was all in his head. It had to be in his head. He was hallucinating. He looked down into the grave and was not really surprised when he saw another white face emerge from the water, leaves clinging to it. Another little girl. This one blonde with eyes so black and liquid you could have drowned in them.

Marcus turned away.

That little girl was saying something, but he did not want to know what.

There was only one thing to do and that was to head back to the patrol car and get the hell out of here, come back with reinforcements. That’s what had to be done. And although his mind was cluttered with crawling, nightmare things, he saw the truth of this and knew there was no other way. He ran around the hedges and almost fell into a pack of girls.

Three of them, actually.

All dressed in their Holy Covenant uniforms and all white-faced with leering eyes of translucent blackness. No pupils, no whites, just that solid blackness. They were all grinning at him, leaves and sticks stuck to them, streaks of dirt on their faces.

“Dave said you should come with us, Pat,” they said in unison. “Dave said you should come so we can play a game together.”

Marcus drew his 9mm pistol. “I know what you are,” he said, trying to get some breath into his lungs. “I know what all of you are. You better get out of my way. If you don’t think I’ll shoot things like you, you’re wrong.”

The girls giggled.

“Get out of my way!”

“We want to play a game with you,” they said.

Behind him, another voice said, “Pssst!”

Marcus wheeled around. Another girl was peering at him from behind a tree. “You’re it!” she said.

Then she disappeared.

Marcus felt the madness open up inside him like a sucking pit that wanted to drown him, body and soul. You’re it? Sure, why not? Of course he was it. It was all a very fucked-up little kid’s game and he was it. Yes, yes, yes.

The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled and he jumped. “Dispatch!” he said into it, just waiting for those eerie little girl voices to come echoing out of it.

But this time it was someone else: “Pat! Pat! Jesus Christ, help me! Help me!”

In the distance, he heard Rose crying out.

Then Marcus was running. He could hear the girls chasing behind him, wanting to tag him and do other things that his mind would not let him think about. He came out on the road just up from the caretaker’s shack. He saw a couple other girls dragging Rose’s body towards the yawning mouth of a tomb.

“Dave!” he shouted. “Dave!”

This has been arranged and you know it, don’t you, Pat? A trap, just a fucking trap!

But he was done listening to stupid damn voices.

Dave Rose was in trouble.

And those little bitches were going to pay for it.

Marcus ran, gun in one hand and walkie-talkie in the other. He’d had enough of this shit and he was going to take care of business now. Just watch him. Games? He’d show those little cunts some games they’d never, ever heard of. The tomb was cut from gray stone with lots of dead ivy clinging to it. The wrought iron gates were thrown wide. He marched through and saw a set of steps before him. He moved down them, determined and resolute…and promptly slipped and fell, plunging into the water. He came up gasping, the sound of splashing water echoing in the cavernous tomb. The stink in there of submerged dead things going to rot was almost unbearable.

But he saw.

He saw Dave Rose just as dead as dead could be floating in the water. He saw those Catholic schoolgirls standing in the murk, dripping and ghoulish and grinning. A few caskets had been pulled from their berths in the walls. What was in them was floating around. Black liquid running from their mouths, the living dead girls chewed on arms and legs and one coveted a skull with hardly any meat on it. She licked at the hollow eye sockets.

“Very good girls,” a booming voice said from behind Marcus.

He looked up and saw…saw a nun standing at the top of the steps. Her habit was filthy with mud and leaves, slit right open to the waist. Her breasts were huge and pendulant and white as cream, mottled with a stark grayness. And the truly, unbelievably insane part was that they had replicated themselves. There were not just two of those bloated, gray-nippled breasts, but four sets running down to her waist, swinging as she spoke.

Yes, yes, yes, Marcus knew, a nun had disappeared with the girls and, Lord be praised, here she was…in the flesh.

She came down the steps, her skirts flowing around her like sheets in a wind, her breasts swaying and slopping from side to side. She held her hands out and he could see the holes that had been punched through the palms as if by nails. Black juice ran from them. And her face…swollen and set with flies, was a lumpy mass of colorless flesh that seemed to be oozing like melting clay. Her eyes were huge and black and running with a clear jelly.

“Patrick Marcus! The Day of Judgment is at hand and the horn will sound!” she said in a voice that was clotted and thick like somebody vomiting. Her teeth were gunmetal gray and overlapping, terribly sharp as if they’d been filed. They gnashed together. “The fallen angels have gathered in our midst and set loose foul horrors which would eat the righteous body and soul! Oh, the evil that men do, Patrick, the evil that men do!”

Marcus did the only thing he could do.

He fired three rounds into her. One of which exploded one of those breasts, spraying rancid tissue into the water.

Then he screamed.

Above, the tomb door swung shut and there was splashing in the water as the girls inched closer. But in the steaming, foul darkness, he did not go mad. Not until the nun took his face in her hands and forced a cold tongue into his mouth. One that was slimy and cold like a river leech. This is what destroyed his mind.

That and the sounds of the girl suckling those fleshy, distended breasts.

22

Some days just go from bad to worse.

Maybe for awhile they tease you a bit with false hopes or promises, but in the end they invariably head in the same direction: they find the biggest, darkest hole available and they drag you in with them.

That’s pretty much how it was for Mitch.

He wasn’t so much worried about the shit hitting the fan, being that it already had and he was covered from head to toe. No, he was worried that it wouldn’t stop hitting said fan, that he’d never be able to quit bobbing and weaving. What he’d been through over at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus was unquestionably bad. The sort of experience that took your mind and shook it up like a snow globe. Ditto for the dead woman in the drainpipe. But what Tommy and he had gone through over at the Bell house…that was worse. That was ugly and just plain disturbing. There was no doubt that one of those things had been in the house with them-after they were driving away, Tommy had reiterated that it had indeed been a girl he’d seen in the mirror, maybe nine or ten, but as much like a nine or ten year old girl as an A-bomb was like a firecracker-and she had been dogging them, watching them, playing games with them much as any naughty girl might do.

Of course, she was not just a good girl gone bad. She was something dead that walked, but somehow and for some reason they would never know, what she had put them through was probably some debased form of play for her.

At least, that’s what Mitch was thinking. Playing with us, happily fucking with our heads. Maybe getting off on the fear she generated. And if we had hung around long enough, she would have declared herself the winner and tore out our throats.

Maybe he was just overwrought, but then maybe not.

When they reached Lisa Sale’s house over in Elmwood Hills, taking their time so they wouldn’t show up at the door pale and trembling, Lisa’s mom and dad and younger sister were all there. The bad news was that Chrissy and the others were not. The good news was that they had been. That afternoon, maybe about the same time Mitch was watching a dead arm flopping on the floor of Sadler Brother’s, Heather and Lisa and Chrissy had returned. Loaded down from shopping at the West Town Mall, they had played a little Xbox and tried on some new outfits, then they were off again.

Mitch told Mike Sale, Heather’s father, to keep them there when they returned. To hold them at gunpoint if necessary. Mike said he would be glad to. Of course, Mitch could see the look in his eyes, the what’s-the-big-deal? sort of look. So, revving up the old bullshit machine to 75 rpm’s, he explained that Lily was freaking out (she was) and that there was something of a family crisis. Mike Sale bought that okay, though Mitch could see that he wasn’t buying it completely.

After that, there was nothing to do but head back to Crandon and Lily.

That was the plan anyway, but then Tommy said, “Mitch? You mind if we take a quick stop by Bonnie’s place?”

Bonnie Kohler was Tommy’s only family in the world. His parents were long dead and his brother had gotten killed in a head-on collision out on Highway 8 six years before. Bonnie was his step-sister. Tommy saw her maybe once or twice a year, but with what was going on, you started thinking more about family. Those slim threads that held you together suddenly started feeling very weighty and necessary.

“Okay with me,” Mitch said.

Bonnie had a store at the very outskirts of Elmwood as it sloped down towards Bethany and the river. Tommy got them there in about five minutes and the further they went, the deeper the water became. Those last few blocks were marked by cars stalled at curbsides and lots of empty-looking storefronts. Even the bars that never closed looked deserted. By the time they got to Bonnie’s One-Stop-package liquor, cold beer, and broasted chicken-the water was over a foot deep in the street. They could see Bethany hugging the river in the distance, water sluicing right up to windowsills.

But at least they found all the people.

They were gathered outside Bonnie’s little neighborhood store which sat between a couple little shops, Antiques of Yesteryear and Fern’s Fancy Gifts-Discount Moccasins and Ojibwa Bead Supplies. The sort of places that Mitch’s father had always called “bucket shops” with some derision.

“What the hell is that all about?” Tommy said, maybe louder than he intended, eyeing the crowd outside Bonnie’s.

Mitch wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look good, though, not good at all.

People generally didn’t gather like that unless there was an accident, a fire, or some guy was handing out money. You could have just won ten million in the lottery or cured cancer, but that wouldn’t have brought them out like something particularly bad. Something involving blood and bodies or hardship. Then you couldn’t get rid of them. They flocked like seagulls when somebody dropped a French fry.

Tommy and Mitch hopped out of the cab into the chill standing water which looked gray and filthy like seepage from a cesspool. Mitch could just about imagine what might be floating in it. When the rainwater gravity drains backed up for any length of time, they also flooded out the sewer systems and the result was sewage in the streets.

Mitch raced behind Tommy to the store. There were maybe twenty or thirty people standing out there in raincoats and rubber boots as the rain continued to fall and the water continued to rise. There was something terribly ludicrous about it all. And Mitch knew that whatever was going on had to be good.

“What’s going on here?” Tommy asked an old guy who had a baseball bat in his hands, of all things.

“We’re waiting for the cops and they’re about as quick as fucking molasses like usual,” the guy said. He pointed towards the store entrance with his bat. “Something’s going on in there. Something bad. You better stay out here with us, mister.”

There were cords standing out in Tommy’s neck now. “That’s not what I asked you.”

“Cool your jets, hotshot,” the old guy said.

Which was about as much mouth as Tommy had patience for. He grabbed the old guy by the coat and nearly hoisted him right off his feet. “That’s my sister’s fucking store…you hear me? Now tell me what’s going on in there.”

The others were all watching now. Maybe they would have come to the old guy’s aid, but not after what Tommy had said. He had just made it personal.

“Take it easy,” a woman said. “There’s some crazy woman hiding in there.”

Tommy released the old man. “Is it…is it Bonnie?”

The woman shook her head. “No, Bonnie’s in Chicago. But she ain’t gonna like it much when she gets back, I’ll tell you that much.”

At this point, Mitch interceded before Tommy started getting really pissed off. It came from about six or seven people, but he finally got the basics. Some crazy bitch came out of the cellar trapdoor and attacked the girl behind the counter. When somebody went in to help, the crazy lady attacked them, too. Both of them managed to get out and now they were on their way over to St. Mary’s Hospital.

“But don’t go in there,” a teenage kid said. “I saw her…she was outta her head.”

“How did she look?” Mitch asked.

The kid looked like he didn’t want to say. Finally, he shrugged. “Just sort of funny…like she’d been in an accident or something. She’s got a gray veil covering her face. Weird, you know? Like she came from a funeral or something.”

Mitch swallowed. I’m willing to bet she did, son. Her own.

There were several others who’d apparently seen her and they just nodded. Together, they were brave enough to stand guard-at a healthy distance from the entrance-but that didn’t mean they were brave enough to actually go in there.

Tommy left and came right back with his four-ten.

“I’m telling you,” the guy said again, “you don’t want to go in there.”

Tommy breezed right past him and Mitch followed. The old guy handed over his baseball bat to him, so at least he had something. They went up the short flight of steps and in. Inside, it smelled like a distillery. A series of tight aisles ran through the store, shelves packed high with everything from canned soup to toilet paper to potato chips. Anywhere there was some free space, cases of beer were stacked in displays. Or at least, that’s how the store had appeared before the crazy lady went on her binge. Now everything was spilled all over the place. Snacks and candy carpeting the floors were dusted down by burst bags of flour and sugar. Racks of hard liquor had been tipped over and there was shattered glass everywhere, the stink of gin and whiskey enough to curl your nostril hairs. A lifesize cardboard stand-up of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was splattered with what might have been catsup or taco sauce.

It was dim and shadowy in there and with the wreckage, there were dozens of places to hide.

“Guess we better take a look-see,” Tommy muttered.

He kicked aside a few cans of beer that went rolling on the old warped hardwood floor and then rolled right back. Behind the counter, the shelves had been cleared of cartons of cigarettes and tins of cigars. There was an avalanche of them back there. Tommy waded through, popping the drawer on the cash register. The money in there was untouched.

Maybe if it had been taken, this all would have been a little easier to take.

They moved down the aisles, stepping over loafs of bread and boxes of donuts, checked out the beer coolers and the glass cases of deli items. All untouched for the most part. The store itself had not flooded as the floor was above the water level, but that wouldn’t last.

In the storeroom in the back, there was muddy water all over the floor right in front of a trapdoor with a pull ring.

“Cellar?” Mitch said.

“That’s it. Just storage mostly. But the kegs of beer are down there, too. I remember our graduation party,” he said. “Me and my old man wrestled a couple of half-barrels up those steps. We got half way up and-”

There was a splashing sound below and Tommy closed his mouth.

Mitch stood there, feeling somehow ineffectual with that Louisville Slugger in his hands. The trapdoor was somehow just too reminiscent of the one Grandpa always disappeared down in The Munsters. In his mind he could see it creaking open and plumes of stage fog rolling out…except it wasn’t fuddy-duddy old Grandpa coming out of there, it was something else.

“She’s down there,” Tommy whispered.

Mitch nodded.

Of course she was down there. The cellar had to be flooded. Mitch could just about imagine it down there…webby and dark and filled with rank water. You would have had to have been really stupid to be thinking about going down there. Question was: How stupid was Tommy?

“Help me,” he said.

Tommy maybe wasn’t so stupid after all. With Mitch’s help, he slid a floor freezer full of ice over the trapdoor. It took a lot of grunting and puffing, but they moved it all right and that thing had to weigh an easy five-hundred pounds. If it wasn’t for the casters it was set on, they would have needed a forklift to budge it. Tommy flipped the latches on the casters, locking it in place.

“That bitch comes up this way,” Tommy said, “she’s got to be one strong lady.”

Having that trapdoor sealed off made something finally loosen in Mitch’s chest. Jesus, this kind of hero crap, it was strictly for cops. Strictly for people that were trained and above all, armed, to get the job done. He helped himself to a carton of cigarettes behind the counter and Tommy didn’t try to stop him; he loaded up, too. Mitch tore open a pack and slid one between his lips. As that old, ugly monkey on his back finally woke up for good and took hold of him, Mitch knew this was how his three years smoke-free ground to a halt. Once an addict, always an addict.

Tommy began rummaging around the shelves beneath the cash register. Finally, he popped the cash drawer and pulled out a key ring.

“Bingo,” he said.

“Bingo?”

“Sure, this is the key to the other door,” Tommy said.

“What other door?”

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “In the alley there’s a cellar bulkhead the beer guys use to load the kegs. It’s the only other way in or out.”

Mitch felt his chest tighten up again. “You’re not thinking-”

“Oh, yes I am.”

After they’d finished their cigarettes, they went back out into the rain and answered the obligatory questions from the crowd out there. No, they had not seen the crazy woman. She was down in the cellar. And, yes, they were going in the back way to sort her shit out. Of course, everyone followed them around the corner and into the alley. And when they got there, standing in a loose circle staring at that bulkhead like mourners staring into a grave, nobody said much. The rain fell, ran down faces and dripped from raincoats. A steady torrent from a rusty rainspout emptied a short distance away with a sound like a rushing stream.

Tommy fumbled his keys to the big padlock securing the doors.

He almost dropped them twice, all those slack-jawed faces pressing in ever closer. He got the key in the lock and when he did, everyone stepped way back. It was like he was breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb and they expected hell to come flying out on leathery wings. Mitch did not step back. He was holding the four-ten and willing his hands not to shake. This wasn’t exactly the same sort of shit they’d waded through at the Bell house. There’d been that gnawing sense of being watched at the house, that sense of the unknown…but down here in the cellar, there would be no cat-and-mouse, he was thinking, there would be a sudden explosion of water and then an amorphous, marble-skinned blur would reach out at them with white fingers.

As Tommy gripped the doors and prepared to throw them wide, Mitch felt an irrational, childlike terror settle into him. It made sweat run down his spine and nearly stole the breath from his lungs like a cat licking the milk from an infant’s lips. Going down there would be like descending into some crumbling vampire’s crypt at sundown with nothing but a flimsy stake in your hands. But the child in him was telling him it was worse than that: going down there was like entering the cannibal witch’s lair in some evil fairy tale…and doing so willingly.

Then Tommy threw the double doors open, first the right, then the left, and they clanged hollowly against the brick facade of the building. He jumped back a millisecond after he’d done so like maybe he was afraid some huge spider would rush out and snatch him.

But nothing rushed out.

In the dirty light, they could see the steps leading down into the water, lots of junk bobbing around down there. A rank and moldy odor wafted out at them with fingers of dirty mist.

“You boys…you boys ain’t really going down there,” the old man said. Not a question, just a statement. “You can’t do that.” He was like some village elder then trying to talk some heroes (fools) out of going into the dark forest and seeking the ogre’s cave.

And Mitch thought: Oh yes, we’re going down there, my friend. Me and my stupid associate here. We’re going down into that dampness to fight the monster and nothing you can say will stay us.

Jesus, this was ridiculous. This was a job for the police.

But Tommy was going down and Mitch knew he had to go with him. That’s how it worked. Besides, look at these idiots gathered around them. They were expecting a show and you couldn’t let them down. They had ringed tightly around Tommy and he like a noose. And Mitch, well, he had this ugly feeling that if they didn’t go down there, the crowd would push them down.

“You’ve had better ideas,” he said to Tommy.

“So have you,” Tommy came back. “Like going into that fucking house.”

Touche?.

23

Tommy took his shotgun and started down the steps and Mitch was right behind him, that baseball bat in both hands like he was ready to knock one out of Wrigley Field in the bottom of the ninth. Tommy stepped into the water first and by the time he found the floor, it was sluicing around his waist. Light came in through the bulkhead and a single narrow window near the ceiling, but still the shadows were sliding around them like snakes. It was oddly warm down there and stank like a polluted tidal pool, dark and fusty. Cases of Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater’s, and Red Bull were stacked along the walls along with towers of beer. Some of the beer cases had broken open and cans of Budweiser and Old Style bobbed around them. In the rear he could see all those shiny aluminum kegs of beer and overhead, ancient rafters threaded with pipes and ductwork that looked like they’d been put in about the time of prohibition.

“You see her down there?” somebody called.

Mitch jumped, slopping forward in that filthy water. The baseball bat was so greasy in his hands he thought it would slide right out of his grip.

“Yeah,” Tommy called back. “She’s right here, holding my ding dong. Says you should come down and get a kiss.”

There were a few uneasy laughs up in the alley. And then, surprisingly, footsteps came down the stairs and somebody waded into the water with them. Not one of the men, but a woman with a fishing hat on. And when she was down there, she looked around for a weapon. Decided against the beer cans and then, comically, grabbed a sack of Gold Medal flour and then another of Kosher salt. They were heavy at least, five-pound bags.

“Come on sweetheart, show yourself,” Tommy said. “I think I love you.”

Mitch giggled and then giggled again as a couple boxes of Stay-Free Maxi Pads came floating by. It was all so entirely ridiculous.

Then there was movement in the water just ahead of Tommy. A ripple, then another as if somebody was swimming underwater. Mitch felt something go heavy inside him, heard the woman in the fishing hat begin to breathe very hard.

“Wait now,” Tommy said.

And then the water ahead of him began to swirl like a whirlpool and then a figure rose up from the murk. Yeah, it was a woman or had been a woman. Her hair was red and hung in foul loops over a face that was puckered obscenely white. Her lips were gray and seamed like an old lady without her teeth in, that mouth shriveled down to something like a blowhole. Her eyes were black and shiny like ebonite.

“Get back,” Tommy told his troops.

Mitch was having trouble moving at all. He kept seeing all that flowing red hair and thinking that Lily would look like that if she was dead…and had come back.

The woman came on, dripping and smelling of decay. Her face was fissured like old elm bark and set with dozens of ragged holes like somebody had been poking her with needles…or spikes. Water ran from them in steady rivulets. When she opened her mouth in something like a grin, her teeth were gray and broken.

“Stay the fuck back,” Tommy told her. “I mean it.”

But she wasn’t staying back. And you could see by looking into those eyes that there was nothing to reason with inside of her. She was just a mindless drone, a predatory thing like a hornet fixed on stinging you. She would not back off.

She brought her hands up and Mitch saw that there were no nails on her bloated fingers. There were fat green worms hanging from the undersides of her arms…they looped and squirmed, began to slide back into their holes with a sound like a child sucking up a strand of spaghetti.

Tommy uttered a little disgusted grunt and pulled the trigger of the four-ten. Maybe he had satisfied himself that this thing was no woman, that killing it was no more murder than killing a woodtick that was sucking the blood out of your balls. The sound of the four-ten was thunder in the cellar, rolling on and on. The dead woman had taken birdshot at close range. It had blown open her shirt in black tatters and opened up dozens of holes in her fish-white belly. And from them, not blood, but more of that inky black liquid and runnels of contaminated water that stank like fish rotting on a beach.

But the blast did not put her down.

She kept coming, those white hands looking for necks to snap and that gray, puckering mouth looking for wounds to leech of blood.

That did it.

They fled. The woman in the fishing hat went splashing towards the stairs and Mitch and Tommy were right behind her. They stumbled up into the light and the crowd was still there, mouths open and eyes asking questions that never made it past their lips.

“GET BACK!” Mitch hollered at them. “GET THE FUCK BACK!”

They did, almost falling over each other.

The dead woman came up the steps slowly, but not jerking and clownish like a zombie in a movie. There was nothing funny about her: there was a deadly concentration to her movements. She came up those steps with a squishing, oozing sound and stepped out into the light. In the daylight, her red hair was vibrant and orange, it hung down her white face in ropy mats. She stood there looking at everyone with those glistening black eyes, water and more of that dark fluid running from her with the sound of piss striking pavement.

Mitch figured she’d maybe been in her thirties when she died…and that was probably not days ago, but weeks.

She took a few slushy steps forward. Her shirt, which was hanging in tatters and strips from the shotgun blast, was open enough for one plump white breast to poke out. The nipple was colorless. What might have been inviting in a living woman was now merely profane.

She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something and more of that black filth ran out like crude oil.

And this is where what was nightmarish became positively surreal.

The woman in the fishing hat had clambered up out of the cellar with her bags of flour and salt. She still held them. With a cry, she tossed the bag of flour at the dead woman and it glanced off one shoulder in a ballooning cloud of white dust that dissipated quickly in the falling rain. Seeing that her first bomb had been ineffective, the fishing hat woman tossed the bag of Kosher salt with everything she had…and with the most amazing results.

It struck the dead woman straight on in the chest.

The bag was sodden to begin with and it completely ruptured with the impact. The dead woman screamed with a shrill wailing and began to writhe, her flesh steaming. Steaming and sputtering and popping like hot grease. She reacted like a salted slug. The Kosher salt burned right into her, absorbed the water she was distended with and as everyone watched, she shook and moaned, plumes of steam rolling from her, her body seeming to shrink, to collapse as she went down to her knees. That breast they all saw dried out like grape, became wizened and leathery. And that pretty much happened to her entire body. By the time she fell over into the puddles, she was dehydrated and blackened like a mummy pulled from a sandy tomb.

There was an odd, sharp smell as of spices, then nothing.

“Holy oh shit,” somebody said. “Did you see that…did you see that?”

One of the corpse’s arms snapped at its joint and fell off. Most people took that as their cue to get the hell out of Dodge, but Tommy and Mitch stood there, staring down at that parched and bloodless thing at their feet. It was curled and brown and shrunken, only that red hair remained, floating out in the water around it.

Wordlessly, they turned and splashed their way out of the alley

“What now?” Tommy said. “What the hell now, Mitch?”

“Let’s get us some fucking salt and head for home.”

It was a wise choice of action.

24

“If we were smart, we’d be thinking about getting out,” Tommy said as they drove over towards Crandon. “You know that, don’t you?”

Mitch pulled off his cigarette. “Is that what you want to do?”

“Maybe.”

It was easy for him, Mitch supposed. To just walk away. He had no family in the city anymore. Mitch himself had no relatives, either, but he did have Lily and Chrissy and they were family to him.

“Well, I can’t just run, Tommy. Not until tomorrow at the very least. Not until I’ve got Chrissy safe with me. Then, yeah, then I’d love to get the hell out but not until.”

“Yeah, we can’t leave.”

“You can…if you want.”

Tommy looked over at him and there was a sadness in his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, Mitch, what kind of asshole do you think I am? You and me grew up together. Outside Bonny, you’re the only real family I got. At least, that’s how I look at it. You say something like that again and I’ll fucking hit you.”

Mitch smiled. “Sorry, Tommy. I should have known better.”

For, really, through all the years what was the constant? Through failed relationships and shitty jobs and frustration? What was the only constant? Tommy Kastle. He was always there with a strong shoulder, a bed if you needed it, and a beer for you. That’s how it had always been. Most men, Mitch knew, shrugged off their childhood friends long before they saw thirty. But it hadn’t been that way with them. Like a pair of twins, they were connected and those connections ran strong and very deep.

“Besides,” Tommy said, “I’m not running. This is my fucking town and I’m not about to let a bunch of zombies run me out. It’s too easy to pussy up and cover your head, go running from something like this, leave the fighting to someone else. But that’s not what I’m about and I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re about.”

Mitch knew he was right.

Run? No, it wasn’t his way either. He’d stand and fight. The only thing that took the fight out of him was the idea of Chrissy and Lily being around. Oh, they were tough enough for the most part, but something about having your loved ones in peril really took the fight out of a guy.

“Let’s not abandon this ship yet,” Tommy said.

“At least until it sinks all the way.”

They drove through the flooded streets and as they made their way to Crandon, which sat on some of the highest ground in the city, there were only four or five inches of rain the streets. Not too much, but by tomorrow? Next week?

“Oh, shit,” Tommy said as he wheeled around a corner.

Mitch saw.

Some guy was standing dead center in their path and he was not moving. They dismissed instantly the idea that he might be an ordinary, albeit, crazy person. He did not hold his hands up for them to stop and as they got closer they saw he was just as white as poured latex. He stood his ground as if daring them to come on.

“If we’re going to fight these things,” Tommy said, pressing down on the accelerator, “then now’s a good time to begin.”

He had the Dodge up to around fifty as they bore down on the dead man who did not move. Did not even flinch. The wheels of the truck threw up gouts of water as they charged forward. The windshield wipers were working madly.

The man still had not moved.

And then they hit him. The impact jarred the truck but slightly and the man was not crushed or tossed aside, he exploded. Like a water balloon filled with ink and putrescence, he literally blew up when they hit him, washing the truck down with black filth.

“Shit,” Mitch breathed. “Holy shit…”

“One down,” Tommy said, winking at him. “But I’m guessing there’s gonna be more.”

Mitch nodded. “Oh yeah, and when it gets dark I got the feeling we’re gonna find out just how many more.”

WORMS

1

Later on, Scott Reed could not be sure what he’d been thinking when he drove the bus straight through the barrier and down into the flooded streets of Bethany. But as it happened, as he saw those barriers smash to kindling and felt the terrible, greasy roll of the bus as it skidded down that curving hill into the water, he kept telling himself it was not his fault. That none of this was his fault. Busing the kids over to Park Falls for that fucking soccer game-and with the Black River Valley at flood stage, every goddamn river in the state bursting its banks-was not his idea. Witcham was going underwater and they wanted him to bus the kids seventy miles back and forth.

Not my fault, not my goddamn fault.

Famous last words.

The kids, fourth and fifth graders, started screaming soon as the bus blew through the orange striped sawhorses and Reed told them to hang on, hang on, but it was sheer pandemonium and he was just glad they were all belted in. It was all just a mistake. The rain had been coming down in gray sheets and visibility was squat, just gray and hazy, raindrops the size of quarters exploding against the windshield. Reed had been maybe going too fast for conditions and instead of turning onto the Broad Street overpass which would have carried them around the northern edge of Bethany and into Elmwood, he had turned two blocks too soon onto Coogan Avenue and down into the sea that was Bethany at high tide.

The bus careened madly as he rode the brake down the hill, Coogan Avenue just as greasy as a skillet. When he rounded the sharp turn near the bottom, almost taking out two parked cars and a fire hydrant, the water opened up before him. The bus hit it doing better than forty-miles-an-hour. Water sprayed up, inundating the bus and making it rock wildly. It tipped first to the left, then the right, steadying itself as the deeper water found it and kept right on going until it struck a flatbed truck abandoned in the street. There it came to rest in that deserted, flooded section of the city, lost from view from above.

The kids were either crying or shouting or just holding tightly to their seats in silent shock.

Reed scrambled out of his seatbelt harness and fell right on his face. “Everyone take it easy,” he said, pulling himself up. “We’re okay now, we’re okay. Is anyone back there hurt?”

Over the sobs and exclamations of surprise that finally leaked out, several children said everyone was okay, okay. Reed went back there to be sure and it was like climbing a low incline going up the aisle. The front of the bus was submerged right up to the hood, water leaking in through the bifold door and flooding the floor near the dash. The back of the bus was up higher, though, so Reed figured they were lucky they’d hit that flatbed before they got into the real deep stuff. What he didn’t know was that the front wheels of the bus had come to rest in a crevice created by a section of pavement that had washed away. The same crevice that had snared the flatbed.

Reed checked on the kids, telling them all to unbelt.

“Are we sinking?” Cal Woltrip asked. “Are we going under?”

“No, of course not,” Reed said.

Thing was, he’d asked himself the same thing, but the bus had sunk as much as it was going to. The front of the cab was flooded now, but that was about as bad as things were going to get, he figured.

Cal looked disappointed.

No surprise there. Reed didn’t know many of the kids on the bus, but he did know two of the boys-Cal and his brother Kyle. Cal was in fifth and Kyle in fourth. They were good boys for the most part, Reed knew, just excessively morbid. They watched too many horror movies and got their biggest thrills by scaring the shit out of other kids. Something Reed sure as hell did not need right now.

Once he saw to the kids, he went up front, feeling that chill water entering his shoes and then lapping up around his shins. He tried the radio and it was dead. Again, no surprise. The engine compartment was flooded and the battery was out of commission along with the rest of the electrical system. Some of the kids had cellphones, but they weren’t working either.

“Help is on the way,” he called back to the kids.

Yeah, my ass it is.

Christ, what a situation. Nobody even knew they were in the city. Last time he’d radioed in they were twenty miles out. So now he was stuck down in this goddamned flooded ghost town with fifteen kids, the oldest of which hadn’t even seen twelve yet. Shit and shit. There were no other adults on board. Lucy Costigan, the coach, had not made the ride back from Park Falls. She’d decided to spend the night there with her sister.

Goddamn bitch, that was just great.

Most days, Reed had nothing but good things to say about Lucy. True, she was a stuck-up bitch generally disliked by the faculty of Fair Street Elementary over in Elmwood Hills. But she was a very attractive stuck-up bitch. She was only twenty four or five, something like that, tall and shapely with long smooth muscled legs that led up to a high, well rounded ass that Reed just couldn’t keep his eyes off. But, Jesus, how was he supposed to? She always wore those tight little shorts with COACH printed across the ass and how were you not supposed to look? Whenever Lucy caught him doing so, she gave him a dirty look, and spun away, her little blonde ponytail bobbing along with her hard little titties.

Reed was thinking if she had been here and the kids weren’t, it would have been just like one of his fantasies where he was stranded somewhere with her. Not exactly like the elevator fantasy-they were trapped alone in the car for like six hours and, well, after a time, they had to do something to relieve the boredom and tension-but it would do in a pinch.

Truth was, Lucy Costigan would never have gotten that desperate.

Even on a deserted island and Reed knew it.

Lucy was shacked up with some rich guy in Elmwood who owned a bunch of car lots in the city. Guy was pushing fifty with thin hair, but he had a full wallet and that’s what Lucy liked. She had a shiny red convertible and a wardrobe unthinkable on her salary. Her sugar daddy bought her the things she wanted and he owned the girl he wanted, put his hands all over those long legs and flat belly, and his dick went around smiling all the time. Unlike Reed, who was the same age as Lucy’s sugar daddy and divorced and hadn’t seen a fine piece of ass like her since-

“Mr. Reed?”

He turned, realizing he’d been fantasizing again about Lucy while unbolting the emergency kit from under the dash. “Yes?” he said, going back with the kit. “What is it?”

It was a girl named Tara Boyle. “How long are we going to be stuck here?”

Until the good Lord sends a boat, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Help would come, sure, but it might take time in the storm. The bus was due back at the school at 6:30, just about sundown, and when it didn’t show, all the parents waiting there for their kids would sound the alarm. But, shit, that was almost an hour away according to Reed’s watch which meant they’d made much better time than he’d figured they would. So either they sat here for a few hours and waited for rescue or he got off his ass and did something about it. Because, realistically, once it got dark, it was going to take time to find the bus. Maybe hours and he didn’t like the idea of being cooped up with these kids that long.

“Not long, honey, don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll be out to get us in a little while.”

He quickly took a head count making sure he still had fifteen kids. He did. That was something. Nobody was injured. That was something else.

“Why did we crash down here?” Tara wanted to know.

Reed swallowed, but a lie managed to work itself up his throat regardless. “I think…I think a car sideswiped us in the rain. Next thing I knew, we went through the barrier and ended up here.”

Oh, it sounded good and who could possibly disprove it? Even after the bus was winched out?

Reed set the emergency kit on an empty seat.

He didn’t know many of the kids. A few of them had rode on his regular daily run, but not many. Cal and Kyle Woltrip, of course. He’d been hauling those two since kindergarten. But the others? Just a few. He recognized Tara Boyle. She was a little princess and a not-so little whiner. Always had been. Her old man owned the Dairy Queen over in Elmwood. Owned lots of things. Chuck Bittner was there. He was the unisex team’s high scorer and an uppity little shit from way back. He’d grow up to be the same stuffed-shirt real estate mogul his old man was. Reed wondered if the kid knew his old man was gay like everyone else in Elmwood did. Bobby Luce was there. Another high scorer, but down to earth, an okay kid. Dependable. Kayla Summers was sitting behind Tara Boyle. Kayla was a good athlete, but she was a crier. Word had it she burst into tears every time she had to do an oral report. She was real quiet and adults made her nervous. Reed gave her a wide berth. He saw Lacee Henderson, she of the long blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes, who was already striking at ten and would go on, Reed figured, to be a knockout of the Lucy Costigan sort. Hopefully, not that big of a bitch, though. Alicia Kroll. Brian Summers.

The others, Reed simply did not know.

When they’d loaded up that morning at Fairstreet Elementary, he’d smiled to each and every one as they climbed into the bus with their gym bags and Fairstreet Flyers jerseys on. But that had been his only interaction with them, really. Lucy Costigan was their coach and she handled them. All the way to Park Hills she’d sat right behind Reed, driving him nuts. He could almost feel her body heat seeping through the seat, kept imagining those long tanned legs and muscular thighs. Every time she bumped the back of the seat with her knee, his dick had woken up and stretched like a hungry tomcat.

Chuck Bittner, true to form, was telling everyone how his old man was going to raise hell about this.

Reed wanted to tell him that when his old man wasn’t home, he was out raising things in other men’s pants, but he figured he didn’t need to lose his job.

“Okay, kids,” Reed said. “It may take time for them to find us down here in Bethany, so what I’m going to do is to wade out into the water and find help. There’s got to be somebody around. If I don’t see anyone, I’ll head back up the hill to the road, flag a car down.”

“But…but what about us?” Tara Boyle wanted to know.

Sure, kid, Reed thought, get used to saying that because you’ll be saying it your whole life: What about me? What about me? What about me? Way he was seeing it, Tara would have climbed over the bones of the others to save her own ass and the way she probably saw it was that Reed had one job above all others and that was getting her to safety.

Piss on the others.

“Quit whining,” Alicia Kroll told her.

“But I want get out of here.”

“’I want to get out of here’,” Alicia mocked in a petulant voice.

There were a couple stifled laughs.

“Quit worrying, Tara,” Cal told her. “Mr. Reed’ll be back in no time. I’m sure he’ll make it in time. If not…well, we’ll just keep sinking and sinking and-”

“Okay, Cal,” Reed said. “That’ll do.”

“Maybe we should go with you,” Bobby Luce said.

But Reed shook his head. “No, Bobby. I need you kids to stay here and sit tight. That water’s too deep. In fact, I want to put you in charge until I get back and I expect the rest of you to do what Bobby says. If you don’t, you’ll be locking horns with me.” He glared at Chuck Bittner. “And that goes double for you, missy.”

More laughter.

“You better watch it,” Chuck told him.

And, oh, dear God, how Reed would have loved to slap that little shit right across the face, tell him a thing or two about his old man. How he spent his free time. But if the kid hadn’t figured that out yet, then he was just plain stupid. Reed was willing to bet that Chuck’s old man had that queer cowboy movie on DVD. Wouldn’t have surprised him any. Reed had heard there were men fucking in it and that showed you where the world was headed, Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.

“I’m just ribbing you, Chuck.”

Chuck just looked away.

Hard one to figure sometimes. Uppity little braggart one moment, brooding and silent the next. Reed had heard that Chuck’s mom had died a month ago. It didn’t seem to be bothering the kid, though. At least that you could see. But word had it she had left him and his old man years back, wasn’t much but a barfly with an expressway between her legs.

Reed opened the emergency kit and showed Bobby the first aid kit, the flashlights they could use if it got dark. He didn’t bother explaining the road flares or the rest of the equipment. Things went well, he’d be back in twenty minutes anyway.

“So sit tight, kids. I’ll be back in a flash.” He moved to the front of the bus and back into the water. “And nobody goes outside. Stay in your seat or in the back of the bus. And I mean it.”

He took one look back at those faces, some excited and some worried and some genuinely upset, and holding onto the rail, started down the steps into that chill gray water. An empty water bottle went floating by.

There was some laughter in the bus and Bobby told somebody to knock something off.

“Just you wait,” Chuck Bittner said.

Reed stepped into the drink and felt for the street. By the time he found it, the water was up above his bellybutton.

“This is great,” Cal Woltrip was saying. “Just like that movie…Lord of the Flies. We’ll be here for weeks.”

“Yeah, we’ll go savage,” his brother Kyle added. “Who gets to be ‘Piggy’?”

Then Reed was out of earshot, making his way around the bus. Well, this is just going swimmingly, he thought and then giggled despite himself. Flooded empty houses and dark buildings stared back at him. And that dark water lapped around him, filled with unseen things.

2

When Mitch first met Chrissy it was on the public beach up at Black Lake.

He’d just come off a pretty nasty relationship and he hadn’t been doing much but drinking and feeling sorry for himself for weeks, calling in sick a lot at work. Then, one Saturday morning, hungover and feeling pretty much like shit, he’d decided to lay off the booze and the pity parties and drive up to the beach and take a swim.

That’s how he met Chrissy.

Just a little slip of a girl with huge dark eyes and a mischievous grin, glossy dark hair reaching down the center of her back. She was sitting in the sand near the water, trying to build a castle with shovel and pail, using dry sand that kept falling apart on her.

Mitch was walking by and she had said, “Hey, mister! Can you help me with my wall?”

Mitch just stopped, smiled. “Your wall?”

“I’m building a wall.”

“Why are you building a wall? For your castle?”

She shook her head. “To keep the ants out.”

“The ants?”

“The giant ants. I saw ‘em on a movie. Giant ants with big teeth.”

Mitch had looked around, brushing a buzzing fly from his neck. He wanted to tell this little girl that she shouldn’t talk to strangers and all that business, but just looking at her in that little pink swimsuit, he didn’t have the heart. She was sweet and honest and cute…how could he not help her? Of course, right away he was wondering what her mom would say when she saw her little girl talking to this strange man.

“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said. “And I have to build the wall to keep the ants out. If the ants get in, I can’t build the castle. Because the ants will eat everyone.”

“Oh, I get it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mitch.”

“Oh.”

“Where’s your mom and dad, Chrissy?”

“My mama went up to the stand to get ice cream. She’ll be right back.”

“Your dad?”

“Oh, he’s in heaven,” Chrissy said, filling her bucket.

Mitch had felt a sharp pain in his belly at that. This girl didn’t have a dad and the idea of him being gone, being dead, was just part of her little world. There was something terribly wrong about that.

“Are you gonna help, Mitch?” she said.

Swallowing, feeling emotional depths he’d never knew existed, Mitch kneeled in the sand, wanting to protect this little girl from the pain of life itself. He showed Chrissy how to dip wet sand from the water’s edge and create a wall of blocks, wetting them down and cementing them into place. Chrissy was fascinated by his engineering process. Just a wonderful, easy kid that smelled of sunscreen and wet sand.

“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.

“We used to do it when we were kids.”

“Okay…tell me.”

So as they amassed a wall that was easily three feet in height and four feet in length and topped it with a battery of sticks and reeds, Mitch found himself talking about building things when he was a kid. How he and Tommy used to build things from sand, clubhouses from scrap wood, how they’d dug forts under the ground and tree houses high in the air. And as he told her about it, he found that he really liked telling her. There was no bullshit to kids, he soon realized. They really were interested in things. They did not pretend interest. Up until that day, Mitch hadn’t given kids much thought. They were little people that skipped up the sidewalk, hollered and screamed like they knew you drank too much the night before, and banged on your door for candy come Halloween.

But suddenly it was all different.

Sitting there, Chrissy just fascinated by him, he wished she were his daughter. That he could take her to carnivals and movies, pick her up after school and cook hot dogs in the backyard for her and all her friends. Regale her with the silly stories of his own youth which she seemed just enrapt by.

About fifteen minutes later, a voice said, “I see you’ve made another friend, Chrissy.”

A tall, striking redhead was standing there and after introductions were made, Mitch learned that her name was Lily.

“I…uh…Chrissy needed some help,” he said, feeling very uncomfortable. “I was just helping her.”

Lily nodded. “I know. I’ve been watching.”

Mitch didn’t say anything.

He supposed Lily had been scoping him out.

“You have to be careful these days,” she said.

“Sure.”

“You’re a real natural with her,” Lily said. “Do you have kids? You must.”

Mitch just shook his head. “No, but I’m having fun. I think I might go buy one.”

They both laughed.

Chrissy said, “Is that where you get kids?”

But Mitch was staring into Lily’s deep green eyes and wanting to swim in them and knowing, somehow, that he was going to get the chance. He liked Lily and she seemed to like him and isn’t that just the way it worked sometimes? Love just found you purely by accident and took you away?

“Mama,” Chrissy said. “We have work to do.”

So then the three of them spent the next two hours working on the wall and building a fine castle behind it, listening to the waves and the gulls and the incessant monologues of a five year-old girl who could speak at dizzying length about the secret lives of butterflies, Popsicle sticks, and the shapes of clouds in the sky. And, the nefarious activities of giant ants, of course.

And that’s how Mitch came into their lives, just a few short years after Chrissy’s father had died in a car accident.

That’s how it happened.

That’s how he had fallen in love with Lily and married her.

And that was the day that Chrissy first captured him and owned him, had owned his heart every day since.

3

That afternoon in Witcham, there was a seeping grayness that was gunmetal, quicksilver, and leaden. Gray rain fell and gray mist rose from the puddles and sluicing pools of debris and that uniform grayness flooded the city, keeping it and holding it with a gravestone stillness, a waiting, and an expectancy. It pressed itself against rain-specked windows and slid over roofs with a sly whispering and climbed stripped trees in dingy coils. Leaves fell before its dead breath and covered the ponds and leechfields in a multicolored mantle that went first brown and then ultimately gray as everything else.

Deke Ericksen, dressed in dripping foul-weather gear that belonged to his father, arrived on Kneale Street by foot, struggling through puddles until finally he stood at the door of the Barron house and knocked. Standing there, feeling the damp down into his bones, he listened for sounds of life and heard not a one. He might as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.

C’mon, Chrissy, he thought, I walked six blocks in this to see you.

Somebody had to be home…didn’t they? Sure, a lot of people were abandoning the city with what was going on, but Chrissy would have said something to him…wouldn’t she?

Deke looked around, seeing nothing but rain and dripping trees, lots of houses that looked empty. He shook the water from himself and tried the knob. It was open. He stepped into the house, feeling the warm dryness in there reaching out to him.

“Anybody home?” he called out.

Somebody was there, he could sense that much. Somebody was nearby maybe holding their breath or peering from a half-closed door.

“It’s me,” he said, “Deke…Deke Ericksen, Chrissy’s friend.”

And then a voice, weak and low, said, “Deke?”

The living room.

Deke hung his rain gear from the coat tree by the door. He stepped out of his boots and went through the archway. Chrissy’s mom, Lily, was sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Damn, she wasn’t looking right. She looked thin, thinner even, and pale like her blood had been sucked out. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was staring off into space.

Deke had not seen her since the funeral of Chrissy’s aunt Marlene, but the physical change since then was almost spooky. There was no substance to her, like she was a shadow cast by someone else.

“Hi, Mrs. Barron,” Deke said. “Just popped around to see Chrissy. She around?”

Lily blinked a few times, then looked at him. “No…no, she’s gone, Deke. She went out with Heather and Lisa, hasn’t come home yet. Mitch went to look for her. I’ve been waiting and listening.”

Deke licked his lips. The bait had been tossed out, but did he want to bite it? Did he really want to know why she had been listening? No, he certainly did not. But it would have been childish and rude to simply say, okay, gotta go, see ya bye. So he sat down in the rocking chair opposite her and got used to feeling damn uncomfortable.

“What are you listening to?” he said, soul of naivete.

But Lily shook her head. “Oh, it’s not what I’m listening to, but what I’m listening for.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” Lily said.

Deke wasn’t liking this. Uncomfortable? No, that was listening to your best friend talk about his penis or overhearing your parents discussing their sex life. That was uncomfortable, this was just spooky. And in his mind he could hear Chrissy’s voice, I know I’m a rotten person and a worse daughter, yada, yada, but my mother is totally wigged out. You touch her and she’s cold, she looks at you and her eyes are even colder. She’s like a mannequin pretending to be mom, you know? At the time, Deke had not known, no. He was sixteen and maybe sixteen-year-old boys weren’t known for the level of their compassion, but he had thought that Chrissy was being a little harsh about her mother. After all, her sister had killed herself and all, you had to feel sorry for her.

But now?

Oh, he felt pity still, but Lily also made him feel…crawly. Like maybe she was nuts or about to go that way. And those eyes, damn, like there was something hiding behind them, something tensing that wanted to scream hysterically at you.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Barron? Are you all right?”

He said this and meant it, because deep down he was very concerned. Maybe it was because he knew tragedy when he saw it and maybe it was because he was in love with Lily’s daughter. Regardless, he was concerned. Had his own mother seen it, she wouldn’t have believed it. Once upon a time, before Deke’s little brother had died and ripped the guts out of the family, his mother would have said: Deke? My Deke? His whole world is his stomach, his karate lessons, and that awful music he listens to that sounds like a soundtrack to hell with singers that always sound like Cookie Monster’s deranged brother trying to vomit all over the microphone, she would have said. Are you sure we’re talking the same Deke here? He has no compassion, un-huh. He laughs when his little brother hurts himself, calls the kid “Butt-Wienie” on a good day and simply “The Discharge” on a bad day. As in keep The Discharge out of my room, mom. No, you’re talking a different Deke here. That’s what she would have said. But therein lay the rub. Children could often be callous beasts at home, but perfect angels around strangers. Because at home they were always accepted. Parents might shout and stomp their feet, but in the end they never turned their young away. But with strangers you had to prove your worth. You had to show them you were not selfish and immature, that you actually had a heart beating in your chest.

And particularly the mothers of girls you were wild about.

So Deke, who was as sixteen as any boy ever had been, was worried. Creeped-out maybe, but worried, too. Sitting there in his Slipknot T-shirt with his shaven head, the piercing in his left eyebrow, and the little goatee under his lower lip, he was worried.

When he didn’t get an answer, he said, “I mean, I know this is none of my business and all, but you don’t look real good, Mrs. Barron. You been eating okay?”

She stared off into space. “Last night I dreamt that all the people that ever died were living underneath us,” Lily told him. “That there was a world beneath us. A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. Down there, down in the sewers and drains.”

“Wow,” Deke said, knowing it was stupid, but at a real loss for words.

“Down there, Deke, they’re all down there waiting for us. That’s what I dreamed. Down below.”

Deke wasn’t up to this noise.

Maybe Chrissy was right and Lily should have been renting rooms upstairs on account of all that extra space in her head. He knew it wasn’t nice thinking shit like that, but how could you not? A whole world under the streets and that’s where the dead people went. That was not just disturbing, it was just this side of freaky. And especially for Deke. And especially because almost two years before his kid brother Nicky went through the ice on the Black River and drowned. When she said that, Deke immediately thought of Nicky down there, pictured him as he’d looked in the silver casket with the little gray burial suit and tie on. And why in the Christ did they bury kids looking like that? Nicky had never worn that suit but once a year at Christmas Mass…they should’ve buried him in a baseball cap and that fruity tiger-striped Frosted Flakes shirt. That was Nicky. That was what he had been about, not suits and ties and all that nonsense.

Lily had been talking right along, but Deke had tuned her out. “…down there, I think of them down there. It’s a nice thing to think about.”

Deke just stared at her until common sense told him to look away. He tried to think of something to say and this is what came to him: “There’s lots of room down there, Mrs. Barron. I know because we had to do a report on it a couple years ago in school.”

Lily was interested now. There was a wet mist in her eyes. “Really? What’s it like below, Deke?”

And then he was telling her, even though a voice told him that she was terribly distraught and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He told her about the elaborate system of drains beneath the city that were for the most part a combined system of sewage and rainwater. That much of it had been designed back in the mid-19^th century and updated and added to as the population of the city grew until nobody was sure what led where and the maps were outdated and it was anyone’s guess where all the tunnels led. Then in the 1970’s, he explained, Witcham had gotten a federal grant to install the Deep Tunnel system which was a series of interconnecting tunnels two-hundred feet down. Lot of people didn’t even know about it. Deke had interviewed a guy from public works about it. He said the tunnels went on for miles and were like thirty feet deep and forty feet wide. Like a sea down there. It was connected to the regular drains by a series of vertical shafts and controlled by a series of pumps and valves and flues.

“They did it because Witcham sits on the flood plain and it’s been flooding for years,” Deke told her, finding it easier to talk about these things than the nature of her problems.

Lily seemed interested. “Can you go down there?”

Deke swallowed. “Um…you mean the regular sewers? Sure, you just go down the manholes in the streets. I went down there with the public works guy. Lots of pipes are only big enough to crawl through and some even smaller than that, but they all connect up with the main drain lines that are big enough to walk around in.”

“But what about those Deep Tunnels? That sea down there?”

Deke knew he should stop right there, because where this was leading was nowhere good. “Yeah…I mean, there are shafts that connect to the Deep Tunnel system. They’re in the main drain lines, a whole bunch of them. Sometimes guys in special wet suits go down there to clean blockages and work on the pumps.”

“Is…is there anything down there?”

“Lots of water.”

“Anything else?”

“The public works guy said the sewers are full of rats. Sometimes they find bodies down there. Bums sometimes pry a manhole cover off or yank the grating off an outlet pipe and go live down there.”

Lily got up and went to the window. She stared out into the drab streets at the water bubbling at a storm drain. “They’re down there now.”

“Who?” Deke said, brushing sweat from his brow.

“All of them. All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.” Lily turned from the window, her face as colorless as the streets outside. Just as cool, just as damp. “I dreamed I saw my sister, I saw Marlene, but she didn’t look like she did before she died. She didn’t look sick and worn-out with gray in her hair and that awful hollow look in her eyes. She looked different, she looked younger, like when we were teenagers. When she was Chrissy’s age. She said I should come below. That everyone was below. That mom and dad were down there. And Grandpa Joe and Gramma Bridgette and Aunt Helen and even Joey Spalten who drowned in the quarry when we were kids. They were all down there and they were asking about me, when would Lily come down, when would Lily come down. Marlene said there were places down there, seas and rivers and creeks to swim in and hidden ravines to run through. She asked me…she asked me if I remembered the story Aunt Ilene had read to us. The Ray Bradbury story where a woman’s lover went down into the sewers and how he was dead down there, waiting for her. And you know what, Deke? I did remember! And that story was true because now it’s happened here, hasn’t it? All down there, all down below waiting for me and I suppose I’ll have to go, too, because I shouldn’t disappoint them.”

Deke realized then he was smiling and he couldn’t seem to stop.

He was seeing Nicky down there, sloshing through the water in a mildewed burial suit, his face like a fungus.

“Is there someone you’ve lost, Deke?” Lily said, getting psychic on him now.

“No,” he said, more sternly than he’d intended.

But Lily just grinned. “We’ve all lost, but maybe in the end, we can all find again.”

Deke was shifting in his seat now. He wasn’t up to dealing with this. He didn’t know how to handle it or what to say. Where was Mitch? He would know what to do. He always knew what to do. “But Mrs. Barron…that…that was just a dream.”

But Lily shook her head. Patient and kind as if she were dealing with a complete idiot that insisted the world was flat. “No, it’s more than that. Much more than that. I’m not crazy, Deke, it’s just that I can’t stand being alone anymore. I miss Marlene and she misses me.”

“But she’s dead, Mrs. Barron.”

Lily nodded. “Yes, but she’s no longer in her grave.” She paused, listening again for something Deke could not hear and was pretty sure he would never want to. “Before you came…I went upstairs. In the sink, yes, in the sink I heard a voice calling to me up out of the pipe. It was Marlene’s voice. She said, we’re below, far below. Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.”

Okay, this was insane now. Voices from drainpipes. Lily had hallucinated it all, of course. He had to keep that in mind. She was not well. Because if the voice of a dead person called up to him from those pipes, black and gurgling, he would have screamed. Yes, he would have screamed and right then, the idea of dead voices calling up drainpipes to a mad woman made him want to start. Oh, but Jesus, dude, get a grip here. This is all wicked mad bullshit. Dead people aren’t down in the sewers and they don’t call to the living, they don’t-

“So that’s what I was listening for, Deke, when you came,” Lily said. Her eyes were huge and feverish, her mouth gone crooked. She brushed pale fingers to the paleness of her face, cocking her head. “I thought…I thought maybe I heard a scraping and I knew it was Marlene, she was scratching at the sewer lid from below.”

Deke figured that must have sounded like dead fingers scratching at the inside of a coffin lid, begging to be let out. But he wouldn’t go there. He just wouldn’t. Could madness be infectious? Could you go crazy being with a crazy person? For he thought maybe he was losing his mind, because, God help him, he almost believed Lily. There was absolute conviction in her eyes and didn’t that count for something?

No, it does not.

That was reason talking and he had to listen to it. Because it all made him think of Nicky, little sweet Nicky-boy who’d wandered away that March afternoon and died an awful, dirty death when the ice on the Black let go beneath him. He’d always been a curious kid and that had been what finished him. Deke and his friends always played hockey out on the Black come winter when it froze up hard and gray, but Nicky was too little to be out there. But he’d gone anyway. Gone to show how grown up he was, only he’d never came back-

Sure, he came back, dumbass, don’t you remember? Those divers went down there and fished him out, found him floating just under the ice. Then they put him in that awful little suit and slid him in that box and then you got to see him, you got to see what your brother looked like when he finally…came…home…

Deke was breathing hard.

All that shit, it was hard. Even eighteen months later, that particular blade was still sharp and cutting and its edge was fine enough to slit his belly right open, to slice all those poorly-healed scabs off and start that poisoned blood running again. Deke thought for sure he’d never be able to squeeze out tears over his kid brother again, but, surprise-surprise, they were still there, stored up in that reservoir that never seemed to run dry. He could feel the pressure of those tears, how they needed to get out again, and he had to force them back and, God, it actually hurt to do that. But he was not about to break down in front of his girlfriend’s mother, of all things. He could see the look on Chrissy’s face now. What did you do today, Deke? she’d ask and he’d smile and say, You weren’t home, so I sat there and had a good fucking cry with your mom.

But all that aside, the pain was still real.

Not that he’d honestly doubted it, because he saw it every day in his mom and dad’s eyes, like they were bleeding inside, just withering away. They’d smile sometimes and now and then, they’d even laugh, but that laughter was forced and synthetic and almost scary-sounding when it came out. Rusty and creaking, the sound of machinery broken-down by neglect and operated by unpracticed hands. Not real, not right, just…agonizing somehow. As if it wasn’t laughter, but just screams from the pits of their souls masquerading as laughter. The loss of their youngest and the ensuing funeral had sucked them dry. They became depthless, cold wind-up toys that mimicked human beings, but that was about it. Being around them, you could almost hear them thinking things like, Nicky would have been in fourth grade this year or Nicky would have been turning nine this year or Nicky just loved Tony the Tiger…remember how he loved Tony the Tiger? or God, we still love you, too, Deke, but we’d trade you in an instant if we could have a weekend with Nicky.

Oh, yes, pain and pain and pain.

They lived it and so did he.

And now Chrissy’s mother was telling him about dead people coming back and it was just too much. Nicky…Nicky had been buried over in Hillside Cemetery, only there wasn’t such a place anymore. Nicky’s grave had been washed out with the others. And maybe his coffin was floating around River Town and maybe Nicky wasn’t dead anymore, maybe-

Lily said, “Are you okay, Deke?”

“Sure,” he managed. “Just fine.”

He excused himself and went upstairs.

He went into the bathroom and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps by that point. He looked in the mirror above the sink and did not care for his reflection. The way his eyes kept blinking or did not blink at all. The way his lips quivered and age had been etched into his young face. He did not look in the sink. He could not bear to. A hot, almost gaseous odor was coming from the drain.

Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.

Christ, he’d come here to see Chrissy and now her crazy mother had opened up a can of something horrible in his head. Dead people down in the sewers. Nicky. Her dead sister calling to her from the drain. What kind of damaged shit was that?

Well, you helped her along that path to the nuthouse, now didn’t you?

He supposed he had. Lily talking about all those dead people living down there and what does he say? He tells her how, yeah, there’s plenty of room down there for a city. Dammit, what had he been thinking? But he knew he hadn’t been thinking at all. Just saying the first stupid thing that jumped into his head. Lily didn’t need to be hearing that, didn’t need to be encouraged to climb the walls and hide in the drapes. It was like some terribly depressed person talking suicide and him discussing the various razors available.

That was just not stupid, it was-

He looked down and something black bubbled from the drain.

It was like ink leaking from a pen. It formed a bubble that popped, then another, that black inky fluid seeping up from the foul-smelling drain. He could smell the sewers and the secret, dank arteries that flowed beneath the city. And something more, something fetid, something like rotten meat.

No, he wouldn’t deal with it.

As he turned from the bathroom, he thought he heard a moist, clotted chuckling coming up from the drain.

He ran downstairs and Lily was nowhere to be found.

Oh shit, oh shit, she’s trying to get into the sewer.

Then he heard her talking. Feeling something solidifying in his guts, he walked down the hallway to the downstairs bathroom. He could hear Lily giggling in there. The timber of her voice was just insane as she giggled and droned on and that was very bad.

But what was worse was when a gelatinous voice answered her back.

4

Slayhoke Penitentiary was a grim, ugly place to spend a day, let alone five years of your life. Harry Teal had done his share of time in county lockups and prison farms, but he’d never seen anything like Slayhoke until that day they’d dropped him off with all those other inmates, all of them chained together with leg irons, all of them hard and desperate looking. Most of them had done real time before and they all seemed to sense that Harry hadn’t. Though Harry had been around plenty, to them he was just a piece of meat to sharpen their teeth on.

Of course, they didn’t start any trouble on the bus.

There were hacks watching them, real hard and brutal looking sonsofbitches, just looking for a reason to use their sticks. But Harry felt those eyes on him and he knew what those guys were thinking, how they were planning on extorting him and using him, maybe selling him to some old pervert in order to get a few bucks that might make their stays a little easier.

No, Harry might not have been a veteran of hardtime joints like Slayhoke, but he sure as hell knew how things worked. He’d spent six months in the Cook County Slammer and he’d seen plenty there. The overcrowding, the violence, the corrupt guards. Guys wired out on drugs vomiting and pissing themselves. Men getting knifed and raped and beaten. It was a way of life there.

But coming into Slayhoke, he felt vulnerable, felt like a virgin waiting to get her hymen busted. Slayhoke consisted of a series of narrow four-story brick buildings topped by smokestacks and surrounded by high razor-wire enclosures and guard towers. It sat roughly five miles outside of the Witcham city limits in the Black River Valley. Coming at it down that winding road through the forest, Slayhoke looked like a Medieval madhouse and that was pretty close to the mark since the facility had a long and unpleasant history as a state hospital for the criminally insane long before it was converted into a maximum security prison back in the 1930’s. You got behind those tall cinderblock walls and you could practically feel the desperation, hopelessness, and inhumanity oozing into you, making you part of Slayhoke. If that place had a soundtrack, then it was a silent scream that echoed only in your head.

The inmate who worked central processing was an Asian named Ricky Chuba. He was a short, thick-necked man who was missing two fingers on his left hand. “See here you been around, Teal…but never max?” he said, looking through Harry’s file.

“No, never.”

“That’s not so good. Says here you like to steal cars, but you ain’t so good at it.”

“I’m good at it,” Harry said, figuring that he was. He’d been stealing cars to order for fifteen years. He knew his business.

But Chuba just shook his head. “No, you ain’t no good at it. If you were, you wouldn’t be here. If I was any good at killing cops, I wouldn’t be here.”

That was logic you just couldn’t argue with.

“You from Milwaukee?”

“Yeah.”

“You been around there a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I’m gonna put you in with another white boy name of Jacky Kripp. He’s from Milwaukee, too. You do what he says, you might come out of this with your life and your virginity. And in this goddamn place, that’s the best you can hope for.”

After that, they took Harry into a five by five steel cell and stripped him. The hacks got on their rubber gloves and gave him a body cavity search and if that wasn’t dehumanizing enough, then they sprayed him with disinfectant to keep the lice down.

“We got the lice real bad here,” one of the hacks said. “We got lots of things you ain’t gonna like here, boy.”

And that was one of the truest statements any of those bastards ever made to him. Because not only were the lice bad, but mosquitoes infested the place in summer and just about all year long there was a serious rat problem. They came out mostly at night looking for crumbs. Weren’t too many inmates there that hadn’t been bitten and more than once. At night, Harry learned to sleep with his state-issue wool blanket pulled right up to his chin because those rats would nibble on anything you left hanging out. Anything. After lights out, they would come out running right over the top of you, squealing and chittering, and it did no good to tell the hacks because they were blind to the rat problem. Lots of inmates had written up motions and writs about the filthy, unsanitary conditions at Slayhoke, but it did little good. The Bureau of Prisons sent in exterminators every now and again and those boys killed so many rats they had to be hauled out in twenty-five gallon drums, but within a month they were back, biting and scavenging.

But that was Slayhoke.

It was infested by four-legged vermin, but they were nothing compared to the two-legged variety crowding in every cellblock. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Everything was dirty and slimy to the touch. The smell there was a perpetual mix of bad food, rotting garbage, urine and shit and blood. Cons committed suicide regularly and knifings were a daily occurrence. The inmates went after each other with shanks and pipes and razors and the hacks sat around, pretending they didn’t see a damn thing while they paged through their girly magazines.

Harry’s first day in stir, Jacky Kripp showed up.

Harry had heard of him, of course, you didn’t run in Milwaukee’s crime circles without hearing about a guy like Jacky Kripp. He was a vicious street hood hooked up with the Chicago Outfit. Through the years Jacky had his hand in everything from drug trafficking to prostitution to contract murder, and was currently sitting on a ten-year stretch for breaking some guy’s head open with a tire iron. He was barely six feet, but weighed an easy 250 and all of it was hard muscle. He had huge Popeye arms sleeved with jailhouse tattoos, bushy black hair, and silver-gray eyes that were completely dead looking like dirty nickels.

When he came to see Harry, he brought some of his entourage. A wiry black guy called Roland Smyth, who was some kind of half-assed gun runner, and a hulking white redneck farmboy named Mo Borden…who was openly known as “Frankenstein” around the blocks. Borden went in at nearly 400 pounds, stood 6’9, and was completely bald. Didn’t even have eyebrows. Word had it Borden had taken an ax to a local farmer in Crawford County after the man had attempted to rape Borden’s kid sister. Borden chopped him up, decided to do the guy’s wife and brother, too. He bagged up the remains, put them out with the trash and then went to a local bar, covered in blood, and told everyone about it.

“You Harry Teal?” Jacky Kripp said.

Harry assured him that he was.

Kripp put the questions to him-who did he run with in Milwaukee and what crews had he been part of. Harry answered the questions satisfactorily because when he was done, Kripp said, “Okay, you’re with us now. Nobody touches you. They touch you, they touch us. If somebody insults you, you hit ‘em. You cut ‘em if you have to and you kill ‘em if you got no choice. We back you up. Somebody throws down on one us, you fight with us. We’re one, you get it? One. Any insult to one of us is an insult to all of us.”

And that’s how it was at Slayhoke for Harry.

His first days there, he saw the respect Jacky Kripp had amongst the other cons. Those that didn’t respect him, he hurt. And he hurt ‘em bad. First week with him, Harry saw Kripp stab a black inmate that cut in front of him in chow line and mercilessly beat a Hispanic punk for simply looking at him the wrong way. But that’s how it worked. Over the next year, Harry fell right in step with it all. He cut people, he beat them, and once out in the yard he smashed a gangbanger’s head to pulp with a brick when he made the mistake of jumping Roland Smyth. After a time, Harry did not remember another life. When he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes he wasn’t sure who was looking back.

By the time of the flooding in the Black River Valley, he was a hardened con toughened by fighting and abuse and brutal conditions. He worked the weight pile out in the yard, he knocked off a hundred and fifty pushups every morning. When he looked around the yard, not many eyes dared look back. If you wanted to survive Slayhoke, you had to be an animal, so Harry grew some claws and kept his teeth sharp. And whenever any shit started, he was the first one into the fray.

And what that got him behind those walls was respect, just like Aretha said.

Life went on and then came the rain and the explosion at Fort Providence Military Reservation and after that? Things just started getting weird. Stories started making the rounds at Slayhoke like clap at a convention. You could hear just about anything you wanted to, depending on who you listened to and what your particular bullshit level was. Crazy shit about yellow rains killing a group of trustees and a few guards outside the wall. Stiffs sitting up in the prison mortuary. Rats that had eaten two guys in a cell in K Block, rats with funny red eyes. Yeah, it was all there, loony stuff about the prisoners being experimented on, about ghosts walking through walls and sucking people’s blood, and, of course, the requisite stories about all those corpses and coffins from Hillside Cemetery washing down into the streets of Witcham. What that was like. And how when the rains finally stopped and the water retreated, it was the cons from Slayhoke that would have to clean up the mess. Another favorite topic was Ft. Providence down the road and the crazy-ass shit they were doing with dead soldiers shipped back from Iraq.

But that was Slayhoke sometimes, Harry figured, like a big hen party.

5

Jacky Kripp was one of the top dogs over at the mortuary. He got to pick and choose the cons that worked with him, so guys were always kissing ass on him, always trying to get a job working the cold cuts. Because, honestly, it beat the living hell out of the boiler room or the metal shop, the mattress factory with its swarms of insects or the roadcrews and their attendant hardcase hacks.

At first, Harry didn’t want any part of shuffling the cold meat.

He told Jacky as much. So, Kripp fixed it so he could get a sampling of those other prison industries and wasn’t long before Harry decided he liked the dead just fine. Of course, at first he lost his lunch a few times. You had lots of dead cons moving through there, some that had been beaten to death or sliced up or even burned. Sometimes you’d get a con you knew that had been fed strychnine with his hash and had died with the contortions, vomiting white foam. Men died violent, dirty deaths at Slayhoke and very rarely was it of natural causes. A lot of medical students from North-Western U worked at the mortuary. Under their instructor’s watchful eyes, they learned how to perform autopsies and very often when Harry and the others wrestled the remains into pine boxes, they were completely mutilated. Just slit and plucked and dismembered.

So it took a strong stomach to work the mortuary detail, but more often than not, the work was light. Harry, Jacky Kripp, Roland Smyth, Mo Borden, and a half dozen other guys would spend eight hours a day in the mortuary, mostly playing cards, smoking dope, and eating gourmet foods Kripp had smuggled in.

But, now and then, there were some really awful jobs to perform. And if they involved stiffs, they involved Jacky Kripp and his crew.

The very same afternoon that Mitch Barron and many other residents learned that the dead were rising in Witcham, the hacks shook Harry and the others out of the mortuary like dirt from a rug, marched them and about thirty other cons out into the pouring rain, gave them shovels and picks. They wanted them to dig up the stiffs in the old potter’s field graveyard where the convicts nobody claimed were buried. The DOC wanted to put a new administration building there, so the bodies had to be moved.

The cons pulled it, of course.

The hacks weren’t about to dirty their hands with shit like that.

Jacky Kripp, who had half a dozen hacks in his pocket, took Krickman, the sergeant hack aside, and said, “What’s this shit, sarge? What the fuck is this about? How come I didn’t know about this three days ago, a week ago?”

Harry knew that Kripp was usually told everything well before it happened. Lots of guards at Slayhoke had kids in college or fat bank accounts, and Jacky Kripp’s deep pockets were the reason. For even behind those walls, Kripp was running a multi-million dollar operation in Southern Wisconsin and the Chicago area. He dabbled in everything from heroin trafficking to extortion to internet porn. Owned scads of legitimate businesses like restaurants and movie theaters and car lots, was a high scale loanshark with as much as ten million dollars on the street at any one time. His personal income was very often in the seven digits monthly.

“They just told us this morning, Jacky, I swear to God,” Krickman said.

“I thought we were friends, sarge? I thought I helped you and you helped me? What the fuck is this shit? Why are you fucking with me like this? You don’t like me? You’re trying to piss me off?”

“Jacky, please, I swear to God, they didn’t tell us…”

It went back and forth like that while all the cons stood out in the rain sucking up the water like sponges. It was kind of funny, because Krickman was among the most hated hacks at Slayhoke. He was basically a violent, ignorant redneck who liked to dish out the shit. The day he broke kneecaps or skulls with his stick was a good day to him. And here he was, the tough psychotic sonofabitch, practically sucking the piss out of Jacky Kripp’s shorts.

Finally, some kind of agreement was reached and Kripp turned to the cons soaking in the rain, all those hard white and black and Hispanic faces, a few Ojibwa and Sauk Indians sprinkled amongst them. “Listen, boys, we gotta do this thing. It’s fucking dirty work and a shitty day for it, but we gotta make the warden happy.”

Not that Kripp actually got his hands dirty.

He stood around with the hacks telling them dirty jokes and stories about all the pussy he’d had in Milwaukee, most of it barely legal. The hacks ate it up and the cons went to work.

Two flatbed trucks were pulled up on the winding dirt drive. These to haul the exhumed coffins the inmates pulled from the earth like rotting teeth. There was also a backhoe that would open the graves to a level of about four feet. That was as close as they dared go with the backhoe’s bucket without risking damaging the caskets themselves. The cons would shovel out the rest of the earth by hand.

“I ain’t got no problem putting stiffs in the ground,” Roland Smyth said. “But digging ‘em back up…fuck kind of work is that?”

Harry wiped rain from his face. “Shit-work. That’s why we pull it.”

It was bad right from the start.

The rain was hammering down, the ground turned to sluicing mud. Your feet sank three or four inches into that sodden clay every time you moved. The graves rapidly filled with water as Harry and the others dug down, opened them up. The caskets were old and rotten, fell apart as you tried to lift them free. And inside them, inside those shattered and moldering boxes, just skeletons, mummies, cadavers sewn with some muscle or ligament, maybe some corded meat, not much else. Some of those poor bastards had been in the ground for years. Now and again, they’d find a few fresh one…and the stink of what was inside, Jesus.

Thirty minutes into it, all the cons were soaking wet and black from head to toe with mud. The only color on ‘em was the orange clay on their hands.

Some of the recent burials had been stripped by rats and Harry saw plainly the elaborate tunnel system the vermin had dug, pawing their way right into the boxes. If there was anything in this world that was more determined to stay alive than cons, it had to be those goddamn rats, Harry figured.

Not that he was surprised, really.

After the first few corpses they found peeled down to the muscle and sinew, he got used to it. Rats. Working the mortuary detail, you were always beating those pricks off with broom handles. First day on the job, Jacky Kripp showed him how to set traps and poison to keep those scavenging ghouls out.

But that was above ground and this was below…seeing their determination to get at the corpses was just sickening.

“I ain’t gonna have an appetite for a week,” Roland Smyth said.

“Just stiffs, man,” Harry told him. “Let’s just get it done with.”

“Just stiffs, my black ass,” Smyth called to him from an open grave. “I ain’t talking stiffs, motherfucker, I’m talking worms.”

And they were finding plenty of those.

According to regulations, all the exhumed caskets had to be recorded along with their contents. That was the worst part. The old ones smelled yellow and aged like moldy carpets buried in moist loam, but those that had been in the ground less than a year just reeked to high heaven. Several cons went to their knees when the lids were popped and roiling pockets of corpse gas blew out at them and they got a good look at the mildewing, collapsing things inside.

That was bad, but the worms were worse.

They gave a lot of the men-Henry included-bad cases of the creepy-crawlies.

You’d pop a box, just not knowing what you might see. Maybe just a stiff dissolving to a gray jelly of putrescence or a pile of bones laced with grave fungi or maybe even a few dead rats that never found their way out again boiled right down to clots of fur. But now and again, you’d find a skullish face threaded with long, slinking red worms that, yes, looked very much like living licorice whips. Great knots and bunches of them feeding from eye sockets and into mouths, worming tangles of wet red wires looped around rib staves and roped around vertebrae like climbing vines. Some skeletons-or things on their way to becoming skeletons- had hundreds of the worms matted and snarled over their bones and some of the fresh ones had split open from crotch to throat, bundles of those worms coiling in their bellies or lacing up the edges of their autopsy incisions like a woman’s corset.

It was disgusting.

And maybe even that didn’t quite cut it.

Harry and Roland Smyth were down in a grave that was rapidly filling with mud as the rain continued to fall and water seeped in dank rivers from the slick clay walls. Using a crowbar, they snapped open the lid, and right away that moist green smell rose into their faces making them gag. Inside, the body was actually moving as the worms nested happily in it. Harry moved quick to work the lid back on, but slipped in the muck and fell, his left arm sinking right up to the elbow in the spongy abdomen of the corpse. And that was sickening enough in its own right, like sinking your arm into wet leaves…but what was possibly worse was, for that instant his arm was in there before he drew it back with a cry, he could feel those worms in there sliding over his forearm like slimy shoelaces. When he yanked his arm out, just offended, physically offended, two or three of those worms were caught in the sleeve of his shirt.

“Jesus and shit,” Roland Smyth said. “Get rid of them.”

Which was what Harry was trying to do. The feel of them coiling and slithering against his flesh was almost enough to slit his mind right open. Finally he shook them free and one of them plopped right on the chest of the corpse. And as he stood there, wanting to vomit, that long red worm slid right back inside the body with a rubbery sound like thread pulled through a cuff.

“Quit fucking around down there, you morons,” one of the hacks said. He was watching the backhoe swing its boom into place. “Let’s get this done with.”

And that’s pretty much the sort of repulsive, nightmarish job it was. Like some kind of exhumation assembly line. The backhoe’s boom would be swung over a grave, the chains secured around the box, and the casket brought up to what passed for the light of day.

It was hard, dirty work, but they kept at it.

The boxes were just cheap pine affairs slapped together in the carpentry shop and most rotted right out in a few years. Mostly, they were light and fairly easy to stand up so they could get the chains around them. But some had burst open from gases and they had to dig through the muddy bottoms of graves, sorting mummified human anatomy from coffin wreckage. A few others had absorbed so much moisture that it took three grunting men to get them up enough so they could be winched out by the backhoe’s boom. Many of them, encrusted with clay and mineral deposits, were nearly impossible to move and others were tangled with tree roots that had to be chopped free…from the outside and the inside.

They could throw another five years at me, Harry thought, and I’d jump at it rather than do this. Fucking graverobbers. Goddamn worms and mud and stink.

He figured he’d never get the smell off him. On a good day, things didn’t smell real sweet at Slayhoke, but come tonight, there was going to a group of cons that were going to smell like open graves.

Mo Borden didn’t seem to mind it.

Him and a couple of big bikers, a few of the blacks and Indians that were always working the iron pile out in the yard-the lot of them too damn big to squeeze down in the graves-manhandled the boxes once they were out of the ground, hefting them up onto the flatbeds of waiting trucks like movers handling pianos and sofas. Mo, he was especially impassive about it all. The bodies meant nothing to him. Maybe it was being a farm boy and seeing the kind of shit those boys did. Mo had once told Harry how they buried cows when they died and how one time, how they’d had to disinter one that was poisoning a pond with its run-off. Dead summer and they had to dig it back up…it was so soft, they actually had to shovel it out of its hole.

Watching him with a decayed bag of bones thrown over one shoulder while he dragged a casket with his free hand reminded Harry of those newsreels of the concentration camps. Those crazy bastards there, pulling a corpse from a heap with one hand while chewing on a sandwich with the other.

Just absolutely desensitized.

“Okay,” Krickman finally said,” take five.”

“About fucking time,” a con named Joey Creet said. He was a pudgy little guy who had a thing for knives. Something his wife found out about when he caught her in bed with another man.

Creet walked over to the truck for a cup of coffee…and let out a shriek. A sunken grave had collapsed right beneath him, probably from subsurface subsidence. He sank right up to his belly in the ground, shouting and swearing and trying to wriggle his girth free.

“Lookit that,” Jacky Kripp said, “he’s a fucking Jack-in-the-Box.”

Both cons and hacks laughed at that one, but Creet wasn’t thinking it was too goddamn funny. A couple cons pulled him up and he was just brown with mud.

Harry got his cup of coffee and had a cigarette. He stood before an open grave with Roland Smyth. They were both fouled with mud and clay. The rain kept falling in a cold drizzle and neither man could remember now what it was like to be dry or warm. The graveyard which had been weedy and overgrown a few weeks before, was now just a rank sea of yellow, sluicing mud. Far as the eye could see, nothing but crude markers and wooden crosses riding those low hills and sloping hollows. The flatbed trucks were heaped with muddy brown coffins piled up like Christmas presents. Another truck was heaped with the dead whose boxes had rotted away or fallen apart. Somebody had thrown a tarp over all that hollow-socketed deadwood because it was giving some of the cons the creeps. But even with the tarp in place, a few fleshless arms and trailing stick fingers hung out. There was a heap of casket wreckage arranged like the wood for a Boy Scout bonfire and Jacky Kripp said they’d have one hell of a wienie roast in a few weeks when things dried up.

But nobody thought that was funny but the hacks.

“Fuck,” Harry said, “this’ll take weeks to do. I mean weeks.”

Smyth didn’t argue the point. “Gotta be a thousand graves here. Shit and shit.”

It would have honestly been hard to imagine a more despicable and abhorrent job and you could see it on those grime-streaked, rain-spattered faces. The realization that this was the kind of duty you pulled for breaking society’s laws. This is what it got you. It got you wet and dirty and sickened in a flooded cemetery.

And wasn’t that just peachy?

“All right, you faggots,” Krickman announced, “back to it.”

Shovels and picks were grabbed and the slow, backbreaking process of digging through that slough of muck began again. A couple of bikers opened a casket and it was filled with rats…big and greasy-looking and pissed-off. One of the bikers got bit and another jumped out of the hole with two rodents clinging to his pants. Krickman and the other hacks unloaded their riotguns into that infested box and that was that. The bitten man was sent to the infirmary.

The rain really started to pour down then, coming down in sheets and curtains and you couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Even the gray concrete hulk of the mortuary itself disappeared. The rain pounded the earth and the graveyard continued to swamp, mud bubbling, a fetid mist boiling off it like steam rising from a witch’s cauldron.

A black dude named Ty Lauder was down squaring off a grave, trying to clean away enough mud so he could get the box open for inspection. A crowbar was passed down to him and the lid came open with a creaking, groaning sound.

“Contents A-okay,” he called up out of the hole, hammering the lid back in place. Then he made a funny gasping sound, said, “Something…something happening down here, man.”

“Sure is,” Krickman said, “you’re gonna be in solitary for a week you don’t get your black ass moving.”

There was no laughter coming up out of that hole and for some reason, this gave everyone pause. Picks and shovels paused in dirty, wet hands. All you could hear was the rain coming down.

“No, something’s really happening here,” Lauder said and there was a note of panic to his voice. “The lid…the lid popped back off…motherfucker, that body moved.”

“Full of worms,” one of the hacks said.

There was laughter from the cons…but strained and unpleasant sounding as if maybe they were beginning to sense something, too.

Lauders let out a small, economical scream that made everyone start paying attention. “No, no…this stiff moved…I saw the hand move,” he said, that panic really settling into his voice now. “Help me out of here! C’mon, help me the fuck out of here!”

He was trying to climb back out, but the sides of the grave were so sodden they just came apart in his hands and he kept sliding back down. “Get me out of here! Get me out of here! Goddammit, get me the fuck out of here! Get me out! GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

By then, half a dozen cons were over there, looking down into the grave. A dozen more pushing in for a look. The hacks kept telling them to break it up, but they weren’t listening. Harry and a couple others reached down and grasped Lauder’s flaying hands, started yanking him out of there as that grave just seemed to collapse in on itself. But his hands were slick with clay and they kept losing their grip and he kept sliding back down, just out of his head with fear. His eyes were bulging and mouth contorted in a silent scream.

And Harry could feel it spreading amongst them in a cold wave: fear. It jumped from man to man and you could see it in the widening of eyes and lips pressed tightly together, bodies scrambling to get away from that open grave.

Harry and another got a good hold on Lauders and pulled him up and out. He ran right over the top of them. Down in that hole, a form sheathed in a membrane of sucking gray mud was sitting up in its coffin.

And then…madness.

Later, Harry thought that you could actually feel something happening. Like standing beneath high tension lines and feeling all the power flowing and feeding and arcing. It was like that, except this energy was coming from the ground. The earth beneath their feet was thrumming, vibrating. And right then, white and scabrous hands began to emerge through the layer of mold like spidery orchids blooming. Not just blooms then, but white roots and limbs and gnarled shoots, trunks and boles and spreading branches until the entire graveyard was alive with the resurrection and a cadaver forest blossomed and thickened and covered the ground in a noxious, seeking growth. Pallid, mossy faces rose from the mud and skinless fingers stretched. Like worms drawn to the surface by rain, the dead were squirming up from their graves, more all the time.

The stacked caskets began to shift and move. Lids clattered open and skull-faces were washed by chill rain. Every casket was in motion, meatless fists beating against lids. And in the other truck, the tarp fell away as dozens and dozens of corpses rotted down to rawboned scarecrows came alive and began to slide free to the ground in a grim army, grinning and whispering and chattering blackened teeth.

The graveyard seemed to explode.

The dead slid from the earth and broke the surface of deep, muddy puddles, water running from empty eye sockets and numerous worm-holes. Markers tumbled and fell, shadows slinked forward, charnel voices screeched into the storm. The hacks started shooting with their riotguns and the sound was of thunderous death knells and funeral bells gonging.

Harry saw men being pulled screaming down into the mire of mud like jungle explorers sucked into quicksand, others simply dragged down into submerged graves by clutching hands.

But then he was running with Jacky Kripp and this was surely the point where reality ripped the seat out of its pants and showed him its scaly, dirty behind.

The rain continued to fall.

Men continued to scream.

By the time Harry and the others made it to the mortuary and slammed the great door shut against the world, there was only a silence in the cemetery. A silence punctuated by rain filling puddles and the shuffling of feet as the dead moved towards the prison itself with squishy, slopping sounds.

6

“Someone’s coming,” Miriam Blake said. “Be ready, girls.”

“I know him,” Rita Zirblanksi said as she saw Deke Ericksen walk up the sidewalk in front of the Blake house. “He used to deliver our papers, he-”

Miriam pulled her away from the curtain. “There you go again, dear, and luckily for you, hear I am to set you straight. You don’t know any of them. They may look like people you know or went to school with or who even delivered your paper, but believe me, they are not any longer who they were. Things are getting desperate and dangerous out there and anyone, anyone, would do the most awful things to you to get what you have. They’d slit your throat, they’d rape and rob you and that’s because order has broken down because of liberals empowering all the crawly things in our society. All the dregs and effing bottom-feeders that should have been content to live in the sidewalk cracks and dirty, low places just as God intended.”

Rita tried to swallow. “This is getting creepy.”

“Creepy, you think?” Miriam said, grinning like a cardboard Halloween witch taped to a window. “Do you think it’s creepy, child? Well, indeed it is, I suppose. But this is only the beginning! You wait, you just wait until nightfall, then you’ll see! When all the crazy ones are howling in the streets and those pale horrors begin slinking about knocking on doors and scratching at windows! Then you’ll see and you’ll be glad I’m here to protect you.”

Rhonda had tears in her eyes; she didn’t know what to think.

First, Mrs. Blake had invited them in, given them a lecture about fighting, and then filled their heads with lots of weird politics, and now…now this. Rhonda knew none of it was right. Rita was getting flushed and that meant her temper was rising. It was only a matter of time before she got out of hand and Rhonda figured on getting out of hand with her.

“We should go…go and see if our parents are home yet,” Rita said, fully expecting Miriam to come down on her.

She was not disappointed.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Miriam said. “I won’t hear of it. You’re safe here and I’m not about to let you go. It’s not safe. It’s simply not effing safe out there.”

Rhonda and Rita looked at each other. This was all getting to feel like they’d been kidnapped or something. Were being held against their will. Like they were Hansel and Grethel being held by the hag in a candycane cottage. And with the way Miriam’s eyes were lit up with some dirty, dim light, maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark.

Rhonda sighed. This was going to be up to her and she knew it. People were of the notion that both Zirblanski twins were hotheads and savages, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. They both had their moments, but more often than not Rita was the one who lost control first. It was boredom, maybe. Rita was very high strung and when she had no outlet for the energy that surged inside her, she had a nasty habit of striking out at whatever was near. More often than not, that happened to be Rhonda. Not that Rhonda was above giving it back in spades when that little witch started it, but she was the calmer of the two. The more reasonable. You pushed Rita into a corner, she’d scratch your eyes out; you pushed Rhonda into a corner, she’d warn you to back away before she scratched your eyes out.

Rita said, “What do you think is out in the rain? You sound like you think there’s monsters out there.”

“And maybe there is, Miss High and Mighty. Maybe there is at that.”

Rhonda swallowed. Could the monsters out there be worse than the one holding them hostage in here? Their parents had always told them to steer clear of the Blake house. You see a rattlesnake, dad had said, you don’t go into its den, you give it a wide berth. The general consensus in the neighborhood was that Miriam Blake was crazy and Rhonda was starting to think that was probably true. She was really starting to weird-out now. There were lots of magazines in the house, things like Guns amp; Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, and the National Revue. But there were also stacks of those nutty papers from the grocery store checkout. A lot of them were the Weekly World Examiner, had black and white photographs on the cover of the president shaking hands with space aliens or giant jellyfish eating ships at sea. THE HARRY POTTER WITCH-CULT, said one headline. HUBBLE TELESCOPE PHOTOGRAPHS FACE OF JESUS IN CRAB NEBULA, said another.

Rita was getting angry. “Are they liberals, those monsters?”

“You listen to me, Miss Smarty Pants. You’re just a child and you can’t know the ways of the world. There are things adults know and others we keep from you young people,” Miriam said, her eyes wide and wet and shiny. “Do you know what happened out at that Army base? Hmm, do you? Well, I do. A lot of us know things the liberal media are ignorant of! It was terrorists that caused that explosion out there! Al Qaeda and those effing sand niggers that knocked down them Twin Towers out in New York City! They’ll blow the beejeesus out of all of us if we let them! They caused that explosion to cover up that stuff they put in the water, the stuff that’s making everyone crazy now! Everyone but me and you two girls! You think I’m making that up? You think old Miriam Blake is off her nut? Well, I’m not, because I know what’s out there! Even now, girls, even now the crazy ones are waiting for the sun to go down so they can leap out and start cutting throats! Down in cellars and up in attics, oh they’re waiting with mad eyes and yellow teeth until they can come out and kill! Kill us all! You hear, kill us all!”

“You’re nuts!” Rita said. “You’re nuts, nuts, nuts!”

Miriam slammed her fist down on the coffee table. Then she jumped up and got her shotgun. “Nuts, am I? Oh, poisoned by liberals, both of you! But you’ll see, you’ll soon see that good Mrs. Blake is right! You’ll see the effing horrors of the night and you’ll see them very soon now!”

Rhonda grabbed Rita’s hand before Rita started spitting like a cat. “We’re leaving.”

But Miriam, grinning and drooling, put the shotgun on them. “Oh, no you’re not! You’re not leaving until your Auntie Miriam says you can leave! Do you hear that? Did you hear what I said, you little bitches?”

7

Scott Reed was thinking about how the school board were going to try and hang him on this one and he didn’t figure the union was going to be able to protect him. It was an accident was all. But when it came to one of their precious school buses and the kids inside, oh, they were going to have his head.

As he moved through the dirty water that came up to his hips, he told himself just to play it the way he’d planned: some nut had sideswiped him and sent the bus careening down Coogan Avenue into the water. It seemed perfectly reasonable, but it was, of course, an utter lie. And Reed wasn’t real good at lying.

Never had been.

He hoped those kids weren’t going crazy in the bus. And more than that, he hoped they were still there, that none of them had tried to take off on their own.

The rain had turned into a deluge again and Reed could barely hear himself think. He’d left the bus some thirty minutes before. It should have been a pretty easy trek, but somehow he’d gotten turned around. He didn’t know Bethany very well. But the bus had broken through the barrier at Coogan Avenue and sped down a hill, around a corner, then into the water.

But if that was the case…where was that damn hill and where was Coogan Avenue?

Reed paused, the water sloshing around him, a lake clogged with dead leaves and trash and bobbing debris. The rain poured down and visibility was shit. It was like being lost in some alien world. It was hard to get your bearings when you could only see ten or twenty feet in any direction.

You got turned around, you idiot. That’s what happened. It’s this damn rain. You made for that corner the bus took and instead of going up Coogan Avenue, you turned into a side street.

Which meant, of course, that instead of getting out of Bethany, he was deeper into it now. Not good, not good at all.

Swearing under his breath, realizing he had just made an even bigger mess of things and doubtful that he would even be able to find the bus now until the rain let up, Reed moved through the foul water towards the buildings lining the street. He pushed a floating tree branch out of his way and watched an overturned rowboat float by like a dead alligator gone belly up.

But the rain was pouring down with such ferocity, he could not even see those buildings, let alone find them. So he stopped and felt the panic rising up inside him like lava working its way up the cone of a volcano. Nothing but rain and gray mist and rising water and…dammit, this was a real lovely fix, now wasn’t it?

Just Reed alone, a bad case of the heebie-jeebies blooming in his guts. He turned this way, then that, the rain forcing him to cover his head with his soaking jacket. Lot of good that did to keep him dry. He felt something bump against his leg and he uttered a dry little scream.

Oh, for chrissake, you got to get it togther here.

He stopped, breathing hard, his heart pounding away. Just breathe in and breathe out. Calm down. Easier said than done, though. Being out unprotected in the streets like this was like being lost in a wind tunnel full of blowing water and spray. Even though everything was wide open in every direction, he felt claustrophobic like he had woken in a box.

Okay now, follow your instincts. That’s the way.

He started towards where he thought the buildings were and something else bumped his leg and this time he just swore angrily. Then he moved off again and tripped on something, went face-first right into the water, fighting his way up, brushing wet leaves from his face. And then he went down again like a foot had been stuck out in his path. He came up yet again, wiping water from his eyes, trying to blink them clean. He bumped into something else, but this thing was adrift.

He shoved against it with one hand and felt his fingers contact something cold and fleshy.

Right in front of him were bodies.

Yes, three bodies face down doing the dead man’s float…except now that he had bumped into them, they were circling like sharks until they collided into one another again.

Reed made himself look.

A teenage boy and an elderly man and a young woman with a braided dark ponytail that had washed around her neck like a rope. Her blouse, which barely covered her in the first place, was drawn up around her shoulders. Her flesh was impossibly white and smooth like molded plastic. She was thin and Reed could plainly see the ribbing of her spine. There was a tattoo of a rising, ornamental sun at the small of her back.

Floaters.

Jesus, just like over in River Town.

Reed felt more than a little sickened now. He splashed away from the bodies, telling himself that they were dead and completely harmless. Christ, if he’d bumped into a sack of potatoes he wouldn’t be freaking out like this. And, ultimately, a sack of potatoes was no more dangerous than a few floating cadavers. Yes, it all made perfect sense. It was very logical…but why wouldn’t his brain accept it? Why was it thinking things he could not even bear to acknowledge?

Where were those buildings?

He splashed forward a bit and suddenly went ramrod straight, sensing movement. He just stopped dead, his muscles bunching and his senses tripping over one another trying give him some kind of input. He spun around in a circle, but there was nothing there. But the idea that there might have been sent him into spasms of uncontrollable shivering.

“Is someone there?” he called out. “Anyone?”

His voice sounded weak and was quickly overcome by the lashing rain. Out of the corner of his eyes, he kept catching glints of movement, figures or forms that melted into the grayness of the storm whenever he looked. It was his imagination. It had to be his goddamned imagination because what he had seen had not looked solid like flesh and blood, but something flapping and membranous like a sheet.

Terror raced through him and this time he could not get a handle on it.

He raced off, stumbling through the water and it was deep and thick. Like trying to run in a dream, like he was dragging cinderblocks behind him. He saw leaves and refuse, then those bodies again.

Except the girl was not among them.

She just floated off, you goddamn moron, a voice in his head said like it was extremely pissed-off. Don’t you be thinking anything else. She…just…drifted…away.

Reed tried to keep it together.

He was out there probably in the middle of the street turning circles. Enough already. Balling his hands into fists, he strode purposely forward and within a minute, he spotted the buildings. That wasn’t so damn hard, now was it?

The buildings were all two and three story affairs made of the same soiled brick. The upper floors were apartments, he guessed, and below, street level, dentist’s offices and pharmacies and curio shops. All of them dark and empty, pooling with shadow. Through the plate glass windows, he could see boxes and things bobbing. So much for inventory. Above, all those tall rectangular windows were simply wet and gray, beaded with raindrops.

The thing to do, Reed decided, was to duck into one of the storefronts for a bit, see if the rain subsided, then he’d just have to back-track the best he could.

It was a plan and it made sense.

He started towards the front of a silk-screening shop and above he heard a creaking sound cut through the rain. He looked up. One of the windows on the second floor was open.

It had not been open before.

Tilting his head back, he called out: “Hey! Is someone up there?”

There was nothing but the sound of the rain, a few lonesome breaths of wind creating a spray that he had to blink from his eyes. He was certain that window had not been open before and the idea of that filled him with a brief rush of terror. His heart fluttered like a trapped moth, then settled down.

Don’t you dare start that shit again.

He stood in the flooded streets, water falling all around him. It had not gotten deeper since he had left the bus, but it sure as hell had not retreated any, either. As he waited and he did not really know for what, a dead cat floated by followed by an empty coffee can. A few sticks. And more leaves, of course. The water itself was dark and oily looking. God only knew what was in it.

Reed kept thinking of Lucy Costigan, the soccer coach. Her of the hard, sleek body and bouncing ponytail. If she hadn’t decided to stay in Park Falls with her fucking sister none of this would be happening. And, man, wasn’t it amazing that in the middle of this mess he was still thinking with his dick? Because he was and he knew it. If Lucy was there she’d be wet and cold, her nipples hard against her shirt like thimbles and Reed would put his hands on them and-

He let out a cry as something wet slapped into the back of his neck.

He almost went under again, whirling about crazily and that’s when he saw what it was. Sure, it was floating there in the rain-speckled water: a doll. A little ragdoll with a stitched mouth and shoebutton eyes. As he watched, it slipped beneath the surface and sank.

Reed knew it didn’t jump on him of its own accord.

He looked up and there was a woman standing before that opened window on the second floor. She was terribly pale and she wore no shirt. He could clearly see the naval of her flat belly and her round breasts quite clearly. She smiled and waved. Her mouth was moving and she was saying something, but he couldn’t hear what it was.

It was then that it struck him with a dreamy sort of realization that the woman in the window was Lucy Costigan. Well, it couldn’t be because Lucy was in Park Falls and that woman up there looked to be a brunette. But the resemblance was uncanny. Same big dark eyes and high cheekbones, long neck, and even the breasts…just as he’d imagined them.

She was trapped up there.

Sure, that was it. She needed someone to rescue her and when they did she would be impossibly grateful and…

And Reed, not paying one lick of attention to his instincts and that high alarmed voice in his head, strolled right up to the door of a curio shop called Leslie’s Notions. The door was open and he waded right in there, bumping past floating boxes and plastic bags. It was shadowy in there and the fear he had felt before had not entirely abandoned him. Some childlike sense of horror told him that any moment something huge and shaggy and oyster-eyed would rise from the standing water and sink its teeth into him.

But as quickly as that image had inserted itself, it fled.

Because Reed felt an exhilaration now, one born from a childhood spent reading fairy tales and heroic fantasy. There was a damsel in distress and he would now rescue her. It was the thing to do. It seemed right and more so, it simply felt right.

At the rear of the store, a door stood open and Reed found stairs there. He began to climb them. About half way up, he stopped again, just wondering frantically what he thought he was doing here. This was insane…yet, so necessary. He could not have stopped himself even if he had wanted to. His heart was telling him to rescue Lucy Costigan even if it was really not Lucy Costigan.

So up he went, glad to be out of the water now.

The steps creaked and his entire body was so waterlogged it felt clumsy and heavy. There was a bad stink up here, one that he associated with shit and raw sewage, but also crawling things, profuse and many-legged.

But that didn’t stop him.

He found a corridor and a waiting room. The door was closed, but he could see wet footprints leading up to it and then he knew it had been these same footprints that he had followed out of the water and up to this door.

The smell was worse up here, just flyblown and rancid, a poisoned smell of corpses afloat in stagnant ponds. And this made Reed again ask himself what in the fuck he thought he was doing.

But then he heard the approach of squishing feet.

“Lucy?” he said. “Is that you, Lucy?”

“Yes,” a voice said and he thought for one moment that it sounded like wind blown through a reedy pipe, hollow and haunted.

The door opened and Lucy was standing there.

Reed went to her as she came to him, melted into his arms and it was then he saw that braided dark ponytail plastered to one bony shoulder with wetness and knew it was the floating dead woman. But he didn’t honestly care. He held onto her and she was cold as the guts of a dead fish and only marginally less slimy.

“Down below, down below,” she said in that voice of windy churchyards. “Down in the dark spaces, that’s where I’ll take you.”

Reed kissed her lips and they were frigid and waxy. Her bland white face was perforated with tiny holes as if something had been tunneling into her. Her flesh was not only cold, but gelid and wormy. As she pulled him closer against her, one of her breasts mashed flat and then popped like bubble in a spew of black fluid.

But by then, Reed did not care.

He let his Lucy take him to the window and then out of it, falling together into the surging dead sea of Bethany. He might have screamed once as they splashed down, his lungs quickly filling with rainwater. But that was it. Looping him in those boneless arms, she dove beneath the streets of Bethany, pulling Reed through those nighted tunnels and into the forever darkness of the rushing, cloistered underworld below where there was only silt and black water and decomposition.

All in all, Reed’s death was almost peaceful.

8

It was coming.

Night was coming.

Like some dead clock chiming just over the gray, fuming horizon, echoing with the sound of midnight down mahogany corridors, night was surely coming. And it was coming with menace and murk and malevolence, and what could you really do but fold up like a flower engulfed by night-frost or lay still like a corpse tucked away in a moonlight latticed box and just hope it would pass you by without stopping or lingering and reaching out for you?

Twilight hung decaying over the winding streets and glistening rooftops of that far northern country of Wisconsin. As the shadows congealed and lengthened, people suddenly evaporated from the rainy walks and stores were closed and doors bolted, shades pulled and prayers muttered through pursed lips. Maybe it was the flooding and the falling rain and maybe it was something far worse. For behind the walls of houses, things were being whispered about Bethany and River Town and the sort of pale, moon-faced things that waited in the flooded darkness.

Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle went up and down Kneale Street, doing what they could and warning those that would listen. Most people wouldn’t even answer their doors and a lot houses were simply empty. The Boyne’s weren’t home, ditto for the Chambers and Proctons. There was a dog madly barking in the Brietenbach’s garage and that was about it.

Lily was home safe and sound-they’d looked in on her first-but there was something very off about her. Before she’d been edgy and morose, now she was too giddy, too happy, too excited. She was acting elusive and coy like some kid who was pretending not to know what her birthday present was or who had a secret they dared not tell. Whatever it was, it gave Mitch the creeps.

“You think they all just got out of town?” Tommy said after a time, standing there on the rain-swept sidewalk beneath an overhanging elm.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “I just don’t know.”

Because, honestly, he was hoping that was it, but in Witcham these days hope ran very dry even if everything else was soaking wet. He stood there a moment, remembering this neighborhood at high summer, the life, the activity. The sounds of kids playing and radios blaring from porches, the smell of charcoal smoke from barbecues and that summery green tang of freshly cut grass. He smiled briefly at the memory of that. Could almost feel the crisping heat of July, hear the sound of cards flapping in spokes, birds singing in the trees. But the smile faded to a ghost that drifted away when he saw the neighborhood now: wet and stinking and gradually flooding. All you could hear was water rushing in the streets, swirling and pooling, the inundated stormdrains still backing up and up as the world sprang a leak and Kneale Street sank. The sidewalks where Chrissy and her friends had drawn elaborate dream houses in chalk and roller-skated and skipped rope…they were covered in sluicing gray water and clumped, rotting leaves.

It was a cemetery now.

That’s what Mitch thought as he stood there. Kneale Street was a cemetery. Just a crumbling and graying monument to what was and what would probably never be again.

He shivered then, noticing that the shadows were spreading through yards, seeping from gutters and beneath sheds, roping around foundations. What sun remained was hidden behind that tightly woven gray tapestry of clouds, well behind the rooftops across the street.

The rain had diminished to a chill drizzle and Mitch looked over at Tommy and wondered what he was thinking as he stared down the street.

“I ever tell you, Mitch, how I put myself through trade school to get my welding and metalwork papers?”

Mitch shook his head. That’s when he was still in Milwaukee working a lathe for Empire Shipbuilding. “No, never did.”

Tommy lit a cigarette in his cupped hands. “I got me a job over in Bethany at Harvest Hill boneyard. You know the place?”

Mitch did. An old, hilly cemetery surrounded by high wrought iron gates. Place was huge. They’d buried his Uncle Lou out there years ago when Mitch was a kid. Place gave him the creeps with all those old stones, statuary, and crypts set into the hillsides. He always expected to see Vincent Price hanging around out there. Harvest Hill was older than the town that had sprung up around it, had graves dating back to before the turn of the 19^th century.

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “Yeah, well that’s how I paid for my two years of higher education. See, Harvest was and is, a goddamned big place. They had like three full time caretakers and lots of college kids helping out with the lawns in the summer and the leaves in the fall. You finished cutting the grass, then you started again. And in the fall? Forget it. You could never keep the leaves out. Anyway, so they got this big ugly mortuary out back of the place stuck in this little woods out there. You could never see it from the cemetery unless it was fall and the trees dropped their leaves…”

Tommy said it was a high, gray concrete building, two story, with tall black windows covered by bars. Looked either like a Victorian insane asylum or Doc Frankenstein’s workshop. Nice manicured lawns and a circular cobblestone drive. Real old world sort of joint, but spooky.

“They used to store bodies there during cholera and typhus outbreaks, piled ‘em up like cordwood,” Tommy said. “The cellar is used as a morgue for people that die during the winter. They store them there for Harvest and a lot of other cemeteries that don’t have their own meatlockers. Out back now, in the rear of the building, you got these two high, dirty smokestacks like something they borrowed from Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka or one of those happy places. Yeah, they’ve got a crematory in the back and they cremate a lot of stiffs in there. At least, they did back then, but probably still do.” Tommy took another drag. “Well, I picked up extra money by cleaning the mortuary up three times a week-Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights.”

Mitch grimaced. “Nice job.”

“Yeah, you bet. While the rest of you idiots were out chasing tail and getting drunk Friday night, there I was alone in that fucking spookhouse mopping the marble tiled floors and swabbing down the prep room, lucky bastard that I was. You know what a place like that is like at night?”

Mitch said he didn’t.

Tommy blew smoke out through his nostrils. “It’s just like you think a place like that is. So quiet it’ll curl the hairs at the back of your neck. You hear a timber creak or moth tap at the window, you almost shit your pants. Maybe some people get used to it, but I never did. Place always smelled old like a library, maybe with a sweet scent of wilting flowers and things beneath that smell you didn’t want to think about. And that crematory…don’t let anybody ever kid you, those places smell awful, like burning hair and singed meat and wet ashes. About make you want to puke.” Tommy laughed as if to dismiss it all, but you could see these memories did not sit easy with him. “But you know what’s really bad, Mitch? It’s the feel of the place. Not how it looks or smells, but how it feels. How it makes your guts curdle in your stomach and makes you imagine things that aren’t there. It’s cold in that mortuary in mid-summer and everything echoes. God. The place is dead and empty, yet you can’t get past the idea that you’re being watched all the time, that there’s somebody behind you or just out of sight that disappears whenever you look. I never got past that. Never.”

Mitch swallowed. “And why are you telling me this, Tommy?”

“Because this neighborhood is starting to feel just like that goddamn mortuary,” he said. “Like maybe the dead outnumber the living. I’m feeling something and it ain’t exactly good.”

Mitch lit a cigarette himself because his nerves were jangling and he had that same gnawing feeling in his belly that he’d had early in the day, the sense that something very terrible was waiting to pounce on him and the whole town. Problem was, he figured he now knew what that something was. Standing there with Tommy, he had that feeling of being watched, too, of eyes crawling along the nape of his neck. But from where? The trees? The sky? The hedges? You just could not put a finger on it.

Maybe it was just the emptiness needling him.

That could have been it.

There was just no one around. As if maybe the rumors of what was really going on were making the rounds, were being telegraphed mouth to ear until everyone knew the nature of what had Witcham in its grip. And such was its dire nature that doors were locked and curtains drawn, children dragged inside and knocks went unanswered. Looking around the neighborhood, there was a hush and a vacancy that you might associate with a desert ghost town. It looked very…desolate. Like one of those spooky, empty towns you saw on a 1950’s civil defense newsreel that was about to be hit with an A-bomb. It was doomsday on Kneale Street and everyone had filtered down into their bomb shelters to wait it out.

Cars were abandoned at the curb, bikes forgotten in yards, garage doors left banging in the wind.

“I had a cousin that was an undertaker,” Tommy said. “George, on my mother’s side. He said sometimes the stiffs would move because of the gas and what not. But I’m thinking they didn’t move like these ones do.”

“C’mon,” Mitch finally said, “let’s get this done.”

9

The next house down the way was Wanda Sepperly’s.

She was something of a legend in the neighborhood, Mitch knew. A cauldron stirring witch to the kids and a reader of palms and diviner of futures to many adults. Mitch didn’t go in for any of that business himself, but he knew for a fact that quite a few on Kneale Street did and many more from other parts of the city. He did not put much stock in fortune-tellers. He did not doubt that Wanda Sepperly practiced some form of folk medicine and was believed clairvoyant, because he had heard the stories just like anyone else. She could cure acne and impotency, she could touch your head with a switch of cherrywood and make your hair grow back and, it was also rumored, she could stop bleeding, both internal and external, by laying her hands upon the afflicted member. Fertility, it seemed, was something of a specialty of hers. She could examine a spider’s dewy web and tell you when to plant and by studying the phases of the moon, she could tell a woman the best nights to lay with her husband to bring forth seed.

Depending on who you listened to, these gifts, if they indeed existed, were either faith-healing or witchcraft.

Mitch didn’t put much into any of it, but he knew that Lily had been over there a few times…even if she would not admit as much.

All Mitch knew for sure about Wanda Sepperly was that she had lived on Kneale Street for the past twenty years in that trim yellow two story house with the gingerbread at the eaves and the sharp pitched roof with the serpent weather vane on top. That there was a tall white picket fence around her property that guarded her apple trees and pumpkin patch. That her vegetable and flower gardens grew lush and green and inexplicably verdant even in the driest and coldest years. And that her petunias and hollyhocks, bleeding hearts and wild roses were exceptionally healthy and vibrant and her tomatoes and carrots, sweet peas and snap beans produced a yield that was far out of proportion to the size of their plots. And all of this, it seemed, with no tending by Wanda herself. She had the green thumb, they said, but you would never see her putting it to use unless it was done by the light of the moon.

This is what Mitch knew.

He did not know about fortune-telling or any of that business. Only that Wanda was very old and that she had operated a farm in northern Price County for fifty-odd years and had managed to outlive a string of husbands. That when the last one was buried, Wanda had come to live in Witcham and nobody honestly knew why.

Tommy followed Mitch through the gate and up the walk. He went up the steps onto the porch and noticed that there were bundles of dried flowers suspended from the overhang. They gave off a sharp, unpleasant odor like a spice cupboard closed up for too long.

He knocked and the door swung in. It hadn’t even been latched.

“Mrs. Sepperly?” Mitch called out. “It’s just me, Mitch Barron, from down the block. Just wanted a quick word with you…Mrs. Sepperly?”

“Well, come on in then, don’t just stand there pissing water into my fine old carpet,” a voice said that was unnaturally hearty for the age of its owner. “I knew someone would come calling, Mitch, and it might as well be you.”

They found her in the living room, though it might have been called a sitting room as in years gone by, because there was not a TV, radio, or electric appliance to be had. Incense was burning in a clay pot and Wanda Sepperly sat in a recliner covered in flowery fabric. There were some old books on a shelf, some curios beneath those, a menagerie of framed black and white photos on the wall. Not much else but an ugly lime-green sofa that had seen better days. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting, maybe a crystal ball or a few skulls or a stuffed monkey, but the room was simply comfortable and cozy with a few tapestries on the wall and thick plum-colored velour curtains.

Nice.

Wanda was dressed in a plain brown dress with a white ruffled collar that looked almost like something the Puritan ladies wore in Thanksgiving prints. She wore no jewelry and her white hair was very sparse, pink scalp showing through. Her eyes were bright, a vivid blue. She looked nothing like the senile old lady that whiled away afternoons on the porch rocker or collected dandelions in a basket…or, it was rumored, wandered her yard by moonlight tapping a stick on the ground.

“You’ve come to warn me of the terrible fix this town is in…but haven’t I smelled it coming for weeks?” she said to them. “There are things you can know and things you can only guess and then there are those which your heart and spirit tell you which cannot be denied. Am I right? Right as rain! I saw it coming, young Mister Barron, indeed I did! Long before Hillside Cemetery gave up its dead, I saw it coming, a nasty surprise all trimmed out in black satin! It was a black ice winter with an early thaw followed by a hot locust summer asprout with devil grass! Such things always bring about a darkmoon autumn bleeding with rain and an angry sky veined with lightening. And what do we have out there? We have a town-more yours than mine-that’s going under like a brick in a bog! Surely, going under and a mind gets to wondering if it will ever, ever come up for air again! Now…are we on the same page here, Mitch Barron, neighbor of mine who can never can be troubled to stop by and while away the time with a crazy old lady?”

Mitch just nodded, couldn’t seem to find his voice.

He had never heard her talk so much. It was as if tragedy was the oil that freed her jaw. Here he thought old Mother Sepperly was just an old bag wrinkled and deflated by the years, but truth be told, that bag was filled with gas so hot it might burn you if you strayed too near. Yes, her face was old lady sallow and thin-skinned, her knuckles liver-spotted and she was more dry-wood than woman, but she was certainly alive. There was a vitality in those twinkling eyes you could not deny and a spirit haunting those bones that no oblong box could hope to contain. Those arthritic, knobby hands of hers had spanked naughty children to bed and pinched apple-pie crusts, they had harvested corn and slopped hogs, read tea leaves and whittled love charms. They were skeleton and skin worn smooth and thin as wax paper, but there was still a snap and a punch in them that ninety-six summers had not been able to steal away completely.

Standing there with his mouth open and Wanda Sepperly’s spicy tongue weaving a rich and heady spell over him, he could do nothing but compare her to some fine old wine stored in dust and cobweb and flaking time in a hidden cellar. A bottle that had now been uncorked and, damn, if it didn’t smell sweet and have enough kick left to put you on your ass.

“Well, Mitch Barron, are you going to speak or am I going to have to root around in yer head like my Finnish grandmother and expose all your dirty secrets as those of my bloodline always can?”

Mitch sighed, found his voice. “We just came to tell you that-”

“Yes, yes, yes, boy, I know, to lock my doors and bolt my shutters,” Wanda said as if it was all too apparent. “I saw it coming for weeks, did I tell you that? I felt it in my bones like the shivers and the rheumatism. Something’s coming, I said to myself many weeks gone. Oh be sure of that, old woman, there’s a big black pot being stirred and what crawls out will not be that you’d want to meet this side of the grave. I told myself these things, felt them, saw them, knew them. From that bad winter to that awful summer, oh, the signs were right and the planets aligned and the stars trembling in heaven. Oh yes, boy, oh yes, old Mother Sepperly was aware as I’m always aware. And when those storms started a-brewing, I knew as much. Back in farm country, yes, we would look for the signs and find them. It would have been no surprise to my kin if calves were stillborn and their placentas an electric blue. And if one placenta held a two-headed birth? Yes, yes, and yes! Such things always follow a pattern. The wind comes before the storm and the seed pops long before the harrow. Ain’t it the truth?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Tommy was looking at Mitch as if he was wondering what in the Christ he had gotten him into and where the exit might be located. But Mitch could only shrug. They’d come here to do a neighborly duty, more or less, to warn old Mother Sepperly of what was and what could be, but she seemed to know all that.

“You,” she said to Tommy, narrowing her eyes, “I can guess your name and all that sideshow bullshit, but I’d rather you confessed. Simpler that way.”

“Tommy Kastle,” he said.

“As I thought. Now reach in your front shirt pocket and share your tobacco with me. Go ahead, go ahead, and wipe those silly thoughts from your head, Mitch Barron. Smoking can’t hurt something as old as me. The cancer needs something healthy to chew and it would find nothing but jerky and gristle in this old frame. Ha! It’s more afraid of me that I am of it, hear?”

Tommy brought out a cigarette and Wanda snapped the filter off and lit it with a match. She took long, deep pulls off it, sending the smoke out through her nostrils. “Better,” she said. “Better. Now you boys have been playing at warning the neighbors of what might crawl out of the darkness this night? And what have they said?”

“They’re not answering their doors,” Tommy said.

Wanda smiled, showing them both her nubby yellow teeth. “Of course they’re not. They sense things and feel things, they know that a darkness is coming and maybe that it’s already arrived. Some have fled and others are hiding. For Halloween has come early and there will be a tricking and a treating tonight and certain revelers you dare not open the door to.” She sat there smoking, her eyes glazing over and when she spoke, the years clung to her like carrion birds to rotten meat. “When I was a girl, yes, in Haymarket, Bayfield County, it was. A tombstone winter was followed by a mad dog summer and that October, Matthew Donnegan went insane, did he not? He took an axe after his wife and three children. A cold and windy October it was. No more came the Donnegan’s into town to church nor market, they stayed out at that farm and it was in the icehouse back yonder that Sheriff Wick found them. Those children all lined up like mummies in a Mexican catacomb, frosty and blue and staring, their mother squatting beside them frozen stiff as a shank of beef. Matthew could not say why he did what he did, only that a grave whispering had come through the corn as it does and he had listened. You recall that year? You recall the wild tales and wilder rumors? Oh, it was bad, bad, bad!”

Tommy and Mitch just stood there, wondering if she had slipped away on them. And as they thought this, her eyes-which seemed to be closing as her mind drifted through the years like dandelion seeds in a good blow-snapped open.

“Ha! I ain’t senile, Mister Tommy! Far from it!”

And maybe Mitch had never been exactly adept at reading minds, but right then he could read Tommy’s just fine. That old lady, Mitch, she just read my mind. And Mitch wanted to tell him that, no, of course she hadn’t. It was just that old people are very sensitive, intuitive, but he didn’t say a thing because he knew right down in his bones that what Wanda Sepperly practiced so effortlessly was more than that. It wasn’t some carnival trick; it was the real thing.

Maybe to add substance to this, Wanda said, “You’re right on that, Mitch, goddamn yes, but you are.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and butted it. She looked from Mitch to Tommy. “Ah, you poor boys! You’ve seen them, haven’t you? You’ve seen those things that tonight will turn this town into a graveyard?”

There was no point in lying to Mother Sepperly and they both knew it. Lying to her was like lying to yourself, like looking into a mirror and proclaiming, that’s not me in there! It’s someone else! You knew better and so would she. So Mitch told her about their experiences at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy, the dead woman in the culvert pipe, all the rest.

“Yes, as I thought, as I thought,” Wanda said.

Tommy stepped forward now, feeling they were indeed on the same page here. “What the hell are they? Zombies?”

That brought a laugh from Wanda that was dry and bitter-sounding. “Zombies? Heh, heh, now that’s a laugh riot indeed! But such words will serve to name them that cannot be named. A zombie is something conjured, I understand, a mindless thing lacking soul and will that chops cane in Guadeloupe and Haiti and such places. Also, a particularly ridiculous shambler of the cinema. But these things? No and yes. I would not name them. You believe they are folks that have come out of their graves to bring evil and make a certain mischief amongst the living, eh?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m thinking.”

Wanda nodded. “Well, you are right and wrong. Yes, they have sheered the veil and come back, but there was no fancy conjuring done, not on purpose, I think. This was not meant to be, but an accident. Listen, Mr. Tommy, them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they’ve returned as is something else indeed. The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, these things have been waiting a long time to be born.”

Mitch felt a heaviness in his limbs. He said, “They…they don’t like salt.”

“No, son, and they probably don’t fancy iron nor fire.”

“What should we do?” Tommy asked her.

“I’m not quite sure, son. But I can read the both of you and I know you plan to stand and fight. I will stand with you. But you had better be off to tell the others. They won’t listen, but you can try. And maybe later, you can come back and talk to me. Leave me one of those cigarettes and latch the door on your way out.”

“We can’t just-”

“Leave me here, Mitch? A frail old woman not in her right mind?” Wanda laughed at that, too. “Off with the both of you. When the time is right, I think, you will come back and I will be here.”

10

“Well, now that was a rush,” Tommy said when they were down the walk from Wanda Sepperly’s. “I ain’t got enough trouble with zombies, you bring me to meet the local witch. Greetings, boils and ghouls, hee, hee, hee!”

“Jesus Christ, Tommy, don’t be such an asshole.”

“Well, my mother always said to go with my strengths.”

“Wanda’s okay,” Mitch said. “Just a little…ah…eccentric.”

Tommy thought that was funny. “Eccentric? Holy shit, Mitch, that what you call eccentric? My cousin Lyle collected wooden dressmaker’s dummies and Victorian parasols. He was queer as they come, but a hell of a nice guy. My mother always said he was eccentric. I agree. But Mother Sepperley? Damn, that’s not eccentric, that’s scary.”

“Ah, you liked her and you know it.”

“I did. She was strange, but she was my kind of strange.”

Mitch walked through the deepening puddles. “Trust me, Tommy, she’s spooky, but you haven’t met the real witch in this neighborhood, but you will.”

“Oh Christ.”

The Zirblanski house was next and nobody answered the door.

So on they went to the Blake house, but only after Mitch warned Tommy that he was about to meet the real witch of Kneale Street. Mitch explained that she had a lot of guns and she liked to use them.

“Just keep your head down,” he said.

“I’m not liking this,” Tommy said.

“I’d like to say she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is. Miriam Blake had her way, she’d shoot anyone that wasn’t white, Christian, and carrying a firearm.”

Now that Tommy had been prepared, they went right up on the porch and that was when the first shot rang out. Had Tommy been any closer to that doorbell, he would have lost his hand.

“Holy shit!” Tommy cried as he and Mitch hit the porch on their bellies.

Inside, there was screaming and shouting and the sound of something crashing. Then the door opened and Mitch saw Rhonda Zirblanski standing there. She was a tough little shit, he knew, but there were tears in her eyes.

“She told us to shoot whoever came through the door,” Rhonda said. “She gave us guns. Said anybody that came to the door was here to rape and rob and murder. She gave us guns, but we didn’t shoot, Mr. Barron! I swear, we didn’t shoot!”

Mitch rose slowly and when he did, tough or not, Rhonda fell right in his arms and he took hold of her, afraid for one frightening moment that she had been shot. But that wasn’t it; she was just overwrought.

When they got inside, they saw Rhonda’s twin, Rita, standing there, looking pissed-off, her eyes just black and simmering like burning pitch. “Hey, Mr. Barron,” she said.

Miriam Blake was on the floor in a blue jogging suit, covering her face with both hands. “Evil effing little bitches! See what they did to me? I take them in, little conniving harlots, and this is how they repay me! It’s their upbringing! Their upbringing! Goddamn parents, that’s what! Goddamn liberal sonsofbitches-”

“You better shut up,” Rita told her and from the tone of her voice, Mitch was thinking that was good advice.

When Miriam peeled her hands away from her face, her mouth was bloody and a blue welt was rising under her right eye.

Mitch sighed as Miriam kept complaining and Rhonda was talking about the guns and how Miriam was a crazy old hag and she knew she wasn’t supposed to say that, but crazy was just crazy, wasn’t it? And Mitch was in stark agreement with her. Tommy grabbed the 12-gauge off the floor that Miriam had tried to pepper them with and not too far away were a couple of little. 32 autos. Tommy shoved them both in the pockets of his raincoat and stood there with the shotgun, looking confused.

When Rhonda was done talking, Mitch said, “She wanted you to shoot us?”

“That’s a lie!” Miriam snapped. “That’s an effing goddamn lie! You little bitch, you little-”

“Shut the hell up,” Tommy told her.

That did it. Miriam sat there, silenced, but hardly out of fight. She glared at Tommy and from that look, he was pretty glad she no longer had access to that Remington pump because she looked just mad enough to use it. Not that he was surprised after the welcome they’d received.

Rhonda started talking again, upset still but calming down an inch at a time. She started repeating verbatim the mad nonsense Miriam had filled her head with: shit about liberal Jews taking over the country and how they controlled the media and the government. How good old American Christian values were being stomped and stifled so that gays could marry and sluts could have abortions. That Hitler had had the right idea because those effing Jews had killed Christ and didn’t they honestly have the Holocaust coming? Well, didn’t they?

Now, Mitch could have given a high hairy shit what Miriam believed in or didn’t believe in, but you didn’t go shoveling this neo-facist bullshit down the throats of impressionable children. You just didn’t.

And handguns? Jesus, you just didn’t pass them out to kids.

“That’s what she kept saying,” Rita told him. “Then when you came up on the porch, she told us to shoot you. And when we wouldn’t, she shot at you instead.”

On the floor, Miriam looked like a cobra all coiled up and ready to spit its venom. Her eyes were fixed and glassy and she was trembling like something in her was ready to explode. Mitch figured if Tommy and he hadn’t been there, she would have killed Rita and Rhonda. Bloody drool was hanging from her lower lip and she did not seem to care.

She made to open her mouth and Tommy shook his head.

She closed it just as quick.

“What happened then?” Mitch asked.

Rita shrugged. “Then I hit her. I punched her in the face twice.”

She was so honest about it, so completely matter-of-fact, that Mitch almost started laughing. Miriam did not seem to think it was funny, though. Her right eye was nearly closed now, black-and-blue and in need of a cold steak. Mitch had to turn away from her. No, it was not exactly humorous that some eleven-year old toughie had flattened her, but at the same time, it was. If Rita had not acted quickly and decisively, Miriam might have killed Tommy or he. There was a very good chance of that. Mitch knew those girls had balls-the entire neighborhood was very much aware of that-he just never knew how much balls. Until now. He could just about envision it in his mind. Miriam going coo-coo and blasting at the door and Rita stepping over and giving her two shots to the face that dropped the old bitch.

And lookit that shiner, will ya? That kid has some kind of hook on her!

Miriam was rocking back and forth on her haunches. She was into her seventies, just a kid by Wanda Sepperly’s gauge, but still pretty old. But looking at her there, she looked not only spry but dangerous.

“Am I allowed to talk now?” she said in her characteristically shrill, catty tone.

Nobody objected. But Rita’s eyes narrowed and you could see the threat in them, the promise to Miriam that if she started running down her parents again, there was a whole can of ass-whooping still on the shelf, seal never broken, and it had Miriam’s name on it.

Mitch thought she was going to start shouting at the girls again, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I know you, Mitch Barron. Oh yes, I’ve got your number, Mister Union Man. Don’t think I don’t.”

“It’s in the book,” Mitch said.

Then she looked right at Tommy. “But you? I don’t know you. Now tell me, hotshot, are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

Tommy looked like he was going to laugh, but he held it in. “Neither. I think they’re all a bunch of freaking parasites. So I think you’ve got my number, too.”

Miriam looked like she was ready to leap. “If my husband were alive-”

“If you’re fucking husband was alive, you old hag, I’d hope he’d have more sense than to be handing out guns to grade school kids,” Tommy said to her.

Mitch figured the both of them were about to launch into some half-ass argument, but that didn’t happen. Because the Kneale Street posse arrived.

11

They were one sorry sight: Margaret Boyne and her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the district school superintendent.

“We heard shots,” Margaret said and then saw Miriam Blake sitting there, beaten and bloody. “Oh my God…what happened?”

Mitch said, “Miriam ran out of clay ducks so she thought she’d use us instead.”

He briefly sketched in what had transpired and Miriam didn’t even try to stop him. She looked right at him as he told his story, a scowl on her face. She made sure everyone could see that scowl and how her eyes rolled upwards in their sockets like it was the biggest load of bullshit Mitch Barron had ever shoveled.

Russel just stood there with that stupid expression on his face, the same one he got when people dared asked him how a healthy man pushing forty could live off his mother and never do a day’s honest work. “There’s been weird shit going on all over town. I been hearing things you wouldn’t believe. This whole thing’s like Y2K…except it’s real this time, it’s really happening.”

Margaret just nodded. She always nodded to what Russel said. Maybe the rest of the neighborhood thought he was a bum, but you’d never convince his mother of that.

Lou Darin, however, did not seem interested. “Well, I for one am not surprised. Anyone with all these guns is bound to crack sooner or later.”

Tommy said, “I have a gun and I got more at home.”

Darin just nodded. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”

Mitch had once most colorfully described Lou Darin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. That had gotten its share of laughs around the neighborhood because Darin wasn’t exactly real popular. He thought he lived in a gated yuppie community sometimes instead of your very average American working class neighborhood. He had numerous times went before the town council trying to get dogs outlawed in the city limits, clotheslines prohibited, and colorful molded plastic children’s toys of the Little Tike’s ilk banned from yards…these things made the neighborhoods look trashy which brought down property values, you know. He was generally disliked on the school board he lorded over and several parent’s groups had tried unsuccessfully to have him removed from office. Lou Darin was the sort of guy who’d run a red light and then swear at you if you dared beep at him. And when he was asked why he couldn’t seem to balance the school’s budget after four years in office, he was quick to point out that it was the fault of the guy before him. Because it certainly couldn’t be Lou Darin’s fault. Maybe he didn’t go around with a button that said I AM GOD…but then he didn’t have to.

Margaret helped Miriam up onto the sofa and Mitch told the Zirblanksi twins to go over to his house, wait there with Lily. Maybe after Miriam, she won’t seem quite so nutty to you guys. He hated himself for thinking shit like that, but he was worried. About her. About Chrissy. About a lot of things.

Tommy lit a cigarette and Miriam did not object. “Listen to me, all of you. I don’t know where you’ve been today or what you might have seen, but there’s some ugly shit going on in this town. I’ve seen it and I still don’t believe it myself. There’s gonna be shit happening tonight. Bad shit. Now, me and Mitch have been going through the neighborhood here, just warning people. It’s gonna be dark soon and all of you had better just lock your doors and wait it out.”

Which got Russel nodding his head. “He’s right. From what I been hearing, there’s things out in the rain. Things like dead people walking around.”

“Excuse me?” Lou Darin said. “Did I just hear you right? Because certainly I could not have. Dead people walking around? Are you losing your mind? We’ve got a situation out there, surely, but I hardly think we’ve stumbled into a trashy B-movie.”

“Maybe we have,” Mitch said.

Russel said, “It’s more than that, Mr. Darin. A lot more. There were these people came knocking at our door-mom you were still at work-and they started talking, started telling me stuff and it all fits in. This is the end of the world. That’s what it is. It’s all in the Book of Enoch…said so in the pamphlet they gave me. God is sending this flood to wash people off the earth. To punish them for being wicked and stuff. They said that foul abominations will crawl forth from the cellar of hell. That’s what they said and I believe them.”

His mother kept nodding her head. Though, truth be told, to Margaret, the Book of Enoch could have been a collection of dirty jokes for all she knew. But if Russel had said it, well, then it had to be true.

As Lou Darin rolled his eyes, Tommy said, “Excuse me, but who were these people that came to your door?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Oh, no, I’d really like to hear this,” Lou Darin said.

Russel got a little red around the cheeks like somebody had just sandpapered his face. “They were Jehovah’s Witnesses…but I don’t see why that matters.”

“The JoHo’s?” Tommy said. “Christ, I lived next door to one for years. They predict the end of the world every time the Pope farts.”

Russel stared at him. “You know, I don’t recall you being from this neighborhood, smartass. Who the hell are you?”

Tommy smiled. “I’m a spy sent by the Seventh Day Adventists.”

Even Lou Darin managed a thin smile at that. “Let’s try and be rational here, shall we? These individuals you’re talking about, Russel…well, they’re fringe. You can’t go around believing anyone who wears an END OF THE WORLD placard. People like that are a dime a dozen. So, no, sorry, I think maybe you’re more than a little gullible, but don’t expect me to stand here and listen to that sort of nonsense.” Then he looked over at Russel’s mom. “Margaret? Are you with me on this?”

Oh, Christ, now that was tough. Margaret never disagreed with Russel. She looked from Darin to her son. “Well, I, um…that is…”

But Mitch saved her. “All right,” he said, “I want you to listen to what I have to say. You may not like it, but you’re gonna listen. You’re gonna hear what I have to say.”

They were all looking at him, so he started talking. He told them about the things at Sadler Brother’s and the living severed arm, the burned woman in the culvert pipe and what happened at Lisa Bell’s house. And finished it all off with what came up out of the flooded cellar of Bonnie’s One-Stop over in Elmwood Hills. He left out the part about the dead man exploding when they’d mowed him down in Tommy’s truck. Thing was, about half way through his tale that sounded like something he’d cribbed from a horror comic like The Vault of Horror, he started to run out of steam. It was the subject matter. By the time he’d finished he didn’t even sound like he believed it himself.

Of course, halfway through, Lou Darin began to roll his eyes and then shake his head. He took off his glasses, wiped them clean on a tissue, and then put them back on in time to roll his eyes yet again.

“What do you take me for?” he finally said when nobody laughed. Because he’d spent any number of years in the school system and he’d heard his share of whoppers told by kids and this had to be something along those lines. “No, really, Mitch: what in the hell do you take me for? Do you think I’m a complete idiot that will believe any ridiculous story shoved down my throat? Do I look stupid? What do you think I am?”

Miriam was grinning ear to ear, just eating it up.

Tommy said, “Go ahead, Mitch, tell him what you think he is.”

“I think maybe you should stay out of this,” Lou Darin warned him. “Because, you know, you wiseass, we’ve got enough trouble without every idiot in the city crawling out of the woodwork and flapping their mouth. So, as I said, I think maybe you should just stay out of this.”

Tommy had the smirk on his face that told Mitch he was looking for a fight. And would keep looking until he found one. “And I think maybe your mother should have kept her legs crossed.”

Lou Darin was a very slick and officious man. He was master and commander and he was not used to being talked to like that. Standing there in his yellow L.L. Bean Southwester with his three-piece Kuppenheimer’s pinstripe beneath and his shiny black rubbers, you could see he was a man who demanded respect. “Who the hell do you think you are talking to me like that? Do you know who I am, you inbred little shit?”

“Easy now,” Tommy said. “You make ‘inbreeding’ sound like a bad thing.”

“It’s all just like the pamphlet said,” Russel piped up. “These are the End Times and all the horrors of hell have been unleashed.”

Miriam started laughing. “Well, isn’t this a fine kettle of fish, Mr. Mitch Barron! See what you and your kind have brought about? Do you see the evils you have set lose? You and your effing unions and your no prayer in school? Do you see what you’ve set into motion?”

Margaret had tears in her eyes. She looked like she wanted to swoon.

Mitch just stood there, getting pissed and feeling frustrated. If this really is the end of the world, he thought, then God must be laughing his ass off, because he left it in real good hands. He looked over at Tommy and Tommy just shrugged.

“I’m telling you, each and everyone of you, what I saw out there today,” Mitch tried again in a very calm voice, speaking very slowly. “I’m not making this shit up. I wish to God above that I was, but I am not. I have nothing to gain by lying here.”

“Except to stir a general panic,” Lou Darin pointed out. “And I believe there are laws against that. Now listen to me, all of you. This has gone far enough. Halloween is some weeks away and I’m really not in the mood for anymore ghost stories.” Then he turned to Mitch. “You know, I would have thought better of you, Mitch. A lot better. I would have thought you would have known better than to play silly, childish games like this. No, no, don’t waste your time arguing. I can see it in your eyes and, believe me, I couldn’t possibly swallow that nonsense. I don’t believe in ghosts or the boogeyman or prophecy for that matter. I know there are no such things. The sun rises and it sets. The sky is blue and the world keeps turning.”

“And when you wipe your ass,” Tommy said, “I bet it smells like a cup of sunshine.”

Mitch burst out laughing, couldn’t help himself.

“That’s enough!” Lou Darin said. “That’s enough from all of you, do you hear me? I won’t stand here and be insulted! I won’t stand here and have you tell me that this is the end of the world! Because if that’s the flavor of the day, then it flat out stinks!”

Mitch thought for a moment there he was going to drop that uppity sonofabitch. But he didn’t. There were bigger fish to fry here than Lou Darin. So he swallowed down his anger and sighed. “All right, Mr. Darin. You say I’m a liar? Okay, fine. Now, here’s what we’re going to do. You and I are going to jump in my friend’s truck here and take a little drive over to River Town. And I’m going to show you those things first hand.”

“The hell we are,” Darin said.

“Come again? I think maybe you misunderstood me, you greasy little sonofabitch. I wasn’t asking you, I was telling you.”

“You better stay away from me!”

Tommy grabbed Darin by the arm. “He’s not kidding, friend. I saw those things: they’re real.”

Darin pulled himself free. “You idiots! You goddamned idiots! Who in the name of Christ do you think you small-minded, shitkicking yahoos are dealing with here? Do you think I fell out of a tree yesterday?” His voice had taken on a high, whining timbre that you usually heard in brats who’d been denied candy or adults that had slipped a cog upstairs. He backed away from anybody because he saw no allies in the group of misfits around him. “Don’t think I don’t know what this is all about! I know! I know! None of you have ever wanted me in this neighborhood and now you’ve seen your chance to play a little joke on me and now you’ve had your stupid little laugh at my expense! Well, ha, ha, joke’s on you! Because I won’t be a party to this madness and I will not be your rubber stamp! Not now and not ever!”

He started backing towards the door with a wild look in his eye like he thought maybe they were all going to jump him and beat him up. But nobody made a move. They just watched him back to the door and then go running right out of it, talking to himself the entire time.

“Well, scratch that asshole,” Tommy said. “He’ll be dead by dawn.”

After that, things got a little uncomfortable. Nobody seemed to know what to say and probably because there really wasn’t anything they could say.

Miriam looked happy about it all. For the first time in his life, Mitch actually thought she was looking happy.

Margaret finally said, “Mitch? Mitch, is it really true? Is all that really true?”

He nodded solemnly. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

Russel needed no more prompting. He took his mother by the arm and hurried her out the door and presumably to their house down the way where Mitch fervently hoped he would lock the door and not open it again.

“Miriam,” he said, “your door is shot up. You can’t stay here. You can’t-”

“You don’t worry about what I can or can’t do, Mr. Mitch Barron! I’ll take care of myself and I don’t need any effing help from the likes of you! So get off my property! Get off my property and stay off! Because next time, I swear to God, I will not miss!”

Tommy pumped the shells out of her Remington and then handed it back to her. Then they got out just like she’d suggested.

“What now?” Tommy said when they were outside in the rain.

“I wished to Christ I knew,” Mitch told him. “My goddamn head is spinning.”

They ducked under a tree and had a smoke, not saying anything, just twisted up tight inside and confused, overwhelmed.

“I been thinking,” Tommy finally said. “If the water keeps rising…it won’t be just River Town and Bethany that go under.”

“No, whole damn city will sink.”

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “We might want to remember where the tallest buildings in town are.”

“It gets bad, there’s always the old Bleeding Heart Orphanage.”

Bleeding Heart sat on the highest ground in town, right in-between Crandon and East Genesee, overlooking Bethany. On a clear day, you could see it from just about anywhere in the city sitting atop Crooked Hill. The orphanage was a big, looming pile of brick that had been closed down for some twenty years now, was mostly boarded up, a nice home for rats and pigeons and bats. There was nothing else up there but lots of trees, an old ruined church, and a graveyard. The ownership of the property was disputed between the city and the Catholic diocese. It was all tangled in red tape and in the courts where it would probably languish for years to come.

“I’m thinking I’d rather drown than have to go up to that goddamn haunted house,” Tommy said.

Mitch just sighed. “We better get back to Lily.” He looked up at the darkening sky. “Night’s coming and I don’t want to leave her alone any longer than I have to.”

12

And then night came down smooth and swift and coveting. The sun, buried behind layers of leaden clouds, went out like a cigarette dropped in a puddle. It sought its grave and moist earth was thrown in after it and it was simply no more. The people of Witcham who had not wisely escaped this sinking ghost ship locked themselves down in the boxes of their houses and apartments. They fastened and chained the lids and hid in the darkness like spiders in dark crevices. They did not turn on the lights because they were frightened that lights could be seen as beacons by whatever haunted that wet charnel blackness beyond their thresholds. But those that did leave the lights on, left everything burning. Not just bedroom, living room, and kitchen lights, but porch lights and garage lights and driveway lights. And when those were lit, they broke out the lanterns and candles and flashlights. Anything to chase away the grim tangles of shadows that might come knocking on doors or scratching at windows begging treats and offering tricks.

Out there, things dripped and things shifted and other things moved in that leaf-caked dead sea of stagnancy that washed turgid and oily up against the buildings and dirty windows. Now and again, a shadow would move or a pale hand would break the mold of wet leaves or a carnival waxwork of gray-white faces would rise from that watery murk, all grinning vapidly with crooked smiles and staring eyes that were terribly dark and terribly huge and terribly depthless. Then, in unison, they would sink away into the clotted bottoms of River Town like corpses into brine, forever drifting and forever nameless.

13

Night hung over the rooftops of River Town like funeral crepe, black and thick and dank with the smell of rot and things disinterred.

Into this sunken graveyard of burial and un-death, three inflatable boats came, their hulls easily gliding through the leaves and bobbing wreckage that had been vomited up by the drowned city in its death throes. They were each seventeen-footers with fifty-five horsepower Johnson pump jet engines and each carried three men of Bravo Company, 32nd Engineer Battalion, Wisconsin Army National Guard. They had been deployed to search for survivors in the flooded sections of Witcham and they were commanded by none other than First Sergeant Henry T. Oates, a guy with twenty-five years of experience in the regular army. Oates had cut his teeth in the 1^st Infantry and 101^st Airborne Divisions and would only be too happy to tell you so. Just as he would also happily tell you that he was only hooked up with these weekend jugheads in order to put in his thirty and get his retirement.

“Okay, boys,” he called out into the sullen darkness of River Town, “drop your cocks and grab your socks, let’s do this and do this right. We get back, shit yes, we’ll be the pride and glory of the Thirty-second. Which, I might add, is like being the shiniest turd in the kitty box.”

A few laughs rolled through the squad.

Oates was riding shotgun in the lead boat with Hinks and Neiderhauser. Jones had the second boat with Strickland and Chernick. And pulling up the rear was Hopper with Liss and Torrio. Oates tried damn hard to be patient with his squad, being that they were just as virgin as boots fresh out of Leonard Wood, but, Jesus, sometimes it was a little hard to swallow. Oates was a real soldier and here he was bopping with these weekend warriors who spent their weeks flipping burgers at Mickey Dee’s and working housewares at the Walmart when they weren’t parading around in baggy pants wearing goddamn earrings and listening to faggot rap music.

Yeah, it was all just pretty damn peachy, this situation.

But maybe it was just the whole damn new Army with their high-tech toys, half-ass politically correct leadership, and those damn fairy berets that made ‘em look like a bunch of French pedophiles. And these weekenders were the very lower strata of that particularly limp-wristed organization. Oates just thanked God that this bunch didn’t get deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan or some equally cheery hellhole, because these boys would get bagged in a week in a real combat duty station.

Not that the Army seemed to understand that or the fat-cat politicos in Washington. Need came, they’d deploy these misfits. But that was the American way, Oates figured. Getting into wars we had no business fighting in the first place. Sticking our noses into one smelly cow-pie after another. But he supposed that was the American way of war: whoever grabs the quickest, gets the mostest…even if no pre-planning went into it.

Not to take away from God, country, and all that happy horseshit, Oates thought.

Problem with war, Oates also figured, was that Americans didn’t have the sort of national psyche necessary for the prolonged battle and body count of combat. Not just Ma and Pa Kettle on the homefront either, but the soldiers themselves. You had a generation weaned on fast food and instant gratification with synthetic values and the attention span of most toddlers. These boys and girls were spoiled and selfish and shallow, the idea of sacrifice was unthinkable to their little minds programmed by MTV, Nike, and the NBA. The way Oates saw it, these kids were good-hearted, but soft and gutless and just as lacking as the name brands they worshipped. No substance, no discipline, no nothing. Back in ‘60’s, your average ma and pa supported the war in Vietnam even though they knew it was the greatest clusterfuck since McCarthyism. They had stood against the hippies who threatened their old school values. But even those hippies they hated had stood for something. They had drawn a line in the sand and they were not going to back down from it: war is shit and the society that supports it and turns a blind eye to the corporate-political deceit behind it is the biggest shit of all.

But this generation?

Hell, they didn’t stand for anything. They just didn’t have the gumption or perseverance necessary. Paris fucking Hilton was a good representation for the entire generation: easy, empty, and heading for a crash.

“Well, well, well,” Oates said. “I see we all got our fancy-ass berets on and that makes me feel like I’m part of the elite. You feeling elite today, Hinks?”

“Yes sir!”

Oates laughed. “What you got under that beret tonight, Hinks? One day your hair’s purple, the next it’s green. What kind of crazy faggot ‘do you sporting tonight?”

“Just my natural color, Sarge.”

Now that was something wasn’t it? When you had to ask some grunt what color he was dying his mother-humping hair?

The boats moved along at a slow clip, sliding through the murky waters and bumping through the bobbing debris. River Town wasn’t entirely dark. The streetlights were still working in most of the neighborhoods, but many were out. The buildings were mostly high and dark. Storefronts empty and washed by shadow. Cars and minivans sunk right up to their door handles, radio antennas rising from the slop like swamp reeds. Looked like some kind of surreal ghost town out there with water flooded up over porches and licking against windows. The boats moved on, the running lights glowing at their bows, searchlights casting a few questing fingers through the ebon byways. The boats were all Zodiacs, silent-runners. About all you heard was a throb and a thrum as they passed, the water splashing in their wakes. They’d been designed for Special Forces and the flood was the only way these knotheads of the National Gourd would ever see the inside of them, Oates knew.

“Don’t look like any life out there at all,” Neiderhauser said. “What the hell are we supposed to find in this mess?”

“Your mother’s virginity,” Oates told him.

“Sarge? Why you always dissing my mother all the time?” Neiderhauser wanted to know.

“Because I love and respect the dear woman, son. Weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have the pleasure of serving with you. And where would this man’s Army be without you?”

Hinks giggled at that. “That’s good,” he said.

“Your mother have any children that lived, Hinks?”

“No sir…I mean, yes sir. I did.”

Oates chuckled. “Don’t be so sure about that, son.”

“This is bullshit, Sarge. It’s just a waste of time,” Neiderhauser said.

“Is it now?”

“Sure, Sarge. We ain’t gonna find nothing but bodies from that cemetery. Not shit else.”

“I see. Is that your professional opinion of the matter?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Quit your whining, son. And I do mean quit it,” Oates told him. “This isn’t making my shorts rise either, but it’s gotta be done. Beats the shit out of patrolling Baghdad. Now, we got lots of missing people in this goddamn city and it would make me very happy to find a few so their mothers could maybe get some sleep. So don’t you dare piss on my boots, soldier, there’s plenty out there who’re suffering and now it’s your turn.”

That shut Neiderhauser up.

Oates was not, in general, a very compassionate sort, so when he talked like that, you knew he meant it. Which meant you’d better toe the line or they’d be pulling about twenty feet of it out of your ass surgically, compliments of First Sergeant Henry T. Oates.

Hinks was at the wheel, doing whatever the man said. That was how you did it. “Sarge? That true about that missing bus full of kids?”

“It is. And despite the fact that I am one ornery, full-mouthed, neo-fascist, intolerant war-mongering son of a St. Louis whore, it would give me great pleasure to deliver those young-uns unharmed unto their families. I can’t say I’ve done a lot to help in this life and far too much to hurt, but that would give me satisfaction.” Oates looked over at Neiderhauser. “And if you do not want to assist me in this, Neiderhumper, then I would just as soon as sodomize you with this here oar and drop your queer white ass into the drink, God bless America and Union Carbide.”

Neiderhauser grumbled something and Hinks laughed. But as usual with Oates, he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to laugh. Sometimes you just never knew. Was Sergeant Oates the funniest man since Larry the Cable Guy or was he was just a mean-spirited asshole like most people thought?

They came to a little two-story house in a block of the same with lots of nice hedges barely breaking the surface of the water. A boat was tied to the porch. Oates figured that was a sign of life. He ordered the boats to pull up by it, which they did after a few minutes spent bumping into each other, the troops swearing at each other and blaming all but themselves.

“Okay, you god-blessing idiots,” Oates told them, “happy hour is over. Get your shit together and get it together now. By Christ, you boys drive like I fuck.”

“Shit, Sarge, Hopper rammed right into us, wasn’t our fault,” Jones said.

“Hell I did.”

“All right, all right, girls,” Oates said. “Quit blaming the wreck on the train. Jones? You get this one. Tie off your craft and search that house. You find any beauticians in there, you tell ‘em Hinks here could use an avocado facial and a finger-wave.”

The guardsmen were all wearing their fatigues with rubber hip boots and rain ponchos. They had their M-16s, too, but Oates forbid them from loading those lifetakers. With this bunch, he figured that would be like giving a blind man a chainsaw in a crowded room. He was the only one with a loaded weapon and that’s how it had to be with these monkeys.

Jones tied off the boat with a mooring line made out of nylon rope looped through the bow D-ring. He tied it off on the porch railing. Strickland and Chernick followed him through the slop and up onto the porch.

“Water smells like shit,” Strickland said.

“Then it must remind you of sex with your boyfriend,” Oates told him. “Now get humping.”

Jones went through the usual protocol of knocking on the door, then he just went in, the door partly ajar. It took the three of them to push it open all the way. Then they disappeared inside. Oates could see their flashlight beams bobbing around in there through the windows, hear them calling out and identifying themselves. At least they hadn’t forgotten to do that.

And the waiting began. A minute, then two that bled into five.

14

“How long is this gonna take ‘em?” Neiderhauser said.

Oates turned and looked at him. “You on the rag tonight, corporal? Heavy flow day or what? You wanna change your fucking tampon, we’ll turn our backs.”

Hinks laughed.

Neiderhauser sighed. “I’m just saying, Sarge, that we’ve got a lot of real estate to cover here. We need to do it as quick as we can.”

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of fucking rum, Neiderhauser, that’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said all day. We’re gonna do it as fast as we can, but we can’t take the chance of leaving someone behind.”

There was some splashing and a few muted giggles. Strickland and Chernick came out the door and down the steps, laughing about the fact that they’d found some floating fuckbooks and a bright red dildo that Chernick had originally taken to be some kind exotic flashlight.

“Where’s Jones?” Oates wanted to know.

“He’s taking a piss, sir,” Strickland said.

“In the house? Well, goodness gracious great balls of fire! Jones! Jones!” Oates called out. “You zip that inchworm up and get your ass out here! I told you knuckleheads not to separate! Get out here!”

Jones showed.

Oates sang, “Well along came Jones, slow-walking Jones.”

“Just taking a leak, Sarge.”

“In somebody’s house?”

“Well, you heard the captain. Sewers are all backed-up, you got sewage everywhere.”

“I don’t give a shit, Jones. You don’t pull that Wee Willy Winkie of yours unless I say so. Got it?”

Jones nodded. “My girlfriend don’t think it’s so wee, Sarge.”

“I don’t care what your sister says. She’s not here. Out here, I’m your fucking daddy and I call the shots. You got that? Do you all read me on this?” Oates said, his eyes surveying the sorry lot under him. “You boys get on my wrong side here and I swear you’re all gonna come out of this with sore assholes and that not-so-fresh feeling! Just because we ain’t got the Vietnamese Boy’s Choir popping out of the bush with AKs and ugly attitudes, don’t mean there’s not danger here, comprende? You boys do what I say and nobody’s gonna get hurt, you don’t and you’ll be chewing my shit fresh from the oven and liking the taste! Any questions? Good, now let’s move out, you fucking assholes.”

Jones untied the boat and they moved back out into the streets.

Oates didn’t respect these boys, but he sure as hell didn’t want anything to happen to them. They were just ordinary kids for the most part playing soldier. They meant well and he knew it. And even if he wouldn’t admit it, he liked them. Not as soldiers, but as the kids they were. No, he did not respect them. But just because you didn’t respect a puppy that shit on your new carpet didn’t mean you didn’t love that leg-humping little sonofabitch.

And Oates was thinking this because he was starting to worry.

He’d been in Desert Storm and Panama, pulled a tour in El Salvador and another in the meat-grinder of Beirut back in the ‘80’s. So he understood danger, he understood threat. And right then he was feeling like the squad was not alone out in those inundated streets, that there were others out there. Others not showing themselves and he did not like it. It was the same sort of feeling, he knew, that you could get out in the jungle knowing there were unfriendlies out there and that one of them was sighting you in his crosshairs. It was not something your brain told you, but something you felt down in the bottom of your guts like an especially cold finger had been shoved up your ass and was wiggling around down there.

Oates could not explain what he felt. It was instinctive, intuitive, and he had learned to trust such things.

When they got to a submerged ballfield?the tops of the dugouts just barely visible, Port-a-potties floating around like empty coffins and bumping up against the wire-mesh behind the catcher’s cage?Oates brought them to a stop in that slimy water.

“Okay, boys,” he said. “I want you all to lock and load. I want magazines in all weapons and I want all safeties engaged until I say different.”

Most of them were ecstatic over the idea, but Hinks said, “You want us to load up? With bullets?”

Oates just shook is head. “Sometimes, Hinks, it’s hard to be your woman. Yes, with bullets.”

“But why?”

“Because those are the regulations according to Henry T. Oates, your resident daddy. Now do what I tell you.”

Dammit, see what you got me into, Angela?

Oates blamed Angela for most things, but never to her face. Because Angela Oates might have weighed a 110 pounds soaking wet and been pretty as a prom queen, but she was the hardest bullbuster a man was likely to meet. And maybe that’s why Oates had married her. Weren’t many that could put him in his place. He loved her and would happily admit as such. But after ten years as an Army wife, she wanted to come back home and Oates was forced to finish his career in the Guard in order to get his retirement. Something he wasn’t crazy about, but did for Angela strictly out of love. And love was a hard master. Because when Oates’ dick had met Angela it had been happy and that’s how Oates knew the rest of him never would be again. Such was love…and hormones.

The soldiers busied themselves inserting magazines and about the time they’d finished and were scanning the grainy darkness with the barrels of their rifles like kids sighting in hostile Indians with tree branches, Liss in the rear boat cried out and fired his rifle. He got off one three-round burst into the night that got everyone agitated and ready to start capping.

But Oates was on top of it. “Who fired that weapon? Who fired that motherfucking weapon and by whose goddamn orders! I said, WHO FIRED

THAT MOTHERFUCKING WEAPON?”

If anyone else was thinking of following suit, their trigger fingers went limp as noodles. The sound of the M-16 spitting slugs had been loud in the stillness, hell yes, but it was a whisper compared to the booming of the first sergeant’s mouth as the profanities echoed off into the darkness of River Town like cluster bombs striking a target.

“It was Liss,” Torrio said.

“Liss?” Oates turned in the direction of him. He was sitting in the stern of the rear boat with his 16 cradled in his arms. In the glow of the running lights his face looked pinched-up like somebody trying to hold back a scream. “Was that you, Liss? Liss? You answer me, you little cocksucker!”

“Sir…yes sir,” Liss breathed. “I saw someone…I just…I just shot at them.”

“Get those searchlights out there,” Oates said.

Using paddles, the boats were brought around, searchlights panned in the direction Liss had shot. There was nothing out there, just wet leaves and floating garbage, a Styrofoam cooler and a sheet of old plywood.

“What in the hell were you thinking, you fucking moron?” Oates wanted to know. “We’re here to save people not kill them. Jesus H. Christ. Anything out there? Anything at all?”

“Not unless they sank,” Neiderhauser said.

Oates knew more than he was saying. He hadn’t been in the soldiering business as long as he had without being able to sense things. And the vibes blowing off Liss were bad. If he had seen someone, then it would have taken a particular set of circumstances to make him fire. Oates had seen guys his age in Saudi who couldn’t even pull the trigger when some fanatic was charging their APC with a belt full of explosives. So, unless his guess was wrong, Liss had seen something that had truly disturbed him.

They made a grid search of the area using just the oars to swing the boats around. They didn’t find a thing. Oates had pushed aside a mass of leaves to see the water beneath, but it was simply black as the run-off from a transmission. A few bubbles broke the surface, nothing more.

“All right, Liss, I’m guessing you imagined things,” Oates said, trying to remain calm. “But you don’t have the nerve for this, so eject that magazine from your weapon.”

He didn’t seem able, so Hopper did it for him.

Liss just sat there shaking with a pained look on his face like he needed to take a good shit and some monkey had sewn up his rectum as a joke. Whatever was laying down low and simmering in his bowels, it was creeping right up now and filling him. And it was not good. Not good at all.

“I saw someone,” he maintained. “Someone…someone funny.”

Oates spat over the side of the boat. “Funny? Funny like Bozo or Clarabelle? Or Wiggles the Pants-less Clown exposing himself at the pocket park? C’mon, Liss, I think we can all use a good laugh right now. See, I almost made a funny, too. When you capped those rounds, I almost blew mud in my fatigue pants and you jokers would have gotten a few good chuckles off that until I started shaking my shorts out on your heads. So, tell me about this funny individual.”

Liss looked like he was trying to swallow down something that just wouldn’t stay put. “Just funny…weird…strange, I don’t know.”

But Oates didn’t believe that. Liss knew, all right.

“C’mon, Liss, spill it. Funny/weird/strange how? Was it a man or a woman? Were they juggling balls or waving an Israeli flag or dressed up like one of the Village People?”

Liss shook his head. “I don’t know…I think it was a man…but…but his face was all white and blobby, Sarge…looked like it was melting off the skull underneath.”

Well, that landed pretty hard. There were a few angry dismissals of it, then just a lot of silence. Oates told Liss they needed more than that and Liss just repeated what he said. That when he’d shot, he didn’t know if he hit them. Only that they went under.

“Like…like they just sank, Sarge,” Liss managed. “Like they were…like a window dummy or something. Not real.”

“All right, let’s get the hell out of here,” Oates said. “But before we go, no goddamn shooting. You understand me, you idiots? Because if you kill someone, not only will you be screwed but also yours truly as your squad leader. And that’s not going to happen to me, you little dickwads. So understand what I now say: If there’s any fucking to happen, I’ll be the horny fucker and you squirts will be the happy fuckees! Understand? You will now do as I say or I will dump your asses overboard! If I say bend over, grab your ankles and grin, boney-maroney, and maybe if I like you I’ll use Vaseline and if I don’t I’ll dryfuck you like a one-nutted hound humping a gopher hole! Do we understand each other, gentlemen, good and good. Now let’s move out.”

The pump jets were started again and the boats moved off further into the desertion of River Town. And the further they went, the more Oates was getting that feeling that he did not like. He had been on some battlefields in his time, but nothing like this. River Town was a graveyard and there were no two ways about that. All the buildings and houses rising from the murk were like monoliths and dead trees rising up from a misting, poisoned lake. A light rain had begun to fall from the scarred clouds overhead. Now and again, they would catch of glimpse of motion just out of the illumination of the lights and that was what was really worrying Oates.

That and what Liss had claimed to have seen.

15

“This is just getting weird,” Neiderhauser said, maybe feeling it, too.

“There’s worse duty than this,” Oates told him, though he did not think there honestly was. “You boys could be going up to that prison to put down the riot, but instead you’re getting a nice boating trip.”

Ahead, some trees had fallen over the road creating a deadfall that was impassable. The branches and limbs were interwoven like a mesh of reed. As the lights splashed over them, Oates was certain there were people hiding in there, shadows moving in the shadows.

“Okay!” he called out. “Let’s try down that alley!”

The boats banked to the right and slid down an alley between two warehouses. Even the wan glow of the sporadic streetlights and the filtered moonlight did not reach here. The searchlights washed over those high brick walls, splashing them with the gigantic, distorted images of the men in the boats. Ahead, nothing but a clogged sluice of dark water, cast-off branches, and leaves.

But then something else.

“What…what the hell is that?” Hinks said.

But Oates wasn’t sure until they got up real close. Elongated, bobbing shapes in the water covered with silt and dead leaves. The boats moved into their midst slowly, bumping them aside. And after the first and then the second did a slow dead man’s roll, exposing white underbellies to the sky, there was no doubt.

“Bodies,” Neiderhauser said. “Fucking bodies. Just like I told you.”

The cadavers were buried in leaves, but there had to be nearly a dozen humped shapes floating around them. As the bows disinterred them, the hot-sweet stench of bacterial decay started bringing stomachs into throats. The smell hung in the alley like a gaseous envelope.

“Just keep your nerve,” Oates told them. “They’re dead; they can’t hurt you.”

Rain was flying thick as snow in the beams of the searchlights now and the wind, so long absent, was picking up, beginning to howl along the roofs and eaves of the deserted buildings as if it were blowing through a subterranean catacomb. You could almost imagine it skirting shattered crypts and blowing through the empty eye sockets of heaped skulls. It whipped and moaned, making rainspouts rattle and loose signboards creak. And the boats kept chugging along, the stink of overturning bodies simply green and nauseating. They kept thudding into bows and scraping along the neoprene hulls like they were moving, dragging splintered fingernails along the sides.

“Well, Peter Piper poked a peck of pickled peckers,” Oates said under his breath. “What have we gotten ourselves into now?”

The guardsmen were bitching and complaining and a few were just gasping and sobbing.

You cry your eyes out and throw your guts out, Oates thought at them. Get it out of your systems: you get used to the bodies, you might turn into soldiers yet.

The alley was long and winding with lots of hard turns and Oates figured it must have been very old, the buildings and the alley part of some nineteenth century industrial area. Not only just the bodies, but floating planks and soaking cardboard boxes and empty drums. Lots of things poking from the mire. High overhead, there were boarded-up windows and others that had simply been bricked over, ancient hooded loading docks and rotting timbers poking out with rusting winches that must have been part of some pulley system for loading freight. They moved around a panel truck that was sunk to the top of its cab and a series of decrepit loading bays off to the right. And that’s another reason that Oates knew this area was old?there was no possibly way a modern truck or tractor-trailer rig could have backed into those bays in the tight confines of the alley. These were from the days of draft horses and wagons.

“It’s like we’re being drawn into a trap,” Neiderhauser said.

Oates wanted to slap him, but he didn’t. He had to get control of this situation one way or another. His command was disintegrating around him.

“I been thinking the same thing,” Hinks said.

“Thinking, eh? Well, I thought I heard a few marbles rattling around in a coffee can. We’ll be out of this alley in no time. You pussies want to hold hands, feel free. But no heavy petting, just like the sign says.” Oates was trying to sound tough, trying to get them feeling confident again. “Sure as shit, Hinks, we’ll be out of here anytime now. We’ll be out of here and cleaner than a country lane after a spring shower…or however that douche commercial goes.”

Hinks tried to laugh, but it just wasn’t happening.

The atmosphere was just going bad. Like opening up a corpse, the farther you went in, the more it stank. Oates was thinking that was applicable, because this place not only smelled like a morgue, it felt like one. It was like they were digging their way into a black grave shovelful by shovelful, pawing deeper into that wormy soil, just waiting for their spades to scrape against the lid of the coffin beneath. And when they did, when they did and that box started opening?

“What was that?” Neiderhauser said.

“What?”

It came again and Oates heard it this time, too. A thudding sound beneath like something had bumped the bottom of the boat and then bumped it again.

Oates swallowed, his brain filled with clutching, evil shadows. “We…we bumped into something. Christ, Neiderhumper, you don’t have to be born a coal miner’s daughter to figure that one.”

But even as he said it, a cold trickle of fear ran down his spine. And it really started to run when it happened again. Something struck the keel with force and the boat rocked, then rocked again. There were shouts and cries from the other two boats now. Either they were hitting something or something was hitting them. Oates badly wanted to cut the order to open those craft up, but that alley was too tight. Last thing he needed was for one of the Zodiacs to strike something and flip over. These goddamn idiots probably couldn’t even swim.

“Settle down back there, ladies!” Oates called out. “This water is full of junk, nothing more!”

Then the boat lurched again. Lurched and stopped dead like they’d snagged on something. The other boats bumped into it and then they were all stopped. The lead boat twisted to the left like it was going to flip, then it spun lazily in a half-circle like something down there was holding it…then it drifted free four or five feet, then it stopped dead again.

The silence was heavy and brooding, even with the rain dropping into the water and popping against the rubber boats, splatting against vinyl ponchos.

“Fuck is this?” Jones called from the boat behind.

Then something slammed into his boat and it was actually lifted inches out of the water and dropped back with a splash. Strickland and Chernick cried out as they were tossed from their seats to the muddy floorboards.

“Something hit us!” Jones cried out. “There’s something under us! There’s something down there!”

Then, on the bottom of all the boats, slapping and pounding sounds. And along the keel of the lead craft, a muted scratching like something sharp drawn along its length.

The men were panicking, searchlights and flashlights scanning the water and the walls of the buildings, those abandoned docks. The rain fell in a fine spray and there was movement in the water around them. Things breaking the surface and disappearing, bobbing and sinking. Shadows slithering and the stink of mortuaries.

Oates saw a face just above the water.

Only for the briefest of moments, but he put his flashlight full on it and there was no denying the grim reality of it. A face bleached-white and puckered, chewed-looking as if fish had been nibbling on it, strips of flesh hanging from the cheeks and forehead like Spanish moss. Then it slid down beneath the waters again.

“What the hell was that?” Hinks said.

And Oates was going to tell him it was nothing, just a fucking doll’s head or something, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to speak. His tongue felt numb in his mouth. But his brain was thinking: Like a shark, a goddamn shark. That thing showed itself like a shark shows its dorsal fin before it attacks. And when the dorsal goes under…

“There’s things in the water,” Hopper called out. “I saw ‘em…like faces in the water, all around us.”

And right then you could almost feel the terror and the adrenaline pumping into each man. Weapons were brought up and bodies tensed. They could feel attack coming, just not from which direction. And Oates knew it, felt it, lived it, as he’d done so many times before. This was how it felt right before the enemy stormed down on your position: the terror, the juice in your veins, that pervasive sense of the calm before the storm as bodies went rigid and breath was held and nerves crackled with electricity.

“Listen to me now,” Oates said and they all heard him. “I want those safeties off those weapons right now. Anything that shows itself is to be considered unfriendly. Drivers, let’s get these boats moving right goddamn now! Hup to it, Mary Lou or there’s gonna be very little loving and a whole lot of raping…”

They were close.

They almost made it.

If they’d gotten out of there a minute sooner, maybe, maybe. But the water suddenly slapped violently around them and exploded. A white, shrunken arm shot out and snatched Chernick by the wrist and then everyone was shouting and screaming. Weapons were discharged at ghosts and the searchlights cast grotesque shadows everywhere.

Chernick was a big boy who worked the weights every day. He’d been a linebacker in high school and he’d been a golden gloves boxer, so he did not go down without a fight. As that white, slimy arm tried to yank him over the side he pulled away and brought it right up into the boat with him.

It…and what it was attached to.

And when he saw it, when he looked that thing right in the face, he started screaming like an infant, thrashing and squealing. He lost his 16, began punching and clawing at that ragged thing he’d fished up from the water. His nails shredded the waterlogged flesh right down to the bone, but the skeletal hand clung on tenaciously, the fingertips sinking right into his wrist. He flopped and wailed, knocking Jones into the drink just as another white arm looped around Strickland’s throat like an especially soft and blubbery tentacle and he was drawn over the side, a mutiny of clawing hands waiting for him.

Oates thought maybe he screamed himself as he saw what Chernick was fighting with, the searchlight spinning on its base and strobing the scene with flashes of light. In slow, jerking motion, he saw something that might have been an old woman once, but was now a blackened and withered thing like a scarecrow, its clothing and skin hanging in streamers that flapped in the wind like pennants.

Neiderhauser was the first to open up.

Whether he killed Chernick or that thing did when it bit out his throat in a spray of dark arterial blood, it was hard to say. Slugs ripped into both Chernick and the dead woman. She was a pitted and insect-ravaged husk and the rounds from Neiderhauser’s M-16 literally blew her apart into a spray of carrion that filled the bottom of the boat, wriggling gruesomely on the anodized aluminum floorboards…bones and scraps of flesh, things that were both and neither like writhing like worms.

And then all around them, faces camouflaged with wet leaves surfaced.

White, scarified hands reached up the sides of the boats.

A faceless thing rose up to Oates’ right and he hammered it with the butt of his 16. It fell back, making a watery, coughing sound. Then he flipped the 16 over and sprayed the water where it sank.

And then the boats were in motion.

Neiderhauser opened up the lead boat, smashing through a gauntlet of white faces and clutching hands. As Jones’ empty boat was flipped over, Hopper’s boat slammed into it and knocked it out of the way. The two boats raced down that alley, barely making the turns.

And as they did so, Oates saw a woman standing on a loading dock, a withered and eyeless thing with long silver hair clotted with leaves and filth trailing down her gray, seamed face and onto her mildewed burial dress.

She was grinning.

Then the boat broke free of the alley and Oates could see the dark, expanding slick of the river as it slowly consumed River Town. Hopper seemed to see it, too, because he turned away from it just as Neiderhauser did. They flew through a street of tall buildings and into a residential district of ancient weather-vaned houses and then there was open fields which had become ponds and then encroaching trees.

Oates had to pry Neiderhauser’s hands from the wheel to get him to slow down and when he did, Neiderhauser looked like he wanted to scratch his eyes out.

“Settle down! Settle the fuck down before you get us all killed!”

Hopper’s boat went right past them, spraying them with filthy water and leaves. And it kept going and going.

“Rubber baby buggie fucking bumpers!” Oates shouted. “Go after those dumb sonsofbitches! Go! Go! Go!”

And they did.

They raced through the falling rain after Hopper’s boat and they caught up with it soon enough. And it wasn’t until Oates saw the high tips of that wrought iron gate pass behind them that he knew they had just entered a sunken cemetery.

And all around them in the wind-lashed night, they could hear the voices of the dead and the damned scraping up from lungs inundated with reeking water and mud.

And this was how things went from bad to worse for Henry T. Oates.

16

There was a dripping.

And from somewhere far away, a sobbing.

Chrissy Barron opened her eyes and they slid shut almost immediately. She was in her bed, she had to be in her bed. Just half awake coming out of a dream, that’s all this was. Just relax and drift off. She heard her mind tell her this and she accepted. At least for a moment or two, then she felt the wetness sloshing around her. Heard that dripping. The sobbing.

Sobbing?

She leaned forward, expecting maybe a pillow, but submerging her face in chill water instead.

She gasped and cried out.

She opened her eyes and forced them to stay open. She was sitting in the back of Heather Sale’s little VW bug, her safety belt cutting a trench into her belly. The car was filled with water. It was right up to her neck. Her entire body felt numb and tingly.

What the hell was going on?

She tried to think and the harder she tried, the less anything made sense. But in the front seat, that sobbing. She recognized it. Maybe everything else was a blur, but she certainly recognized that sobbing.

“Lisa?” she said. “Lisa?”

But the sobbing continued unabated. Chrissy tried to rise, but her seatbelt held her in place. Her neck was sore like she’d gotten whiplash and the rest of her was just numb and senseless. When she tried to move her arms, they felt thick and ungainly. Like rubber limbs somebody had grafted onto her as a joke. She flexed her hands into fists, kept doing so and soon they were tingling madly, almost painfully, but they were working.

“Lisa!” she said. “Heather!”

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lisa Bell was saying, her head reclined back on the seat. She moved it slowly from side to side, so at least she was coming around and that was something.

As Chrissy tried to work her seatbelt catch with those rubbery, useless fingers, a panic settled into her. She was not the panicky type, that was Lisa’s thing, but it took hold of her and she began to thrash in her seat, fighting to get the belt off. When careful manipulation didn’t work, she tried brute force. Yanking and pulling on it, sweat popping on her brow, her muscles bunching and straining. But it was no good. She was gripped by claustrophobia, the sense that the car was sinking and that she was going to sink with it.

Finally, she relaxed, panting.

The car wasn’t sinking. Oh, it had definitely sank, but the water wasn’t any higher than it was before. Still up to her throat. It was then, as she breathed in and out, forcing herself to relax, she remembered or allowed herself to remember. Heather. It had been Heather’s idea. They were coming back from the Uptown Mall just off Main and Heather wanted to get a closer look at the flooding in River Town. Chrissy had told her she was nuts…it was getting dark, the sun was going down. Time to get home while they could. And that had been Heather’s idea. She was driving Chrissy home, over to Crandon, but she decided to skirt the outer edges of Crandon, get a look at River Town and the flooding…

Then what? Think! Think!

Cable Street. It wound around the outside of River Town, right in-between River Town and Crandon. It was a hilly drive and then they’d come down into that hollow, the road disappearing into a sea of dark water.

“Let’s just plow on through,” Heather said, liking the idea.

And before anyone could stop her, she’d jammed down on the accelerator and they’d raced down there, hitting that water and then something else, something that stopped the VW dead. Chrissy could remember the car flying up in the air, the sudden jolt…then blackness.

And how long ago had that been?

It was dark now…they must’ve been out for awhile.

The feeling coming back into her fingers, she easily popped the catch on the safety belt. And let out a breath, the cruel embrace of that belt squeezing her mercilessly.

“Heather!” she said, sitting forward now, a sharp pain in her guts and shoulder where the belt had dug in. “Lisa! Lisa!”

From Heather there was only silence.

But Lisa was coming around, moaning and groaning. She coughed a few times and raised her head up. “Where…are we? Oh My God! Help me! Somebody help me! I’m drowning! Oh God, help me!”

She began to thrash and wail, crying out things that were utterly unintelligible. Chrissy pulled herself up by the front seat and took hold of her. “Take it easy! You’re all right!”

Lisa turned her head. “What happened? What’s going on?”

“We hit something in the water,” she managed. “Now get your belt off.”

Lisa started to do that and then she looked over at Heather, seemed to realize that there was someone else in the car with them. “Heather? Heather? Heather?” She let out a little scream and started to thrash again. “She’s dead! She’s dead! Heather’s dead?”

“Knock it off!” Chrissy shouted at her. “Heather’s not dead! She’s just out cold…”

But then she pulled herself halfway over the seats and saw Heather. Unbelted as usual, she was facedown in the water, her blonde locks floating around like strands of sea grass in a tidal pull. Chrissy grabbed her, pulled her up out of the water, but it was no good. The windshield was shattered and she must have hit when they struck the water and whatever was in it. She could see that perfect bloody impact in the windshield, cracks spiderwebbing away from it in every direction.

Lisa screamed and Chrissy wanted to, too.

Heather’s head was split wide open, the ragged wound running from forehead to the crown of her skull. The water had washed all the blood away and even in the dim light, you could see the bubbly-looking convolutions of her brain, gray and fleshy and just awful.

Chrissy let go of her and she slipped into the water face-first.

She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, Chrissy started thinking. She’s dead because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

She turned away, dropping back into her seat, ripples running through the water now. She fought to keep the contents of her stomach down and slid over towards the door. She tried to open it, but it was jammed somehow. She unrolled the window and pulled herself out of it, submerging in that chill, stinking water. Coming up, gasping and shaking, feeling all those slimy things floating in it. She had to get a grip here and she knew it. It was all up to her now. That’s how it worked. Heather was the daredevil. She was the queen and Lisa? Lisa was the basketcase. Sweet and caring, but useless in a stressful situation. She freaked out when she got a B on an algebra paper, became positively suicidal when she couldn’t remember the combination to her gym locker.

Brushing water from her face, Chrissy thought: Okay, you have to do this. You’re an absolute self-centered bitch and you know it, but right now you have to be something else. Can you do that?

She figured she could.

She took hold of Lisa’s door and got it open a few inches. She kept pulling and it opened slowly with all the water, but it did open. Lisa was having an anxiety attack, but that was to be expected. She fought against Chrissy as Chrissy tried to help her. Finally, Chrissy just slapped her right across the face. It was what they did with hysterical people in movies and although she was not a violent person…honey, it just felt right.

It calmed Lisa right away.

She started to cry.

“Knock it off,” Chrissy told her, popping the catch on her belt and dragging her up out of the car. “We have to get help.”

Together, they climbed up the hill out of the water. When they got to the top, they could see River Town spread out to the left and Crandon to the right. Most of River Town was submerged and parts of Crandon were under, too.

“What can we do, Chrissy?” Lisa said. “I’m scared…I mean, I don’t know what I am. But we’re trapped, we’re really trapped.”

“We’re not trapped. We just have to do some wading is all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Then in River Town, whatever lights were still burning went out and then Crandon followed suit. A thick, unbelievable blackness fell over them.

“Shit,” Chrissy heard herself say.

17

This is what happened at the Hope Street Cemetery:

When Officers Pat Marcus and Dave Rose did not turn up for a few hours after what seemed to be a pretty routine vandalism complaint, their empty squad car was discovered parked outside the caretaker’s shack. A brief search of the grounds turned up nothing. And it was this that got the wheels turning. For Marcus and Rose weren’t the first missing cops in Witcham; everyone in the department was still reeling from the loss of Officers Miggs and Heller from the River Town Precinct the night the Black River burst its banks and the disappearance of Eddie Stokely over in Guttertown that very afternoon. It was not good. And every cop in Witcham felt it right down to his or her roots. And as Captain Knoles said, “If we can’t even take care of ourselves…how in Christ are we supposed to take of this city?”

And this is what brought twenty cops out to the Hope Street Cemetery after dark that night. They came with guns and attitudes and a dog team borrowed from the State Police. Yes, the damn rain was still pissing down and there was every possibility that the dogs wouldn’t be able to scent their own balls, let alone track two missing cops. But Knoles didn’t care about that. The city fathers were shitting all over him and if he wanted to save his job, he had to at least make a good show of it. Because like the mayor herself had told him, “For the love of God, Captain, what kind of half-assed dog and pony show are you running over there?”

And Knoles honestly wasn’t sure himself.

So he siphoned off every extra available uniform he could get, even though there weren’t any extra available uniforms. His people were already pulling twelve and sometimes sixteen-hour shifts. The overtime alone was going to throw the city budget into an uproar. Let alone the bitching the cops themselves were doing.

Lieutenant Van Ibes was running the search and he broke his men into four five-man squads, each with a dog handler and each given a particular quadrant of the boneyard. And given that the cemetery was spread out over some two city blocks, that was plenty. Just a misty, rainy run of hedges and trees, hollows and low hills, stones and crypts thrust from the waterlogged ground like bad teeth from rotting gums.

Donny Soper pulled the duty and he was not happy about it. As they followed the dog-handler and his hound at the stone wall at the back of the grounds, he told Breeson and Kerr all about it. “I haven’t seen my wife or kids in three days,” he said, his black slicker shining with water. “You believe that shit? Three fucking days. I been pulling double-shifts courtesy of that prick Knoles. They got me sleeping in the barracks out back. You guys don’t have to do that. You got seniority. You got the years on me. You get to go home. But me? No, I get to bunk in that dirty, ratty old barracks. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, they haven’t even been used for nothing but storage since the fifties. Then Knoles gets this bright idea of clearing it out and setting up cots. And who gets to sleep there? Me and all the other idiots who don’t have the time in.”

Kerr just ignored him. Kerr was good at ignoring guys like Soper.

“You’re getting paid for it, aren’t you?” Breeson said, his flashlight beam glancing off the wet faces of monuments. “Christ, think of the check you’re gonna be pulling from this.”

“It’s not all about money,” Soper told him. “I need to see my family, too.”

Kerr grunted a little laugh at that.

Breeson had to hold back his laughter. Yeah, Soper was some kind of family guy, all right. When he wasn’t bitching about the job and how people like Knoles kept him down, he was bitching about his beloved family. His wife who was a shrew that nagged him twenty-four seven and his kids that were little demons straight out of hell sent to torment his every waking moment. Yeah, he missed them, all right. What he missed was his recliner and his TV and his refrigerator. His Wednesday night bowling and his dog and his girl-on-girl movies on the Playboy Channel. Maybe somewhere after those things he missed his family.

Up ahead, Sergeant Rhymes and Kleets, the dog-handler, paused while the hound sniffed around at the base of a stone urn.

“Must’ve picked up something,” Kerr said.

Soper laughed. “Yeah, probably got a good whiff of some bones.”

They stood there as the rain fell, not hard but more of a constant annoying drizzle that left a wet sheen on your face and made the trees drip and drip and drip. They panned their lights around, the beams looking like bright yellow pencils writing on the night. The tombstones rose around them, some new and shiny, others just worn and leaning and speckled with lichen. And all of them shadowy and crowded, like being in some surreal forest of marble trees.

The hound pissed against a stone and the men laughed.

Kleets led him away through a little family plot with stone urns and benches, lots of cylindrical markers that looked like pillars.

“You guys think all I care about is money?” Soper said, picking right up again.

“I’m thinking,” Kerr said.

Breeson just shrugged. “I thought you were big on money, Soaps. I mean, shit, I borrowed two-fifty from you for a burger and Coke that time and it was like pulling teeth getting you to open your wallet. Then day after day, you were after me to pay it back. You couldn’t even wait a week until payday. You remember that? When I paid you, I gave you two-fifty exactly and then you said the burger and Coke had come up to two-fifty-seven. You wanted those seven cents.”

“I got mouths to feed, don’t I?”

Kerr chuckled. “You are one cheap sonofabitch, Soaps. That’s why nobody wants to go drinking with you anymore. Rest of us are buying rounds and there you are, sitting on your fucking hands.”

“Like I said, I got mouths to feed.” He fell silent for a moment or two, brooding maybe.

Breeson wiped water from his face and thought about getting back to the station house and crawling into a hot cup of coffee. He and the others didn’t spend much time thinking about Dave Rose and Pat Marcus. They all knew those guys, but they didn’t like to be thinking about them or what might have happened to them. There was shit going on in this city that nobody liked to admit to. It was easier that way. So even though the lot of them knew they were coming out here to look for the missing men, they talked about anything but.

Soper said, “You guys think I’m a cheap bastard, fine. I don’t care. You think I’m a complainer, fine. Again, I don’t much care. You ought to try sleeping in those fucking barracks. I shit you not, it makes me miss the Army. Christ, those racks they got for us are like sleeping on beds of nails. Fucking Russian surplus or something. And that ain’t bad enough, I got to sleep next to Karpinski.”

Both men burst out laughing at that.

Up ahead, Ryhmes told them to pipe down, his black face just wet and shiny.

“Sure, you guys laugh. You have a good laugh,” Soper said. “You know what it’s like sleeping next to Karpinski? He snores all the goddamn time and when he’s not snoring, he’s farting. I mean constantly. Like a goddamn bugler. All night long he’s ripping one off after the other. Two hours into it, goddamn barracks smell like a burst gas main. Jesus. Something’s wrong with that guy. It’s not natural to have that much gas. Smells like he’s shitting his pants.”

Breeson laughed under his breath.

Now this was something he could sympathize with. There was something abnormal about Karpinski’s bowels. Breeson had partnered with him for a couple months once and the car would smell so bad you had to drive with the windows open in January. The whole time, Karpinski would be grinning like a little boy, lifting his leg and letting ‘em rip. “Hoo! There’s one for you!” or “Here’s a kiss for you, Breeson!” or “Christ, if that one would’ve had legs, it woulda walked right out of my asshole!” and “That one don’t smell like roses, now do it?” On and on and on. When Joey Hill had gotten killed over in Crandon in the line of duty, Breeson had been selected to be part of the honor guard at the graveside service. Karpinski had, too. There they stood with their dress uniforms on and white gloves, everyone crying and just losing it because they’d all loved old Joey. Whole time, Karpinski is cracking ‘em off. When the honor guard had raised their rifles to fire a three-shot salute, Karpinski had timed the rifle shots with the shots coming out of his ass. It was embarrassing. Breeson didn’t figure anyone there hadn’t smelled those vile bean farts Karpinski had launched.

“It’s not natural for a guy to be doing that,” Soper said, maybe louder than he intended.

“Shut the hell up back there!” Rhymes said and this time he wasn’t fooling around.

The hound was acting funny all of sudden. Kleets was having a hell of a time with him. He’d start this way, then that, turn in a circle, stop dead. Right now, his nose was low to the ground and his hackles were raised. He was growling low in his throat. He was scenting something and he wasn’t liking it much.

Breeson just stood there, trying to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He had to lick rain off his lips to get it to work. The air out at the graveyard smelled dank and wet like run-off from a subterranean pipe, but now it seemed to be getting worse. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but now he was thinking it smelled oddly organic. Like growing things. A smell that had no business in a chill September boneyard.

A hot, germinating sort of stink.

Like rising yeast and moist fungi and sporing things…

18

“C’mon, boy,” Kleets said. “C’mon.”

The dog started moving again, pushing between two headstones and leading them around the side of a mossy crypt that was so old it seemed to be sinking into the earth. He started acting really funny again. Starting and stopping. Yelping and straining at his leash. Kleets was trying to calm him, but it wasn’t doing much good. Rhymes was on his walkie-talkie, checking in with the other units. His voice had a very somber tone to it that Breeson had never heard before. Like maybe he was expecting something to happen any time now and it wasn’t going to be a good thing. Van Ibes’s voice coming through the handset sounded about the same.

“Something funny going on here,” Soper said.

“Knock it off,” Kerr told him.

“Sure, if you say.”

But Breeson was feeling it, too. He didn’t know if it was this black, wet night in the cemetery or that hound acting all jittery, but he was feeling very tense all of sudden. The flesh at his belly just crawling in waves. He kept looking around like he was expecting to see something horrible come slinking out between the graves, something with yellow eyes and big teeth. He thought if someone would have sneaked up behind him and tapped his shoulder, he would have jumped a foot. The graves. The rain. That clinging mist. Man, it made the cemetery look like a set from an old horror movie. Now and again, he caught sight of one of the other squads, their flashlight beams scanning around, their muffled voices carried by the wind.

Kleets got the hound moving, but the dog fought him all the way.

“See the way he’s acting?” Soper said. “Dogs can sense things we can’t. I had a dog once that?”

“Shut up,” Kerr told him again.

And they were all feeling it, Breeson knew, same thing the hound had been picking up on for some time now. The sense that something was very wrong here. That if the graveyard was a puzzle, that suddenly the pieces were not fitting together so good anymore. The atmosphere seemed swollen with dread.

They moved on, the hound shaking now. The ground was just soft muck and their boots sank right into it. All you could hear was the water dripping and the dog growling and boots being drawn from the mud.

The hound stopped before a flooded grave that sat in a little low dip. The water had spread out and consumed three or four other graves. Looked like a little fish pond, dead leaves floating on its surface. The hound was smelling something there. He sniffed the water and then jumped back like something had nipped at him. He froze up in a straight line, one forepaw extended like a pointer and his tail straight as a poker. A low whining came from his throat. Kleets yanked him away and the dog took off fast, leading them on a merry chase through a series of graves. Then he started to snarl and fight, snapping at the leash, his own tail, and even Kleets. There was a row of hedges before them. High enough so that you could not see over them.

“Hell is wrong with that mutt?” Rhymes wanted to know.

They stood around again, sensing something but not knowing what. Rhymes got on his walkie-talkie and his voice was practically a whisper. Everyone played their lights around. Nothing to see but those high hedges sparkling with raindrops, tombstones and gnarled looking trees.

“We just gonna stand here?”

“Shut the hell up,” Breeson told Soper this time.

They were all listening and listening hard. They were hearing something, but they did not know what: a sodden, slippery sort of sound like wet snakes coiling around each other in a ball. Slithering, undulant. And something beneath it like a muted hissing, the sort of sound a radiator makes as it cools in the summertime.

The dog took off and Kleets with it.

Around the hedgerow they went and so fast that Kleets could barely stay on his feet. Rhymes and the others followed suit, running through that muck and the pools of standing water. Through patches of mist, around burial vaults plastered with wet leaves and…and that was as far as they got.

“Jesus Christ,” Soper said.

They were all seeing it and to a man, they weren’t sure what it was. Not really. For the cemetery before them and as far as their lights could reach was alive. It was growing and pulsing and blooming. Snotty strands of some white morbid fungi were growing right up from the saturated ground in a great webby growth of pale tissue that was moving and coiling, shining like oil. The gravestones and markers and obelisks were consumed by a pulsating, slithering plexus of living material that reached from the ground and right up into the trees. It was threaded from branches to monuments in sheer plaits and heaving tarps. All of it viscidly alive and smelling of putrescence.

The hound took off running in the opposite direction and Kleets did not try to stop him.

“People,” Soper said. “Growing…like people.”

And that’s what it looked like. For sprouting like buds from that network of fungi were dozens and dozens of faces…men, women, children, terribly white and distorted, unformed like the faces of fetuses. Embryonic. Not only that, but winding loops of tissue and things that were trying to become limbs. Breeson saw hands erupting from a womb of fungi. You could see the impressions of fingers pressing against the membranous material and then the skin ruptured like a hymen, the hands bursting free like they had just been born. And not just one hand, but ten and then twenty, many of them blossoming from the same bulb. Hands growing upon hands growing upon hands.

“What…what kind of fucking freakshow is this?” Rhymes wanted to know, his voice filled with desperation and disgust.

The others said nothing. What could be said?

Arms were snaking free, chalky and mottled. Long exaggerated fingers splaying out, webbed together, but wriggling and alive. Solid masses that might have been bodies eventually…some even had the mounds of female breasts. And heads, of course. More all the time. Sometimes singly, but often three or more heads joined together or a single head with more than one face. And in one particularly gruesome instance, there was a rising, knobby pillar set with dozens of screaming faces piled one atop another like carvings on a totem pole, individual faces and faces melting into other faces.

And what was the very worst thing was that this was not some mindless, freakish growth.

For that entire network was getting excited at the arrival of the cops. It was undulating and creeping, spreading out, multiplying. More faces bursting free. More clutching, deformed hands. Things twitching and writhing and emerging. Yes, it was all reacting to their arrival and the faces, though they lacked eyes and had only hollows where eyes might be placed, were looking at them, heads craning on rubbery necks to get a look at them. Faces pushing out of gelatinous masses with horrible juicy sounds, mouths opening and closing like they were trying to breathe.

Soper ran off and Kleets did, too. They all heard them splashing away and who could really blame them? Because this, this was an atrocity. Whatever that oozing, shifting cobweb of flesh really was, there was no getting around what it was trying to be. It must have started germinating far below in those buried coffins, perhaps, filling them with degenerate life, feeding on the raw materials of the bodies down there, absorbing them like colonies of pale toadstools. Then bursting free from those boxes and growing through the soil in a fleshy white mass like some hungry cancer, an intricate system of rootlets, becoming an immense fruiting body that drained the charnel earth of grim nourishment before erupting from the waterlogged ground as a whole and giving flower. And now it was above ground, covering the earth and stones and bushes and crawling right up the trees in an unbroken circuitry of excrescence. Imitating what had given it life, crudely replicating what it found in those caskets far below.

Yes, Breeson knew, that was exactly what had happened. What was bringing the dead back in this city had now resurrected an entire cemetery. The knowledge of this made him want to drop to his knees and cry.

Everything out there was moving and worming, boiling with pestilent life, limbs reaching and hands fluttering and faces opening like crypt orchids. Mouths were opening and shutting, things like colorless tongues licking spongy lips.

“Get out of here!” Rhymes suddenly said, shocking them all out of it. “Now! Get the hell out of here!”

The web of flesh was agitated now, everything squirming and stretching, faces popping from central masses like bubbles. There were hissing sounds and slithering noises, the sound of that fungi in motion as it began to really move, spreading out in the direction of the men themselves. Contorted mouths opened and screamed with agonized voices. The voices of men and women and children, but shrill and piercing, or low and clotted. A wall of noise that masked the movement of the fungi itself.

The ground began to tremble.

Trees began to shake and stones began to tumble over. Men cried out and the cemetery earth rumbled like an empty belly. Great rents opened everywhere, headstones falling into the earth, trees falling over and the ground itself vibrating like an earth tremor was sweeping through it. Limbs fell from the oaks overhead. Mausoleums shook and swayed, many of them crumbling into heaps of shattered concrete. The men tried to find their feet, but were thrown to the ground, into each other, tossed over the heaving earth. That fungi was whipped into a wild agitation, creeping in every direction, it seemed, multiplying itself. Something white and lashing like a tentacle yanked Rhymes screaming into the night. Chasms were opening everywhere as the skin of the graveyard simply sheared open in dozens of places.

And it was surely not from any seismic activity.

Breeson, stumbling along, avoiding falling trees and tipping monuments, saw clearly what it was all about. That horrible fungi was the cause. For it was like an iceberg in its own way: what you saw above the surface was just a fraction of its total volume. And now the rest of it was coming up, unearthing itself, tearing itself up by flaccid white roots. It vomited from the split earth like some seething, steaming infection in mounds and pustules. A heaving mass of noxious gray-white jelly that was veined purple and red and blue, faces and forms and limbs swimming up out of the tissue, hundreds of bulging pink eyes opening.

Breeson saw Kerr fall into a pit of that rising flesh, heard the mucky, slopping sounds as he sank into it.

All across the cemetery, men were screaming and crying out for help and begging for mercy. Five or six cops came running in his direction and were literally swallowed alive by what oozed from the ground.

In the end, it was only Breeson who made it to the front gates, the graveyard alive and roiling and consuming behind him. And by then, of course, he was completely out of his mind, happily so.

19

“At first, it’s only a sliding and a dragging…a creeping noise coming out of the woods at you,” Cal Woltrip said to the children gathered in the shadowy bus. “But you can feel it getting closer, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And by then, heh, heh, it’s too late, far too late. For the thing has found you, the thing is coming closer and closer?”

“Just stop it,” Tara Boyle said.

“?and you can’t run, you can’t hide. You can only scream as it drops down out of the dark and winds around your throat, squeezing and sucking your brain out.”

His brother Kyle giggled. “Yeah, you can hear it sucking your brains out.”

“What is it?” Alicia Kroll wanted to know. “What does it look like?”

Cal laughed like a horror movie host: “Heh, heh, heh.” He was holding one of the flashlights under his chin so that his face was mired in shifting shadow. “It looks like a brain…a living, crawling brain with a spinal cord that’s like a tail. That’s what it wraps around your neck…that’s what holds you while it sucks the brain out of your skull…”

“Oh, gross,” Lacee Hendersen said.

“That’s stupid,” Chuck Bittner said, which was pretty much what he said about anything unless he came up with it.

Kyle looked at him. “You’re a fag just like your dad.”

“Shut up!”

“Homo.”

Bobby Luce held up his hands. “Okay, okay, everybody stop it!”

Kayla Summers began to whimper.

“Oh, boy,” Alicia Kroll said, “here we go again.”

Bobby Luce sighed. How was he supposed to reign in this bunch? True, Mr. Reed had placed him in charge of them while he went to look for help, but that didn’t exactly mean he wanted to be in charge. Mr. Reed had been gone for like two hours now and the natives were getting restless. Half of them wanted to leave the bus and find their own help and the other half wanted to stay. If it wasn’t Kyle and Cal Woltrip telling stories about psychopaths with chainsaws and brain-sucking monstrosities, then it was Chuck Bittner threatening them all with his father or Kayla Summers bursting into tears and Tara Boyle whining about everything. The others weren’t so bad, but they were all getting nervous and agitated and maybe more than a little scared.

And it was scary.

Bobby Luce, despite his eleven years, had inherited the practicality and rock-solid nerve of his parents. He did not scare easily. Even if something in a horror movie or horror comic occasionally freaked him out, he understood very well the dividing line between fantasy and reality. That line was very hard-etched in his mind. But even with his adult logic and common sense, this entire situation of being trapped in a bus in the pitch black in a flooded section of town…well, it was more than a little overwhelming.

The power had gone out now and Bethany was dark as a midnight cellar, that rain falling and falling. Sometimes light, sometimes very heavy, but always there. And like the others, all of it was getting on his nerves.

But what can I do? he wondered. I have to keep everyone here. Mr. Reed put me in charge and that means I’m responsible. I can’t let anyone leave and if they stay, I can’t let them claw each other’s eyes out.

It was a hell of a situation.

Sure, they were supposed to be a team, they were supposed to work together. Fairstreet Flyers, one for all and all for one. But that barely held water on the field during a game, let alone in the real world. Bobby wished Coach Costigan were there. She always seemed to have a pep talk for every eventuality and when that didn’t work, well, she had one hell of a temper, too.

Sighing, he shut off his flashlight.

They only had the two and they wouldn’t last forever. There were fifteen of them waiting in that bus and most were just sulking now, not saying a thing and Bobby wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. God, what was taking Mr. Reed so damn long?

“Cal,” Bobby said. “Turn that flashlight off. No sense wasting those batteries.”

“Okay, Chief.”

The light went off without an argument. Bobby was suspicious right away. Cal and Kyle weren’t as bad as some of the others, but they could be trouble. And Bobby was suspecting trouble when Cal didn’t even argue with him about the light.

“Probably a good idea,” Cal said. “You never know who might be out there.”

Oh, boy.

Kyle giggled as he always did. “Sure, out in the storm…you don’t know what’s out there. Some lunatic might see our lights and come to investigate.”

“He might have a knife,” Cal said.

“Or an axe,” his brother speculated.

“And he might be hungry. He might want something to eat,” Cal said, his voice dropping a few octaves into its horror host tone again. “I wonder who he is?”

“Some guy that escaped from a mental hospital,” Kyle decided. “Sure, he’s wandering out in the storm. He can probably smell us. And when he smells us, he’s gonna get hungry.”

Cal nodded. “And when he gets hungry, he’s gonna remember that butcher knife in his pocket.”

“Or that bloody axe in his hand.”

“Yeah, and he’s gonna want some meat. Some meat to chop up, red and bloody meat that he can stuff in his mouth. He likes the taste of it. It reminds him of all those kids he ate before they put him away.”

Bobby said, “C’mon already, will you two quit it?”

“And when he’s done eating us, he’s gonna want some souvenirs. Maybe a heart or a skull or something he can stuff in his pocket and chew on?”

“Stop it,” Bobby told the both of them.

Kayla Summers was crying again and a few other kids were fighting back sobs.

“Why don’t you two grow up already?” Lacee Henderson said, getting a little tired of talking Kayla down every time the Woltrip brothers got her all worked up again.

“He’s not coming back,” Tara Boyle said. “Mr. Reed.”

“Sure he is,” Bobby told her.

“But he’s not. If he was, then he would have been back by now.”

“That’s right,” Chuck Bittner said. “I think we should just walk out of here. It’s stupid to wait like this.”

And pretty soon they were all voicing their opinions and what was Bobby to do? He was bigger than the others, so he could probably physically stop a few of them, but not all of them. It just wasn’t possible.

As the other kids argued back and forth, Lacee and Alicia and Kayla were the only ones for staying put. Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the rain and felt the darkness closing in around them, imagining it to be some malefic fist that would crush the bus to a pulp. It was crazy thinking and not the sort that Bobby indulged in much, but the image presented itself and some morbid streak in his mind liked it, decided it was the perfect thing to torment him with. He tried to shake it out of his head, but it clung there as the worst things always seemed to. Maybe it was this waiting and maybe it was the Woltrip brothers with those terrible stories, but Bobby was frightened. He wasn’t sure of what exactly, but the fear was there: thick and unreasoning and complete.

C’mon, you idiot! You’re not afraid of the dark and the oogie-boogie man now are you?

But at that moment?which, although he was not aware of it, was a defining moment in his young life?he could not honestly say that he did not believe in spooks and spirits and creeping nightmares. God, it was so awfully dark in that bus, your mind just got carried away. Nothing but the sound of all those kids breathing or maybe not breathing at all, just holding their breath and waiting, waiting for something to happen…

And suddenly, with that in mind, Bobby became aware of the fact that nobody was talking.

It was dead silent in the bus.

The Woltrip brothers were not trying to scare the pants off anyone. Chuck Bittner was not bragging about his old man’s money. Tara Boyle was not whining. And, above all, Kayla Summers was not even crying.

There was a tenseness in the bus, an almost electric sense of foreboding like everyone was trying to keep quiet so that maybe if there was someone or something out there, they would not hear them, would not be able to zero in on them. Bobby swallowed. Then swallowed again. It wasn’t just him now. They were all feeling it. Like maybe they were not alone after all. That maybe something really was out there, something hungry and patient and incalculably evil.

Stop it! he told himself.

But he couldn’t.

His guts were tangled in knots and there was sweat beading his brow. Something was happening or about to and he could feel it. Really feel it. A palpable sense of dread, of doom. Though the rain was coming down at a steady rate, he thought he could hear splashing sounds outside. He looked to the windows, but they were speckled with raindrops and beyond them, God, it was miserably dark, unfathomably dark like the inside of a buried coffin.

“I’m scared,” Tara Boyle said.

“Shut up,” Lacee told her. “Be quiet.”

Bobby was thinking weapons now. If there was someone or some thing out there, then how would they defend themselves? For he could feel it right from his balls up to his throat, that inexplicable sense of danger. And more than that, the unshakable feeling that there was someone out there, people maybe, gathering around the bus like jagged-toothed sharks gathering around a sinking ship or buzzards circling a dying man.

There was a sudden thudding sound against the side of the bus and somebody let go with a strangled little cry.

“Who did that?” Bobby said.

But there were no answers. Just those faces barely visible in the gloom.

“Kyle? Cal?”

“No,” Cal said. “It wasn’t us. It came…it came from outside.”

And Bobby believed him, even though he wished it weren’t true. Maybe at any other time he would have been thinking that it was just Mr. Reed coming back with help, but he knew better. This was no help arriving, it was something else entirely.

There was another thud.

Bobby felt Lacee grab his arm and Alicia grab the other one. Something was rattling fiercely in his chest and it took him a moment to realize that it was his own heart. The girls’ hands on him were gripping him so tightly he thought they would snap his arms.

And then outside…a sliding, dragging sound like somebody was pulling themselves along the length of the bus. And on the other side, another thud…then a screeching sound like nails were being dragged along the outside panels.

Kayla Summers said, “It’s…it’s those brain-eating things.”

“Shut up,” Kyle told her. “That was just a movie…”

The tenseness held, was welded into place much as the bodies it came from. Finally, the Fairstreet Flyers were a team…one mind and one body. They were locked together, holding onto one another for dear life. They didn’t know why exactly, but they understood the sudden necessity of it.

Bobby wrenched himself free of the hands on him, knowing that somebody had to do something, somebody had to break this spell before everyone just lost it and started screaming. It was like being in a darkened movie theater, knowing something horrible was about to happen up on the screen. Or being in one of those carnival Halloween spookhouses, walking down a dim corridor and knowing that someone was about to reach out and grab you…

Bobby took hold of the flashlight, his hand shaking. He brought it up and turned it on. The beam of light was absolutely blinding and the moment his eyes adjusted to it, Bobby wished he’d left it off.

Maybe the dark was better.

Because in the dark you could not see those pallid faces peering in through the windows. Those starkly white faces set off by huge, glistening black eyes that were simply empty and dead.

Somebody screamed.

Bobby turned the light off.

There was a sudden knocking at the bifold door. At first just a gentle rapping, then a pounding and finally a hammering.

Whoever those people were, they wanted in.

Suddenly, a million hands were thudding against the outside of the bus, others beating against the door. Fingers scraping against the glass and faces pressed against those windows, hollow-eyed and pulpy.

The kids were crying out, screaming. Some were praying.

But Bobby heard none of it.

Because he was looking at the windshield up in the cab. There was something crawling up it he first took to be a giant, leggy spider. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see what it was quite plainly.

A disembodied hand.

It was pale and bloated, the fingers pulling it up the windshield, leaving a slimy trail behind it.

Bobby didn’t hold off any longer: he screamed.

20

A few minutes after they entered the cemetery, Henry T. Oates came to the shocking realization that not only were they fucked here, but that in this particular violation, there would certainly be no flowers or soft kisses in the dark. Not so much as a heart-shaped box of candy. No, this definitely was of the grab-your-ankles-and- grit-your-teeth variety.

Neiderhauser, God bless him, was still whining. “Sarge…I’m serious here…this is crazy. To hell with Hopper and Torrio. Piss on ‘em, we need back up.”

“I’ll let you know when you need back up, sunshine,” Oates told him.

They were drifting through the black water of a cemetery that Neiderhauser said had to be All Saints. Which was all and fine in Oates way of thinking. Not that that pearl did them much good. When you went to meet your maker, didn’t matter whether it was a bayonet or a Russian knife that sent you there; you were going all the same. And right then, Oates figured it didn’t much matter the name of this particular boneyard, because the shit was about to get deep.

Neiderhauser had killed the engine so Oates could get his senses stoked up and hot, maybe tell him just what was going on here. Just after they got into the cemetery, trying to catch up with Hopper’s boat, there’d been a booming sound like an impact somewhere out there, which made Oates think that Hopper and his band of merry men had smacked into something and flipped over. Course, over the sound of the Johnson pump jet engine at full rev, it was hard to say.

“Back there,” Neiderhauser said. “Those things in the water…they were?”

“Unfriendlies,” Oates said. “That’s what they were and that’s how we’ll log it.”

Nobody argued with him and that was a good thing, for he surely wasn’t in the mood for it. They’d lost the second boat back in the alley along with four boys. Now that wasn’t just bad, it flat out stank. And now maybe they’d lost Hopper and Torrio, too. Oates wasn’t liking this. This whole op wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a fairly simple search-and-rescue, nothing more.

But now it had become anything but.

Oates had seen those things in the alley, too. He had seen what they looked like and it had scared him as bad as the others. Those…individuals, how could you classify them? Not as men and women surely. They looked like they’d crawled out of a mass grave, were in search of a few spare body bags.

You can try and be cute and sassy about those things all you want, Oates told himself, but they were all dead, the walking dead, goddamn?

“Zombies,” Neiderhauser said. “Zombies.”

“That’ll do,” Oates warned him, wiping a mist of rain from his face. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

Hinks hadn’t said a word since the incident in the alley. As if the very horror of all that had completely shut something down in him, had emptied him. He was just a shell with staring eyes. Maybe he was in shock and maybe he had lost his mind. Either way, Oates just didn’t have the time to babysit him. Not now.

Knowing procedure, Oates had radioed it all in. But the captain told him to stay and look for survivors and under no condition abandon his people out there. So that was that and now here they were.

But it was no easy bit.

Even without the fear that was worming up his asshole like an unfriendly finger, this was a mess. For maybe All Saints boneyard made some sort of sense when you were walking its roads and following its paths, but when there was a good six or seven feet of water covering it up, well it was a maze. All around them were trees?thick boles like pillars, branches spreading out above in a nearly unbroken weave and stout limbs rising from the soup. And in-between, the tips of tall monuments and the peaked roofs of burial vaults jutting up. Yeah, it was a maze, all right. The water was turgid and oily, a foul steam rising from it, lots of things bobbing and drifting just under the surface.

It was positively claustrophobic.

It reminded Oates of a mangrove swamp he’d spent two days in down in Brazil as part of a survival exercise years back. It was dark like that swamp, stank like that swamp, and gave him that same feeling of vulnerability…the sense that there were terrible things out there, watching him, things he would never see until they jumped out of the darkness at him.

Neiderhauser was terrified.

His constant bitching and complaining had an edge to it now that made you think he was teetering, that if he fell all the way, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would never put him back together again. Sure, fear. Ugly, simmering fear. It was in all of them now.

And there was nothing Oates could say to change it.

What they had seen back in that alley, well, it was not the sort of thing you could just turn away from. It was the sort of thing that got down inside your mind, crouched in the darkness there.

“All right,” Oates said, “let’s get this done. Grab those oars, you poo-nanny sonosofbitches, and take us around that stand of trees.”

Again, they did not argue. Hinks and Neiderhauser sets their weapons aside and took hold of the oars, pushed them forward. The branches of the trees rose up jagged and skeletal, looked sharp enough to impale a man.

They came around, skirted the oval top of an obelisk, and thudded right into something. It was a box, long and narrow and covered with leaves.

“A coffin,” Neiderhauser said.

And it was. It bumped past them and they all fell as silent as Hinks. The wan moonlight reflected off its tarnished brass handles, falling rain speckled its surface. Oates knew that when a graveyard was inundated for days upon days, sometimes the soil just dissolved into a muddy silt and what was under it tended to rise to the surface.

“There’s another one,” Neiderhauser said.

Oates was on the spotlight and he picked out two or three others, one of them completely rotted. More a collection of sticks than anything else. Rotted cerements trailed out into the water like confetti.

He could almost feel that communal terror rising in his men again and maybe himself, too. The shadows and rain and stink…and now floating coffins. Jesus.

“Well, hang my cock from the sour apple tree,” Oates said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

Hinks and Neiderhauser worked the oars again as Oates got on the bullhorn and called out for Hopper and Torrio. His voice echoed out through the flooded graveyard, coming back at him with a whispering sibilance as if a dozen voices out there were mocking him.

He kept working the spot, the beam of light glancing off floating coffins and the greasy surface of the water, picking out a few high headstones and imbuing them with a moonish phosphorescence. That awful, fetid fog rose from the water, the light barely cutting it. Weird shadows and half-glimpsed shapes darted through the gloom. Things splashed and the water rippled.

Oates panned the light around and picked out a lone figure standing atop the flat roof of a sepulcher.

“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.

Oates put the light on it and he thought it was a woman. At least…once she had been. The light glanced off her and she was a blackened, twisted thing, draped in trailing rags that might have been her burial robes or what remained of her flesh, but probably both. Oates pulled the light away from her, something clenching tight in his belly. The rain had subsided to a chill drizzle and the moon chose that moment to break briefly through, bathing that figure in a cold white light. Standing there, unmoving, framed in moonlight broken by the reaching tree limbs overhead, the fog rising up all around her, she looked like some cadaverous prophet touched by the light of heaven.

But she was no prophet and there was certainly nothing heavenly about her.

She was a dead thing, ragged and rotten and emaciated, her face white as a gravestone, punched through with the black holes of her eyes and a crooked, grinning mouth. A dark sap ran like blood from her lips, moonlight reflected off the rungs of her exposed ribs.

Hinks made a gagging sound.

“Well, fuck this,” Oates said, bringing up his M-16 and opening up on that spectral figure on full auto. He hit her dead on, nary a stray bullet buzzing off into the night. The effect was instantaneous. As the rounds chewed into her, she jerked and shuddered, but did not go down. Then she simply exploded, burst open like a jellyfish, spraying black filth over the top of the roof. Whatever that stuff was, it glistened and oozed like marsh slime.

The sudden, invasive stench of putrefaction was nauseating.

Neiderhauser vomited. Right down the front of his rainslicker.

And then the water began to stir, slopping and splashing with unseen motion from beneath. Bubbles began to break the surface all around them, thick and gelatinous things. The water roiled and agitated, rolling with tumid waves that slapped up against the boat. There was an eruption of wet leaves and stinking water and a coffin broke the surface a few feet away. Then another and another. One struck the boat from below almost spilling them all into the drink. It scraped along the bottom with a muted squeaking sound and then worked its way free, jumping from the water and standing straight up before falling back over.

Hinks cried out and took up his M-16.

He began firing into the water, drilling rounds into that slop and into caskets. Just beneath the surface there were faces, white and eyeless things, slowly rising like bubbles. One after the other they came up, silt running from their eye sockets and black bile from their mouths. Some were recent interments, fleshy and puckered; others were wraiths and scarecrows, Halloween skeletons trimmed out in tattered hides, their faces leathery and seamed.

Neiderhauser started shooting, too.

Oates didn’t.

Not right away. The absurdity and hopelessness of waltzing into this horror story just sapped the strength from him. He had seen his share of scary flicks, but never once had he seen a character just lose it and burst out into hysterical laughter…right then, though, that’s exactly what he felt like doing.

But then as spidery arms clawed over the lip of the boat, the humor dried up in him and he started shooting. Not that it seemed to do much good. Some of them exploded like the woman and some of them were just shattered apart by the bullets. Two of them came up into the boat, grasping Hinks by the ankles and he emptied his magazine right into them, popping quite a few air chambers in the process.

And then he screamed.

Sure, he’d been silent and devastated for awhile, but now it was all coming out. Boiling out like poison. A ripping, reeling, wailing scream like his mind had decided to purge itself in one fell swoop. It was high and insane. More pale arms looped up into the boat, clutching hands grabbing him and he fell to his knees, shaking and screaming.

Neiderhauser fell away from him, blocking Oates’ line of fire. Oates tried to shove him away, but Neiderhauser had just simply snapped. He clung to Oates, sobbing and whimpering, and would not let go regardless of what Oates did.

There had to be twenty or thirty living corpses in the water now, most of them surrounding the front of the boat, crawling right over the top of one another as they tried to get at Hinks. With all those reaching arms and clawing fingers it was as if a forest of deadwood was growing up over the bow of the boat. Hinks was almost lost beneath those white limbs and tearing hands.

Oates tossed Neiderhauser off him with a shove and opened up on the dead. He punched a lot of not-so pretty holes through them, scattered a lot of grave waste over the surface of the water, but that was about it.

Finally, he crawled over Neiderhauser and got the engine going.

As he did so, a teenage girl wormed up over the other dead ones and pulled Hinks to her like a lover. You could no longer hear his frantic screams over the hissing and howling of the undead. Her face was gray and fringed with mildew, her eyes black and shining and starkly translucent. She gripped his head with two pulpy hands, black juice running from her nostrils. Her stare was vacant and remorseless. Then her mouth expanded like the blowhole of a whale and she vomited a stream of black mucus right into his face. It was thick and viscous, hanging from his cheeks like snot.

And that was about all Oates saw.

He jerked the throttle and reversed the boat backwards, Hinks and his dead friends falling off the bow. They he worked the stick and brought the boat surging forward, bouncing off coffins and the tips of monuments and rotting faces. And then he had the engine at full boar and there wasn’t anything that could stop them. They crashed through the branches of trees and slammed against the roofs of vaults, knocked caskets out of the way and he could see the spiked tops of the gates. A single coffin floated past them, the lid opening and a thin, withered arm snaking out.

Neiderhauser was still screaming himself hoarse as they passed out of the cemetery.

And Oates, about to lose his mind, reached over and slapped him across the face.

“Don’t you fold on me,” he told him. “Don’t you dare fucking fold on me.”

21

It took what seemed hours to go just a few blocks.

When they said Witcham was flooding, they weren’t kidding. As Deke Ericksen moved through the inundated streets, he decided that “flooding” didn’t really cut it here, because Witcham wasn’t just flooding, it was goddamn sinking.

And somewhere out there, Chrissy Barron was maybe lost or worse.

Now he did not know that to be true, but somewhere in his guts he was convinced of it. He’d been over to her house twice now and she still hadn’t made it home. There was only her mother there, talking about dead people in drains and that was really something wasn’t it? Chrissy had been telling him that her mother had lost it ever since her twin sister Marlene killed herself and now Deke believed it completely.

The first time he’d gone over there, she’d freaked him out with all that talk and made him think of his dead kid brother Nicky. Something he did not want to be thinking about anymore than he already did. Especially with what had happened over at Hillside. He’d left there that afternoon, something black and disgusting bubbling up the bathroom drain upstairs and Lily downstairs talking to someone in the other bathroom.

Just bullshit, man, he told himself. You didn’t hear what you thought you heard. You couldn’t have. It was just Lily mimicking another voice.

But, despite the absurdity of dead people speaking through drains, he could not convince himself that Lily had faked it. Sure, she was off the deep end…but that voice, gurgling and wet, it had not sounded like Lily at all.

Deke pushed it from his mind.

He’d gone over there again before sundown and Chrissy was still gone, Mitch still out looking for her, and Lily had been…what? Too lucid, too calm for somebody that imagined dead people talking to her from drains. Deke hadn’t hung around. Something about Lily was eating a hole through him and he left right away.

He’d been canvassing the streets ever since.

It was a bad night. The rain still falling and the water still rising and now and again he’d hear a National Guard chopper overhead, but that was about it. The city not only sounded dead, it felt dead.

But maybe that was his imagination.

God knew, he was plenty keyed-up.

In some of the lower-lying areas of Crandon, the water had come right up to his chest and now with the power out and no lights to be had…well, it was just bad. Real bad. Deke kept feeling things bump into him and he could not see what they were. Could have been floating tires or bodies for all he knew.

He was wasting his time and he knew it.

The chances of finding Chrissy on foot were astronomical. She was probably holed up with Heather Sale or Lisa Bell. And if the phones had been working, it would have been easy enough to check.

Deke decided he had to give up looking, just head on home. The only thing that had kept him out this long was the certainty that Chrissy was out there and needed his help. But drowning out in the streets wasn’t going to help her any.

In his raincoat, the water up to his waist, he made for the higher areas of Crandon, away from River Town and the river itself.

He wished he’d given up earlier.

Because there was something infinitely claustrophobic about Witcham now. The flooding. The dark. The sounds you heard. He had his dad’s hunting knife with him. Something had told him it was best to be armed, so he’d taken the knife and now he had it out, all those sounds in the shadows getting to him.

He kept thinking about Lily Barron.

Those crazy things she’d been saying. Dead people down in the sewers. It made him think that all those sewers and even the Deep Tunnel System he’d told her about were connected with the streets drains all around him. Maybe he couldn’t see them, but those drains were everywhere and he knew it. They’d all backed up, flooding the streets with rainwater and probably sewage, too. Whatever had been down in that coveting, wet blackness, had been vomited up into the streets now. The idea of that chilled him. He kept picturing all those living dead people in the water around him. Sometimes he almost thought he could smell their rank stink and feel their lewd presence. Dead things that were monsters now…rotting and watery, but whose minds were sharp and lethal.

Stop it for chrissake.

Words to the wise. He kept on this way, they were going to have to commit him. Maybe he’d get to share a room with Lily. Again, that wasn’t nice, but he was feeling suddenly very uncharitable.

All of them we lost through the years, they just went below into that secret sea and that’s where they are now. All the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.

God, Lily was insane. She had to be.

But insane or not, it made him think of Nicky.

He’d loved that kid, but had never told him so or even realized it until the funeral. And by then it had been too late. They always say to tell the people you care about how much they mean to you…but who really does and who doesn’t wish they had when it’s too late? Nicky. Nicky-boy. A.K.A., The Drainage, Butt-Wienie, Pain-in-the-ass-little-shit-that-could-never-leave-me-alone.

Oh God, but it all hurt so much, remembering.

It made Deke think of the funeral. The memories were all distorted and surreal, like something reflected from sideshow mirrors, but they never let him go. Never. He remembered the room over at the Styer Funeral Home. All done up in cranberry velour and he’d overheard his Uncle Jake say that it looked like a French brothel in there and he hadn’t known what a brothel was then, but now he did. And it almost made him laugh. Almost.

He wished then as he wished probably every day since that he’d told Nicky that he’d loved him. But what would Nicky have said to something like that? Deke, you so cwazy, you a cwazy cat. Nicky had trouble with that R-sound and had been going through speech therapy for it. Something Deke had teased him about, of course. But isn’t that what big brothers did? Sure, they picked on their kid brothers, belittled them, made fun of them.

That’s what they did.

But surely they weren’t supposed to stand around in dusty, flower-smelling funeral homes and stare at their kid brothers lying in coffins. No, there was something criminal about that. Before Nicky’s funeral, Deke had known nothing of death. His grandparents had died before he was born and there’d never been any pets to teach him the realities of death. Death was like alien abduction or something equally as exotic…it was for other people. You heard about it, but you didn’t really believe it. Not really.

But then came the Styer Funeral home.

That perfectly awful cranberry room.

And Nicky lying in that little silver casket in his powder-gray burial suit and tie, hands folded primly over his belly. Deke could remember it all so vividly that sometimes he thought the memory was not real, but something manufactured by his fevered mind. Nicky had not looked like Nicky. He had looked fake, unreal. He had been compressed or sunken, as if death had taken something big out of him, something that had filled him and in its place they had inflated him with gas, then allowed him to deflate. They had rouged his cheeks to give him that boyish glow, but beneath Deke had seen something darker like maybe his flesh had gone purple or black. His lips were shrunken, his body like that of a waxen dummy that had been left out in the sun too long, allowed to melt and sink and thicken. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but what was in that casket that everybody cried over just looked absolutely phony.

It wasn’t until later that Deke had cried.

And then much later still, he’d began to have nightmares. He’d wake up in the dead of night certain something had come into the house, that something was standing darkly out in the hallway or maybe in the closet, just breathing. And he knew that something was Nicky, but Nicky come back from the dead, Nicky risen from the grave, stinking and dark and covered with dirt and worms. It got so bad that Deke had had to sleep with the light on for nearly six months. And even so, he’d come awake certain he could hear his brother breathing in the darkness outside the door or in his old room, playing with his toys, sitting there, moldering and falling apart, leafing through comic books or playing with plastic army men by pale moonlight. It was bad. And even with that light burning, he still had the dreams that he would wake from, certain Nicky had been standing over him as he slept, blowing foul grave breath in his face, clots of rank soil dropping from him.

And even now, eighteen months after the funeral, he still would dream of his brother. But not good and sweet and happy Nicky, but a fusty and vile thing that whispered from beneath the cellar stairs?

Okay, that was enough.

Deke wasn’t going there anymore.

He had to get a grip. Nicky was dead. It was tough and it was ugly, but that’s the way life was. Even at sixteen, Deke knew that. Yes, he loved his mom and dad, but he did not respect them. Could not respect what they had allowed Nicky’s death to do to them. And more than anything, he would not allow himself to become like them, things that should have been shoveled into the grave with his brother.

Deke was up on the sidewalk now.

The water was only up to his thighs and that was at least a little better. He had about four more blocks to go before he reached home and that was a damn long way in the darkness and water.

He hoped that Chrissy was safe, even though he suspected she was in trouble.

He rounded a corner with infinite slowness. He passed by a few dark, brooding houses and then saw one lit up by candles or lanterns. Someone was still alive down here in the low-lying areas of Crandon then. That was reassuring. He hadn’t seen anyone in hours and even then they’d been in the far distance…muted voices, the occasional sound of oars on a boat or a motor cutting through the drink.

Deke stopped.

Christ, he was tired.

Maybe I should go into that house, he thought, rest up for a couple minutes. They probably wouldn’t mind seeing me.

The front door was standing open.

Deke made his way up there, the house sitting on a low hill that brought it up out of the water and he desperately needed to get out of the water. He was beginning to feel like a frog, bloated and heavy and waterlogged. He moved up the walk, then up the porch steps. The water receded to around his feet and he felt heavy, ungainly.

In the house, the light was coming from the living room. He followed its glow, splashing along the carpet. The house smelled dank from all the rain, but it was nice in there. Water was dripping, but there was no rain in his face.

There was no one in there.

Even without looking farther than the living room, he knew the house was empty. The silence there was huge and echoing. Whoever had lit the lantern was gone now. It sat lone and forgotten on the mantel above the fireplace next to a bunch of framed photographs. Deke went over to look at those pictures, maybe he’d recognize someone.

Something shrilled and he jumped.

The phone.

It rang again.

But that wasn’t possible…the power was off. It couldn’t be ringing. Feeling disoriented, he stumbled over to where the phone sat on a desk. It just kept ringing and he stared dumbly at it.

This is totally psycho, dude, the power is out.

But maybe power had been restored to a few houses and maybe phones worked some other way. If that was so, he could call Heather Sale’s or Lisa Bell’s and find out about Chrissy.

He snatched it up on the seventh ring.

Slowly, with trembling hands, he brought it to his ear. There was air in his throat and he could not speak. Water dripped from him. On the other end, he could hear something.

Something like wind howling through low places.

Then a voice, clotted and congested said, “I’m coming, big bwother…wait for me…I’m coming…”

Nicky.

With a rasping scream, Deke dropped the receiver and fell onto his ass in the drenched carpet.

And still he could hear his brother’s high, screeching voice.

Laughing.

And laughing and laughing.

And another voice in Deke’s head told him, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.

Out in the streets, the wind howled.

22

Thing was, Lily did not ask why Mitch and Tommy came home carrying bags of salt under their arms. She just looked at them, smiled and accepted. And that probably wasn’t a good thing. Again, Mitch was struck by that weird mood she was in. She was acting like a little girl with a secret. A big, wonderful secret kept locked behind pressed lips. And Mitch just couldn’t bring himself to ask what that secret might be. As it was, she was giddy and happy and excited like she was waiting for something momentous to happen.

Oh, something might happen tonight, he found himself thinking, but I don’t think you’re going to like it, Lil.

The Zirblanksi twins were staying with them being that they still couldn’t find their parents. Mitch and Tommy had been over to their house three times and they still weren’t home.

“I don’t want you girls to be worrying,” Mitch told them. “Your mom and dad are probably holed up somewhere waiting this out.”

He wasn’t sure whether the twins believed him or not, but they seemed comfortable with the idea of staying at his house. And he supposed after Miriam Blake, the Addam’s Family would have seemed acceptable. Mitch hadn’t known the girls very well before any of this started. They’d grown up a few houses down Kneale Street, but he didn’t think he’d ever said much more than a simple hello to them his entire life, stuffed some candy into their plastic pumpkins on Halloween night and waved to them on the street. Of course, the twins had a reputation as hellions, something he knew was pretty much true.

But tonight, he was not seeing that.

Rita was very quiet for the most part, brooding sometimes, kept chewing her fingernails. Rhonda was the more outgoing of the two. She kept asking questions, wanting to help with things.

When Mitch and Tommy got back at sundown, or just after, Rhonda had said, “Why so much salt, Mr. Barron?”

Maybe Lily was too lost in her personal fog to care, but not Rhonda.

Mitch had to come up with a lie…and quick. “It’s for my ice cream maker,” he said, not entirely sure where that pearl of bullshit had come from. “You need lots of salt.”

That much was true. Mitch had gotten an ice cream maker for Christmas a few years before and it now sat on a high closet shelf gathering dust. But he’d read the instructions and you did need an awful lot of salt to make ice cream.

Rita brightened at the idea. “We’re going to make ice cream? Can we make strawberry?”

Mitch swallowed. “Um…well…”

Tommy knew he was lying, was enjoying how he squirmed. “Yeah, Mitch, I want some chocolate. Can we make rocky road, too?”

“I love rocky road,” Rhonda said.

Oh, Christ…now what?

The power was off and they were sitting around by candlelight and these kids wanted to make ice cream. You didn’t need electricity to make it, but you needed a freezer. Already, Rita and Rhonda had helped Lily move most of the perishables from the upstairs freezer to the floor freezer in the basement where it was cooler. They would last down there longer, but it probably wasn’t cold enough to store ice cream. But looking at those two girls with their big dark eyes and pretty faces, he could not tell them no. He supposed they could sacrifice one of the bags of salt. Tommy and he had brought home thirty pounds of the stuff and Lily?being Lily?already had a couple five pound bags in the pantry. Lily was like that…or had been…always stocking up when things went on sale. That’s why they had like twenty rolls of paper towels downstairs and enough toilet paper for ten years.

Lily said, “I think it would be fun to make ice cream, girls. When Chrissy gets home, she’ll want some.”

Mitch felt that like a knife in his chest. Still no Chrissy. He’d fed Lily some bullshit about her staying the night at the Sale’s house and Lily had accepted that. Maybe it was true. Maybe that’s where Chrissy indeed was. After all, Heather Sale’s dad said they had been there and would be back. Still, Mitch didn’t like not knowing where she was. Especially with the flooding…and other things.

In the kitchen, by the light of a Coleman lantern, Lily and the girls began assembling ingredients. At least it gave them something to do. And when she was busy, that funny light in Lily’s eyes didn’t burn so bright. Maybe this is what she needed: to keep busy. Maybe, maybe. But there was something there that Mitch did not like.

“I been thinking of all these lights we got going,” Tommy said after Mitch had delivered the ice cream maker to the girls. “You think…you think it’s a good idea to be burning them?”

Mitch didn’t know exactly.

In a way, he thought lights might bring in people that needed shelter and the more, the merrier tonight. But there was also the possibility that the lights might draw in those other…people out there. For surely, like it or not, they were out in the streets now. Mitch had been thinking about them a lot and not coming up with any good explanations for any of it. All the doors and windows were locked. They had Tommy’s four-ten and Mitch’s twenty-gauge Remington auto-loader that he used for hunting partridge in the fall, to go “a-grousing” as his old man had called it. Though it had been a few years since he’d been out bird hunting, he still had a full box of shells. So they had weapons, if it came down to it.

But would any of that be enough?

“I don’t know,” Mitch finally said, “but I figure we have to take a chance. It might be worse sitting in the dark with those kids.”

They had pulled Lily’s big conversion van out of the garage now and pulled in Tommy’s truck. He had a police scanner in there and that, at least, connected them with the world. The garage was attached, so they didn’t have to go outside.

While Tommy sat in the cab listening to the police chatter which was pretty hairy stuff?lost people and bodies, looting and shootings, accidents and people trapped in flooded buildings?he sat by the workbench and smoked, staring out the single rain-spattered window at the night beyond. He didn’t really know what any of this was about. He figured most didn’t, but there were a few out there who did. After seeing that living dead woman that the cops pulled from the drainage ditch, seeing that she wore the remains of military fatigues, Mitch had pretty much made up his mind that the explosion out at the Fort Providence base was all connected up with this. He didn’t know what they did out there, nobody really did, but they were involved. All this shit had come down after that explosion and although Mitch didn’t believe half the crazy stories circulating about that, there must have been a germ of truth in there somewhere.

The Army was saying it was fuel tank that exploded.

But Mitch was no longer buying that.

They had been working on something weird out there, must have been. The idea that the dead would start walking around on their own just didn’t wash. The Army were up to something fantastic out there and whatever that had been, it was out of control now. Maybe something in the rain. Mitch had spent four years in the Navy. That wasn’t exactly a career, but it was enough experience so that he knew the military were not exactly up front about their activities. And when they fucked-up, they rarely admitted such. No, Mitch was not much into conspiracies. He didn’t really think the military had captured flying saucers or anything, but they were no doubt involved in things equally as frightening.

This scenario pretty much proved that.

Mitch didn’t trust his own government any farther than he could throw them and he sure as hell did not trust the military. You put people in power and they invariably abused it. But even with that in mind, he doubted that any of this was meant to happen. No, it was an accident. Something went wrong, something got out of control.

But what exactly? What had they been doing at that base?

Tommy came over. “Mitch…it’s getting pretty wild out there.”

“No shit?”

“I’m serious here. There’s been some kind of riot out at Slayhoke, prisoners running wild. The National Guard are up there putting it down.”

“Jesus, just what we need right now.”

“And something else…there’s a bus load of kids missing,” Tommy said. “They were coming from a soccer match and now nobody can find that bus. But they figure it’s in town.”

“One tragedy after another.”

Tommy lit a cigarette. “You know what I was thinking?”

Mitch looked up at him.

“I was thinking about that witch, that old lady you took me to see.”

“Wanda Sepperly?”

Tommy nodded. “I don’t believe in any of that crap, but you got to admit that lady’s got something going on. She knows things. I bet she might know where that bus is and I bet she might know where Chrissy is.”

Mitch nodded, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe…maybe we should take a walk over there.”

“Maybe we should.”

Mitch nodded. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to tell me about some cousin of yours that was a witch.”

“What kind of family do you think we are?”

23

Next door to the Barron’s, as the idea of making ice cream was being tossed around, Arland Mattson came awake to the sound of invasion. He’d been snoozing in his recliner, feet atop a stool heaped with newspapers. He came awake slowly, dreaming about the sores on his chest and the pains he got down in his bowels sometimes. He opened his eyes, thinking he’d maybe heard a car backfire, but then right away he heard only the sound of the falling rain, the wind skirting the eaves.

Nothing more.

Right away, he became suspicious.

Arland had not necessarily been of sound mind since his wife Camille had been taken by cancer ten years previously. What had been a somewhat alarming trend towards suspicion and distrust while she was alive, had bloomed into a fully developed persecution complex by the time of the flooding of Witcham. Arland was extremely paranoid, was certain that the government were watching him and had planted listening devices in the walls of his house. He also believed that the pancreatic tumor that had killed his wife was not merely a matter of heredity or chance, but the result of something slipped into her food that was intended for him. And he knew that there were parasites living inside him, tiny insectlike creatures that were eating away his stomach, even if the doctor told him that such a thing was impossible. Neighbors like Mitch Barron had gotten used to the threats of frivolous lawsuits and the rampant conspiracies that Arland saw in everything from sudden changes in the weather to the questions asked by census takers, but they only saw small bite-sized portions of his dementia.

Had they seen more, they would have had him committed.

So when Arland came awake, he knew that his house had been invaded. Possibly by the things the rain had brought and possibly by government agents that had come to steal his water samples that he had taken from the rain.

Arland sat there in his chair, listening, knowing something had come into his house and right about then he began to smell it. Whatever it was, it stank dirty and flyblown.

Houses are very personal things.

They are the webs of our daily lives just as we are the spiders that inhabit them. And, like spiders, when something settles into our webs, we can feel the minute tugging of strands, the vibrations, the weight and physical impression intruders make. And this is what Arland was feeling. Though he was past eighty, terribly thin, and his vision was not so good, he could feel that sense of invasion just fine. The minute threads of his web had been touched, broken, torn asunder. Some weighty bluebottle fly or yellowjacket had landed and become ensnared in those fine filaments and he could feel the oscillations of their distress…or perhaps it was his own.

Lightly, he got to his feet and grabbed a butcher knife off the coffee table. His battery lantern was still glowing and he took this, too.

Arland was afraid, but he had suspected this for some time. It was only a matter of time before they came to silence him; he knew too much. They had no doubt hoped to kill him in his sleep, but he had thwarted their plans, had he not?

He walked out of the living room and into the hall.

The front door was open a few inches and this more than anything made something solidify in his belly. He always kept the door locked. But now it was open and what could that mean? Well, yes, they had picked the lock, of course. They knew how to do things like that. There was a hidden key outside, secreted beneath a loose brick on the porch, but even they would not have known that.

Only Arland did.

And Camille, of course. But Camille had been dead well over five years now. She’d been cremated over to the Harvest Hill crematorium.

Maybe he’d forgotten to lock it.

And then, he was suddenly certain that he had. And now somebody had come into the house in the dead of night.

Arland stood there with the knife, wishing then he had a gun. But he’d never gotten one because they had to be registered and that was just another way the government tracked you and fattened the file they kept on everyone.

There were wet footprints leading from the doorway and down the hall to the door that led to the cellar. Of course, that’s where they would go. Arland kept much of his material concerning their activities down in the cellar. He only hoped they would not touch his mason jars of rainwater, he needed those for his class action suit against them.

Breathing hard, a tightness at his chest, Arland followed those prints to the cellar door. The lantern threw jumping shadows all around him.

And a voice in his head told him, This is a job for a young man, not an old one.

But Arland dismissed that. He was up to this. Certainly, he was.

And that’s when he heard something shatter in the cellar.

One of his mason jars.

The crash was followed by another and another and another. They were destroying his specimens, that’s what they were doing.

He threw open the cellar door, the light casting flickering illumination. He saw prints leading down the steps, prints that were black and muddy. As he started down, a papery rustle in his chest, more jars shattered and as he got to the bottom of the steps, one was tossed at him out of the darkness, exploding against the wall a few inches from his head.

Arland started and slashed out with his knife.

Shadows.

Shadows creeping and crawling and oozing around him. The stink was worse down here, a musty odor of rotting vegetables kept in moist closets. It was almost unbearable. Like something dead and fruiting with mushrooms had come into the house. It made his eyes water and his stomach heave.

Another jar shattered against the wall and another.

A pain needling dead-center of his chest, Arland struggled forward and for the first time he was wondering if he was truly up to this. If maybe coming down here had not been a terrible mistake.

He could hear that other person…they were somewhere down in the webby, mazelike confines of the cellar and they moved with a wet, squishing sound as if they did not have feet as such, but were stepping about on bloated toadstools. Shaking badly now, he came around the furnace room and into the washroom where the dryer and washer were. His light reflected off shards of glass in the stationary tub. Dozens of bottles had been broken in there.

But as he moved forward, something sinking inside him, he saw a mason jar on the floor. Its lid was missing, but it was about half full. But not with rainwater, but with something yellow and sharp-smelling: urine.

Arland gasped, barely able to catch his breath now.

He held up his lantern and there was another mason jar a few feet away and another beyond it. Both were about half-filled with urine. There was no mistaking that gagging, foul odor, the ammonia-like sharpness of it. Somebody…somebody had broken his jars and then emptied the others out, filling them with piss. Yes, there were more jars ahead, they led like a trail right up to the door of the rec room.

Arland was suddenly terrified.

Because unless there were dozens of people, no single person could have put out that much urine. Nobody had that much water in them. Yet, he was still hearing those squishing sounds and he knew there was only one individual down here.

Okay, you fool old man, now what? Do you try and run or do you face what’s been doing this?

But Arland knew there was really no choice.

For if he tried to make it up the steps, he would feel the motion behind him, then cold white fingers at the back of his throat. Because this was not some mere prank, this was all done for his benefit. Just like that trail of jars was meant to lure him into the rec room like a trail of candy leading to a witch’s cottage.

There were things in life you knew and those you could never know.

And what was waiting for him in the rec room was definitely of the latter variety. It had come slinking in here to torment him. Something hideous that had perhaps went door to door up Kneale Street trying locks until he or she or it had found one unlatched.

You might as well have invited it in, he told himself. Something that wanted to get out of the rain and wind, something lonely looking for warmth and…companionship.

And what could that be?

What exactly could that be?

Because he was pretty certain it was not the government.

It was something else.

Arland went to the rec room door and heard a muted giggling in there. The sound of someone laughing into their hands. His throat dry and his heart hammering painfully, he pushed open the door.

He saw the pool table right away. There were three more jars sitting on it, all half-filled by this thing with an inexhaustible bladder. Oh, its smell was nauseating and it reminded him of barns filled with rotting hay and boxes packed with wet, decaying leaves. Nothing alive could carry such an odor, only something dead and gassy and blackened.

He heard that giggling again.

More pain threading through his chest, he brought the lantern around and the knife clattered from his hand. He could not say exactly what he saw, only that it was a great blubbery shape plastered with brown Autumn leaves. Its head was matted with strands of gray hair that fell over its distended face. Its flesh, what he could see of it through the leaves, was white and puckered, smeared with streaks of dark mud. And it was naked. The breasts were pendulous and thickly-veined with blue, the belly hanging in greasy rolls.

A woman…or something that had been one once.

She was squatting on the floor, giggling with a wet congested sound as she filled yet another mason jar with piss. All the while, making a droning sound that was oddly musical and maybe was supposed to be a happy humming.

Arland gasped.

The piss kept running.

The sound of that was awful, not just the sound of liquid squirting into that jar as from a spigot, but chunks and clots of something dropping in there as well as if the bladder itself was coming apart.

Oh, Christ, no, no…

Arland went down on his ass, pain exploding in his chest and his vision blurring. Darkness moved through his head in waves. But after a moment, his vision cleared.

He heard the woman get up, sounding like a bag of wet laundry shifting. She came over to him with those splatting footfalls and stood over him. She was swollen and ripe, water dripping from her. With one bloated hand, she held up the mason jar she had filled and dumped it over Arland’s head. The urine was cold and filled with bits of sediment and chunks of tissue. He vomited right away, trying to cry out the whole while.

The rancid thing stepped over him and he could see beneath that tangled hair and accumulation of leaves, that she had eyes…black, shining things, jellied and glistening like bubbles that wanted to pop. He saw a mouth, gray broken teeth licked by a black tongue.

She stood over him, filled with squirming things and larval activity, bits of her dropping away. Oily fluids and watery discharges ran from her and she kept smacking her lips.

When she spoke, it sounded like her mouth was filled with oatmeal. “Arland…let’s take some samples, eh? One more for our class action suit…that’s a boy…open your mouth…let me fill it for you…”

As Arland’s heart ruptured in his chest, he felt those flabby and greasy fingers yank his mouth open as she squatted over him, bringing the cancerous ruin of her green and undulant privates into his face. Humming happily, she drained her bladder into his mouth.

But by the time that gray, sludgy water overflowed his mouth, Arland was thankfully dead.

24

An hour after those things attacked the bus, Bobby Luce lost what control he’d had of the kids. Some wanted to leave and some wanted to stay and nothing he seemed to say could bring them together again. So much for team spirit. So much for the Fairstreet Flyers. Their camaraderie, if it had ever really existed, was now just dust in the wind and Bobby simply did not have enough hands to hold it together.

He was tired.

He was fed-up.

And, yes, he was scared.

Even now, a good hour after those things, those people, had tried to get into the bus, it was still on him as he imagined it was on the others: that deep-set, almost automatic fear that made him start whenever the wind picked up or something splashed. How could you put that business into context? How could you absorb that into your world-view and not come out of it with white streaks in your hair? Those people…there were other words for them he didn’t dare use…those people had not been normal. They had looked pale, waterlogged, like corpses pulled from rivers and lake bottoms. And yet, they had been alive…well, at least, they had moved. Because their eyes had not been what you might call alive…dead and shining and just empty, hollow.

And they had been deranged, psychotic, something.

They wanted in and Bobby refused to speculate as to why.

And then, of course, if all that wasn’t enough to kick your legs out from under you, there was always the hand. Because he’d seen it, that severed dead hand crawling up the windshield. And so had some of the others.

“They’re zombies,” Cal Woltrip said as if it was all too obvious. He had dropped the horror host voice now that the shit had been finally scared out of him and had adopted an almost clinical tone, like Van Helsing talking about vampires. “That’s what they are. They can’t be nothing else.”

Alicia Kroll just shook her. “Walking dead people? Oh, come on.”

“Yeah, as if,” Lacee Henderson said.

But if these two girls were the last bastions of reason, no one else dared to argue the point. They sat around in the darkness, sunk in their personal mires of terror, and just accepted.

“Zombies,” Kyle said. “Zombies.”

“You saw them,” his brother went on, “you saw what they looked like. You think normal people look like that? You think even crazy people have faces and eyes like that?”

Bobby opened his mouth to object, but what was the point?

“I’ve seen zombie movies,” Chuck Bittner said. “And they eat people. They come back to eat people.”

At which point, Kayla Summers started sobbing uncontrollably.

Bobby just sighed and buried his face in his hands, wondering if Kayla’s tear ducts ever ran dry.

“Oh, God, does she ever stop?” Tara Boyle said. “Wah, wah, wah, wah. I’m so sick of this bus and I’m so sick of that crying. God.”

“Shut up,” Alicia told her.

Lacee put her arm around Kayla. “Is this stupid crap necessary? Do we have to sit around and talk about zombies?”

“That’s what they are,” Cal pointed out.

“Lah-tee-dah,” Lacee said. “So what? What does it matter what they are? They’re creepy and flipped out and nutso. That’s all I need to know. And what makes you the authority, Mr. Know-It-All? Just because you’ve seen more dumb movies than anyone else?”

“They’re not dumb!” Kyle said, either defending his brother or zombies in general, it was hard to say.

Lacee laughed. “They are, too! I’ve seen those dumb movies, they’re totally lame! Zombies stumbling around like a bunch of retards! I’m so sure. Unless you’re really slow, stupid, or crippled, I think you could outrun them even if those morons in those movies can’t…”

Oh, dear Christ, she was insulting the Holy Grail here, pissing on the cross, taking a dump on the altar… to Kyle and Cal, zombie movies were everything. They were both zombie freaks, collected dvds and toys and comics and masks and you name it, had waded through the gory waters of Italian splatterfests, and could both openly quote from George Romero’s Dead Trilogy. It was a religion to them and you didn’t make fun of a man’s faith.

“You’re a dumb bitch!” Kyle told her. “Everybody knows you’re nothing but a dumb bitch! A slut! A sleezebag! A whore! A?”

“All right,” Bobby said. “That’ll do.”

Kyle had a horrible temper, but Bobby was pretty certain that Cal wanted to say pretty much the same things to Lacee. Although she was none of those things, still being in the fifth grade, it didn’t slow Cal down.

Lacee thought it was funny. “Cal, can you please restrain that little disease? He’s so gay.”

Kyle fought to get free, but Cal would not let him. Bobby figured if Kyle got loose, he would probably start swinging on Lacee. But whether the Woltrip brothers liked what Lacee said or not, she did have a point. Those zombies in those movies were not exactly known for their speed or grace. They were slow, drunken, dim-witted. He didn’t think that these things were of that variety.

“This is all dumb,” Chuck said. “You’re all dumb. And especially you, Kyle. You and your stupid, stupid, stupid zombies! I’m sick of it! I’m sick of all you assholes!”

Kyle started laughing, then singing: “Chuck is a friend of mine, he will blow me any time. For a nickel or a dime, fifty cents for overtime. If you have a credit card, he will blow you extra hard?”

Chuck dove at him and Kyle met him, the two of them swinging and kicking. Cal and Bobby broke them up. Both were panting and bleeding and just wild. It took about five minutes before they both quit swearing and calling each other names.

Finally, Tara said, “Let’s just go.”

Bobby said, “It’s not safe out there.”

“Well, it’s not safe in here, that’s for sure,” she pointed out.

And that’s how the team finally, ultimately broke up. Tara and Chuck, the Woltrip brothers, and six or seven others just got to their feet and made for the door. Bobby let them take one of the flashlights, but that was about it.

“And you guys are just going to stay?” Cal said.

Alicia nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’re all nuts,” Kyle said.

“Maybe,” Bobby told him, “but we’re not going to die out there like you guys.”

“No, you’re going to die in here.”

Bobby watched them go, knowing he couldn’t stop them. He took hold of the lever and opened the doors. And it was at that particular moment, in the light of Cal’s flashlight, that Bobby saw indecision on their faces, as if maybe they weren’t real sure this was the best idea after all.

“Cmon,” Cal said, stepping down into the water and the others followed one by one, complaining about how cold it was.

The water up to their chests, they all looked back up at Bobby. “Last chance,” he said.

They turned and waded off, Cal in the lead.

Bobby shut the door.

He never saw any of them again.

25

Well, contrary to popular belief?or that of one Sergeant Oates?Hopper, Liss, and Torrio were certainly not dead. Maybe what they were going through was not exactly balloons and funny hats, but they were certainly not dead. They’d passed right through All Saints Cemetery in their boat and had not collided with a thing. Not until Hopper brought them back around into the city proper and they’d hit a partially-submerged car. And that had sent all three of them ass over teakettle into the drink, left them scrambling in that dirty water with nothing but their rifles and the gear they carried on their backs: a few packs of MRE’s, some emergency flares, a couple extra magazines for their M-16s.

But that was about it.

Their boat flipped over, dumped them, and then magically righted itself as boats sometimes will do. Last they’d seen of it, it was making headway out into the darkness without them. And if that hadn’t been so unbelievably tragic, it might have actually been funny.

On foot, in the flooded byways of River Town. If there was humor in that, you’d have to dig pretty deep to find it. The only good thing was that they were unhurt and far enough into River Town so that the water was only about waist-deep…unless you happened to step in a pothole.

But what did any of it mean, really?

It meant that Hopper, being a corporal, was in charge of Torrio and Liss, both privates. It meant that he was responsible for them and that if anything untoward happened to their shiny white asses, the captain would eat him alive over it. Not to mention what that professional ballbuster, Sergeant Henry T. Oates, would do to him. Hopper wanted command like he wanted a third tit or a removable skull-cap. Maybe not even that much. Because with command came responsibility and he was not very good with that. At 21 years of age, Hopper had lost no less than three jobs in the last year and a half because he’d forgot to set his alarm. His mother still had to remind him to wear clean socks and if it hadn’t been for his sometimes girlfriend, Cathy Jo, he would no doubt never clean his apartment or even remember to get some food in his belly on a regular basis. He would have happily zoned out playing Cellcom or Grand Theft Auto on his X-Box, screw reality.

But now he was in charge.

And he wanted it even less than he’d ever suspected. Because there was shit coming down in this city that he did not like. There were dead people in the water, only they were moving and seriously pissed at the living. Yeah, it almost sounded like a video game, when you thought about it. And Hopper loved video games almost as much as he loved Cathy Jo giving him a blowjob…but he sure as hell did not want to live in one.

As they trudged through the flooded streets, rifles in hand, the stink of the water up their noses, he kept telling himself that they were alive and they were armed and that was the important thing. He was glad for that. Or almost. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if Liss had bought it when the boat flipped, because he was just psycho and things were bad enough without a guy like that around.

Right then, Liss was saying, “I should call my mom, you guys. She gets really mad when I’m late. I don’t want to get grounded again. God, last time I couldn’t even watch TV. She had me doing laundry. You believe that? I had to do laundry. Your moms ever make you do laundry?”

“Can’t you shut him up?” Torrio said.

“No, I can’t,” Hopper said.

Jesus, he felt sorry for the guy. Almost. Maybe a combination of pity and contempt, you came right down to it. Liss had been funny ever since he’d opened fire in that ballpark, said he’d seen someone, and Oates had jumped up and down on his ass like it was a trampoline. He’d snapped or something. Had some kind of breakdown. Ever since then he’d just been out of it. Hopper kind of felt sorry for him. At any other time he would have really felt sorry for him. But they were in a bind here. They were in a potentially dangerous situation and the last thing he needed on his first run with command was guy who’d lost it.

Liss kept talking about shit that made no sense and Torrio kept bitching about it and there was Hopper, right in the middle, trying to keep things level. Was this why Oates was so belligerent all the time? Because he was playing babysitter for a bunch of wanna-be soldiers and the irony of the situation made him run down himself, them, and the Army in general?

And all this time I thought he was just an asshole, Hopper thought.

The rain picked up a bit, stippling the stagnant water around them, beading their faces. Hopper was miserable and he figured that went for the other two as well…Torrio anyway, Liss probably thought he was at a Cub Scout meeting or something.

“So what’s our plan here?” Torrio said.

Hopper scanned the silent, sunken streets with his flashlight. Nothing but rain falling and debris floating, empty buildings to either side flowing with shadow. There were things in the water and they could have been just about anywhere. Waiting in the flooded darkness, ready to leap out at them with gnarled white fingers. Christ, it was ugly, it was tense. He figured maybe this is what it felt like being in a real war, people out there wanting to kill you. Or maybe being the survivor of a shipwreck and waiting for the sharks to show. He supposed the latter was more applicable.

“I said, what’s our plan here?” Torrio said again, raising his voice. It echoed off the silent buildings around them and that was more than a little disturbing.

Hopper sighed. Goddamn Torrio asked the same question every ten minutes or so. “Our plan is the same as it’s been since we went overboard, dumbass. We keep moving. We keep moving until we get to some dry ground. Until the water goes down.”

“Shit,” Torrio said. “I don’t know this city and neither do you. How the hell do we even know where we’re going?”

“I thought you said you knew Witcham?”

“I know the clubs by the University, dude. I never been way out here before.”

“Well, we just keep going. As long as the water doesn’t get deeper, we’re going in the right direction. It’s up to our waists, right? It starts going down, we’re getting there.”

“It’s been up to our waists for two hours.”

“Oh, quit whining.”

“Who’s whining?”

“You are.”

“Shit.”

Liss said, “This is like that time at Bear Lake. Remember that? It kept raining and raining and the river kept getting deeper and my dad said, it’s gonna flood, it’s gonna flood. God, we barely got out of there. Water was right up to the bottom of the bridge. It washed out an hour after we crossed it.”

“Oh, shut up,” Torrio said.

“Just ignore him already,” Hopper told him. “He’ll snap out of it. Right, Liss? You’ll snap out of it, won’t you?”

Liss nodded happily. “Yeah, sure I will. I’ll snap out of it.” He stopped, shrugged. “Snap out of what?”

Hopper almost started laughing. Again, if it hadn’t have been so unbearably tragic, it would have been funny. But there was nothing funny about where they were and what was waiting in the water for them.

26

“Something brushed my leg,” Torrio said about fifteen minutes later. And the way he said it, you could be pretty sure it wasn’t a stick. “You hear me? Something brushed my fucking leg!”

Liss, who had lost his rifle somewhere now, just stood there with that glazed look in his eyes, perhaps trying to recall a similar experience at Bear Lake.

“So you bumped into something,” Hopper said. “What of it?”

That’s what he said, trying to be very cool and breezy about it all, but deep inside something turned over in his guts and went belly up. He’d been waiting for something to happen, something bad, and he wondered if this was it. Because this was how it would start, he knew, with a suggestion of something.

“Don’t give me that,” Torrio said, scanning the stinking, oily water with his flashlight. “I didn’t bump into it, it bumped into me.”

Hopper sighed. He scanned the water with his light, too. A stick passed by in the turgid, almost nonexistent current. A few leaves. Then a fairly large dead bass from the river itself.

“One time at Bear Lake,” Liss said, “a painted turtle brushed against my sister’s leg when she was swimming and she screamed.”

This time it was Hopper’s turn: “Shut the fuck up.”

They stood there, watching that water like maybe they were expecting to see a dorsal fin emerge. The surface was greasy-looking and steaming like the seam of fat over a kettle of chicken soup. The lights would not penetrate it anymore than five or six inches. It was just a drainage of dirty water, sewage, debris, and numerous dead things. That was offensive enough on its own, but there were other things in it and they all knew it.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Hopper said, whispered actually, like something down there might hear him and decide to prove him wrong.

The lights moved about, the beams filled with an opaque mist, reflecting off that oily surface. Each of them was feeling something now. Not just the possibility that something was near, but the certainty of it. Hopper himself was feeling like every muscle in his body was tensing, every nerve end jangling with a sudden eruption of electricity. He was pretty much numb from the waist down from being in that cold water, but he felt suddenly warm all over. The rain fell on his beret, dripped off the rim and ran down his face like tears. But even with that, he could feel himself begin to sweat.

“Maybe we should get out of the water for a bit,” he said. “Take a break.”

“Yeah,” Liss said, caught up in it, too, now.

Torrio nodded, but never spoke. There was a ripple in the water just ahead of him as if something large had just passed beneath the surface. It could have been a big carp out feeding, but nobody thought that for a moment.

Hopper played his light on the houses nearest them. Some were two-story jobs. At least, they could go upstairs and get out of the water for a bit. It was better than this, anyway. He chose one at random.

“Come on,” he said.

The other two fell in behind him. They moved as quickly as they could towards the house, water splashing around them. The house came out of the rain and mist slowly, a tall narrow structure that looked impossibly dark and forbidding. But a haunted house beat the stinking, flooded streets any day.

There was a splash behind them.

They whirled around.

“What was that?” Torrio said.

They were a good thirty feet from the house. If there was anything in the water with them and it didn’t want them getting inside, it had plenty of time to show itself.

Hopper was not only warm now, but shivering at the same time. It felt like somebody had tied his guts into a square knot. He felt his breath in his lungs, the water running down his face. A cold chill swept up his back and he felt a sharp pain in his bowels like he might shit himself.

Something splashed off to the left and the water roiled.

“Hopper…” Torrio began.

They were shining their lights in every which direction, the beams filled with raindrops and fingers of mist.

“Shit,” Torrio said, taking a few splashing steps back.

“What?”

“I saw something…something just under the water over there. Something white.”

He pointed his light in that direction, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. The beam flickered with the shaking of his hand.

And Liss cried out. “Ouch. Shit. Something…I think something bit me.”

Oh, Jesus, not good, not good at all, Hopper was thinking. It was like crossing a tributary of the Amazon or something, piranhas circling them, coming in for the kill. He wondered if they could smell blood…whatever was out there.

“All right,” he said, “let’s get to that fucking house. Now.”

They started to move, going as fast as they could and the water was sloshing around them, waves cast in every direction. But they all knew that it wasn’t just their movement stirring up the water, it was something else.

The house was closer.

But not close enough.

Something bumped into Hopper’s leg and he let out a little muted cry, but nobody paid attention. What was going to happen, he knew, was going to happen very soon now. And before they reached the house. Right then he started doing something he hadn’t done in years: he began to pray.

“Hurry up!” Torrio said, taking the lead. “They’re in the water! Something’s in the fucking water with us!”

They charged forward and then Liss made a strange almost yelping sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. They turned and put their lights on him. He was just standing there, his face contorted with horror. Something hit him from below and he went one way and then it hit him again, and he went the other way. And then he screamed into the night and fell backwards, going completely under. He fought to the surface, choking and gasping, and then he went under again.

Neither Hopper or Torrio moved.

They both knew that Liss needed help, but they honestly didn’t know how to help him. They felt powerless. Just locked down with abject terror. And maybe Hopper’s comparison of shipwrecked sailors was right on the money…for what did you do and what could you really do when the sharks took the first member of your party?

Liss came to the surface again and there was blood streaming down his face. And there was no doubt as to why: a great strip of flesh had been ripped from his left eye socket to his lip and it hung there in a grisly flap. Water was spraying around as he thrashed this way and that and nobody could tell what was going on. He called out their names, spitting water and blood. Then he turned around, trying to pull something off his back and they saw.

They saw what had him.

At first Hopper thought, crazily, that there was a baby on his back and then maybe a dwarf. But it was neither. It was roughly the shape of an infant, but bloated to twice the size. Just a fish belly-white thing that was lumpy and grotesque, set with a series of irregular fleshly mounds like great tumors rising from its back and erupting from its bulbous head. Liss went down on his knees in the water and the thing clung to him like some monstrous, evil twin growing out of his back. But it wasn’t growing out of him, it was clinging to him with claws that were sunk in his back.

“Oh my God,” Torrio said.

And that summed it up, more or less. They had the lights right on it and it didn’t seem to care for that much. Its face was a semi-human distortion, bulb-shaped and made out of a white, oozing flesh that looked like it had been worked from clay. One side sliding down in the process so that the right side of its face rode up much higher than the left. Its left eye was little more than a slit webbed shut by filaments of skin; its right huge and black and shining. Its mouth drawn downward like a rut.

It looked right at them with a mindless hatred, its rubbery lips drawn away from nubby teeth. It made a low mewling sound.

Torrio couldn’t take it.

He opened up on it. Rounds drilled into Liss and the thing, scattering bits of them into the water. Liss went under, taking that horror with him. Liss did not come back up, but the thing did. A great section of its cranium had been blasted away, something with the texture and color of dirty motor oil running down its face.

It was enough.

Hopper put a few rounds in its direction and then stumbled blindly through the water to the house, Torrio just ahead of him. Their lights were flickering and spearing about, casting fantastic shadows around them in the screaming darkness. The front door was open, banging against the wall.

Torrio led the way in. The house was set above the level of the street, so the water was only up to their knees by that point.

“Find the stairs,” Hopper said.

Torrio did and they made for them. Weighted down in wet fatigues and raingear and equipment, they felt like they each weighed roughly five-hundred pounds.

Behind them, there was more splashing.

They put their lights back there and saw maybe a dozen white, mounded bodies moving through the water in their direction. Torrio squeezed off a few rounds, but the things kept coming, pushing slowly through the water in a tide of white clumped flesh. They were crawling like babies, nearly underwater, making for the stairs like lungfish coming out of the water to lay their eggs.

Torrio and Hopper pulled themselves up the stairs. Had they been dry, they could have raced up them. But as it was, they struggled up them like old men, each step a chore. At the top, winded and dripping, they put the lights on the water below.

Yes, the things were still coming.

They both saw them. Like horribly mutated fetuses, the things began dragged themselves up out of that dirty water. Each of them had the general form of a human infant, but exaggerated to a shocking extreme. White-fleshed and bulging with morbid cancerous-looking growths. Some had faces and some had none, just wide oval mouths that were more like those of lampreys than human beings. Some had two eyes and some had only one, others had eyes opening in their chests and bellies and even in the palms of their hands. Some had huge, spidery limbs on one side and withered sticks on the other. Others had too many arms or no arms at all. And quite a few had limbs that were more like writhing tentacles than anything else.

But what Hopper saw that disturbed him more than anything else, was that quite a few were joined together at the head and the hip or shoulder like Siamese twins. And some had more than one head, sometimes just a bulb growing from a shoulder like something that wanted to be a head.

No, they were not human. But jellyfish and embryonic squids that were pretending to be human.

“God, hurry,” Torrio said. “Hurry.”

Together, they stumbled down the hall, hearing the slushy, wet sounds of those things climbing the stairs.

27

“That thing was eating Liss,” Torrio said.

He hadn’t said a word in some time and this is how he broached the silence. Hopper didn’t bother commenting on it. They were safe for the moment. The things had been climbing the stairs for some time, but now it was quiet out there so they must have retreated.

“It was eating him,” Torrio said.

“Yeah, no shit.”

They were sitting in a room, the door locked to what might lay in wait outside. It was the bedroom of some boy, probably, who had seriously been into airplanes and space exploration. Plastic fighters and spacecraft hung from the ceiling on threads. There were posters of the moon and Mars on the walls. Even the bedspread featured rockets and stars and satellites whizzing about. Torrio was laying on it, his equipment tossed to the floor.

Hopper sat on the edge of the bed. “What the fuck is going on in this city?” he said. “What the hell is this all about?”

“The dead are rising, man, just like in those movies.”

“And those things downstairs?”

Torrio took his time in answering that one. Finally, he said, “Freak babies.”

“Freak babies?”

“Yeah, man, sure. You’ve seen ‘em. They used to have ‘em at sideshows and shit. Dead babies in jars. Things that died at birth. You know, things with two heads or too many eyes, three arms. You know.”

Hopper was going to tell him that was ridiculous. What possible chain of events could have put freak babies from sideshow jars into the water out there? And, better, what made them alive? What turned something that was essentially pitiable into a monster?

“Listen,” Torrio said.

There was movement out in the hallway.

A dragging noise.

Then a dripping sound like water was running from something.

Neither of them dared to even breathe.

More sounds now, gathering outside the door. Hopper heard a drawn-out phlegmy sound that might have been breathing. Something sniffed along the bottom of the door and then there was the sound of dozens of fingers scraping.

“They won’t get in,” Torrio said, breathing heavily.

But Hopper was not so sure. The door was only a cheap panel job. It couldn’t take too much. And those fetal nightmares out there were throwing everything they had at it. Pounding and scratching and tearing at it. The door was rattling uneasily in its frame. If it came open…

Well, Hopper did not want to think what it might be like to be buried in a sea of those things, drowning beneath those scraping fingers and sucking mouths.

No, no, no.

He went over to the window. The garage roof was just below them. They could drop onto it and get back into the water, try another house maybe. He undid the latch and was surprised when it slid up as if greased.

“Come on,” he said.

Torrio didn’t argue.

Hopper went first, leaping onto the roof seven feet below. He hit hard, but the roof was flat so he didn’t roll off. Torrio followed.

“Now what?”

Hopper scanned the water. It looked okay. “Back in,” he said.

They lowered themselves into the drink and felt that chill water consume them again. The pervasive stench of it was sickening. Just rot and things they didn’t want to know about. They started moving down an alley, their hearts in their throats, shining their lights about. The rain had slowed to a trickle. The clouds thinned enough so that moonlight actually made it through, illuminating the sunken, surreal world around them.

“Wait,” Torrio said.

Somebody was standing at the end of the alley where it opened into the street.

Just a figure that looked to be cut from the darkest vellum, almost like a cardboard cut-out. Had they seen it in a yard, they might have thought it was a statue. Except this statue had two eyes that shined yellow in the wan moonlight.

“Fuck this,” Torrio said.

He took aim on it and fired a couple three-round bursts at it from his M-16. The bullets kicked up the water around it and made it jerk with the impact of the ones that hit, but nothing more.

It just stood there, watching them.

Hopper felt something coming from this one that was beyond anything they’d felt before: just an absolute, seething evil that sucked his breath away. He grabbed Torrio by the arm and led him away between two houses. Whatever it was, he did not want to come face to face with it.

He found another open door and they went in, crouching in the knee-deep water, just breathing and waiting and hoping to dear God that the creature did not follow them. Outside, it was dead quiet. Nothing but the rain, an occasional breeze along the roof. There was a narrow stairway on the other side of the room. There must have been a window at the top for it was lit by yellow moonlight.

“Should we go up?” Torrio whispered.

Hopper didn’t answer.

Something moved up there. There was a rustling, dragging sound as something came towards the top of the stairs. They had their flashlights off. The moonlight was enough. Whatever was up there must have known they were there, because it kept coming and finally, they could see it.

Not it exactly, but the shadow it threw against the stairway wall.

Something hunched-over and inhuman, a single arm extended before it, the hand more like a tree branch than a hand. Enlarged and deformed, the fingers splayed out like crooked twigs, impossibly long and wiry.

Hopper thought: Good God…what’s that coming down the stairs?

But he didn’t want to find out what could throw a shadow like that, what could move with that undulant, worming motion. Torrio and he splashed back out into the streets and behind them, a dry and crumbling voice called out to them. What it was saying, they did not know.

Out in the water.

Hopper was out of his mind. He didn’t know where to go, where to hide. Another house? Take their chances out in the open? The two of them just stood there in the flooded street and waited and waited.

“Hopper?”

There was a splash and Torrio was gone. Nothing but ripples where he had been standing. He did not come back up. Hopper could barely catch his breath. He stood there, turning around in circles, filled with white fear. Hot urine coursed down his leg.

“Desecrator,” a voice said.

Hopper turned and looked at the form standing behind him. A tall, dark man with eyes that burned like yellow lamps. He was dressed in a flowing leathery shift like a shroud. His face was an atrocity. He looked like a mummy from a carnival sideshow, pitted and hollowed and riddled with holes. His face was honeycombed…and out of those chambers beetles were coming and going…along with rivers of black water.

Hopper let out a little cry and the rifle fell from his hands.

He did not know who this man was, only that he was a simmering malignance that would pollute and devour anything that got too close. He felt the man’s mind touch his own and his thoughts went to ash.

Oh, please, dear God…don’t touch me…

The beetles were everywhere, pouring out of the man in a swarm, moving through the water in clustered islands, crawling up Hopper’s legs, clustering on his raincoat like barnacles. Flying and swimming and enveloping.

And the man himself, that terrible dark man…you could not see him anymore. He was just a crawling, creeping mass of insects in the rough shape of a man. Infested.

Hopper screamed.

And then he was drowning.

Drowning in a rising sea of biting, nipping beetles. They covered his face and hands and slipped under his clothes, went for his eyes and the soft bulge of his throat.

But they didn’t get into his mouth until he opened it in a wide, wet scream.

Which echoed out raw and painful as he slipped beneath the waters. But the dark man would not let him go. He yanked Hopper up, held him there, brought his own hideous face in closer. He opened his mouth and there were squirming things inside. Things like dozens of bloated red tongues. But they weren’t tongues…just huge, slick carrion worms. They snaked out of his mouth and right past Hopper’s lips, sliding over his tongue and filling his throat.

Infested by worms and beetles, Hopper sank beneath the water.

“Desecrator,” said the dark man, melting away into the shadows.

28

Once upon a time, there was a clown named Grimshanks and he was a real jolly sort. He entertained at kid’s parties and local carnivals, was a real hoot at fund-raisers and private hoo-hahs. He was known as Koo-Koo the Clown and Boo-Boo and Laughing Lester, in fact a wide variety of harmless, fuzzy and cozy names, but to himself, when he looked at himself in the mirror with the whiteface on, he was Grimshanks, always Grimshanks. And it didn’t matter that his real name was Edward Shears or that he was an accountant by day?or had been, until those bloodsuckers at Stenig and Weinberg let him go…downsizing, they said. No, that was just stupid ephemeral stuff just like the rest of the world and none of it really mattered.

Nothing was real until he put on the makeup and saw Grimshanks grinning at him from the mirror.

It had been that way since he was ten years old.

He had trouble remembering what things were like before he was ten. He supposed they were ordinary and dull. But after he was ten? Then he became Grimshanks, a harmless clown that entertained at children’s parties and stalked boys by night.

As a kid, Eddie’d loved clowns and harlequins and jesters, the idea of playing dress-up and becoming someone else and something else. But it was just average role-playing and good fun, the sort of thing you let out at Halloween and locked away the rest of the year. That’s all it was. He was a normal boy. No obsessions, no compulsions. He collected baseball cards and Marvel superhero comic books. He was a boy scout and a damn good Little League pitcher. His old man had left when he was five, never to return, but Eddie lived with it and after awhile, he couldn’t even remember his father.

If life wasn’t good, then it was certainly livable.

Then one day, when he was ten, he’d been on his way home from over in Bethany. He had a big wad of gum in his mouth and as fate would have it, he’d grown tired of the taste and decided to spit it out. Right there on Locksley Avenue. He stepped off the curb and spat it out…right on the fender wall of the big black Chrysler driving by.

The car stopped.

So did Eddie.

The car was an older Chrysler Imperial hardtop, a black beauty. A big, boxy slab of Detroit steel like the sort of thing a gangster might drive or a TV cop. It sat there at the side of the road, idling, that big 440 under the hood purring like a tiger with a belly full of meat. It was a cool car. That’s what Eddie had thought, sounded like it had some real balls, could lay some real rubber. But as much as he liked street machines like that, he got a real bad feeling from it. Something in his guts clenched.

Time seemed to have slowed down and it was just him and that big black car. The street seemed empty, deserted. He wanted to run, knew he had better, yet he didn’t. And a voice, a scratchy, out-of-tune voice, said in his head: Well, now you’ve done it. You spit on that car and those guys in there aren’t going to like it much. Okay, you bought this one. Here’s your ride, sunshine. Here’s where you learn about the boogeyman?

“Hey, kid,” a guy in the front seat said in a nasal voice. “No, it’s okay, kid. I just want to talk to you.”

The guy doing the talking was behind the wheel, a little guy with bug eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, his thinning gray hair greased straight back.

“C’mere, kid.”

Something in Eddie was telling him to run like he’d never ran before, but he didn’t. He walked over to the car. There was a big guy in the passenger seat. He had a thick neck and a pockmarked face, eyes that were watery and gray.

Eddie swallowed something down. “I…I didn’t mean to spit on your car.”

Bug-eyes smiled and there was something wrong about that smile. A dead carp would smile up at you from a bucket like that…empty, lifeless. “Just an accident, eh, kid?”

“Sure.”

“We all have accidents, don’t we?”

“Sure.”

Bug-eyes kept smiling like he couldn’t stop. “See, this is an expensive car and we just can’t have kids spitting on it.”

“No, no…I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “I didn’t mean to.”

He felt trapped. Bug-eyes had a way of looking at you, making you feel like a fly stuck to one of those No-Pest Strips. You could buzz your wings and wriggle your legs, but you weren’t going anywhere. And something in his eyes told you that if you tried to get away, things could always get worse.

The other guy in the car still had not looked at Eddie. He was cracking shelled peanuts between his thumb and forefinger, chewing the nuts very slowly and deliberately.

“Denny?” Bug-eyes said. “Show our friend here about this car.”

“Listen, I’m sorry…”

Denny stepped out of the car, chewing nuts, his gray vapid eyes not even blinking. He smelled of oil and chemicals and leather. He was big and there were scars on his face like somebody had taken a knife after him.

“No, it’s okay, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “Denny won’t hurt you. He just wants to show you how expensive this car is. Go ahead, Denny, show him that back seat. Show him how it is back there.”

Denny opened the back door and motioned Eddie forward.

Eddie felt something sour bubble in his stomach, there was a tightness in his chest and a sharpness prodding at his bowels.

He approached the open back door like he was afraid it might take a bite out of him. He was too scared to run, too scared for everything. Anyway, he walked over there like he was walking up to an open casket. Denny was standing behind him by then and he could smell something coming off the man that wasn’t hair tonic or after shave lotion, but a smell that was cold and raw like thawing meat. And the back of the car, those dark leather seats…it smelled like blood in there, metallic and savage.

“See that upholstery, kid?” Bug-eyes said. “That’s real leather. Special ordered and all that. Now would you want some nothing punk kid spitting on those seats if they were yours?”

Eddie shook his head.

The streets were still deserted. Nobody was around. Not some kids rollerskating or some lady walking her dog or some guy strolling down the walks from work with a lunch pail in hand. Nobody, nothing. Everything was silent and deadly.

“Touch those seats, kid,” Bug-eyes said. “I want you to feel how expensive they are.”

“No…”

“I think you should. Denny? Do you think he should?”

“Yeah.”

“See, kid? We want you to do it,” Bug-eyes said and it was not a request. He wanted Eddie touching those seats and he was almost excited by the idea. His voice had gone high and wavering. “Touch ‘em, kid, touch those fucking seats. Put your hands on ‘em, that’s right, touch ‘em…run your fingers over that hide, real slow and easy-like…”

Eddie was trembling and sobbing because he knew where this was going. This was one of those educational movies the police showed at school, where some pervert offers a kid candy and that dumb kid gets in and nobody ever sees him again. That’s what was happening and Eddie was petrified. So he didn’t try to escape. He didn’t even fight when Denny pushed him into the back seat, jumped in with him and clamped a big, salty hand over his mouth.

“Don’t squirm, kid,” Bug-eyes told him. “Denny won’t hurt you…unless I tell him to. And if I tell him…you don’t want that do you?”

And that’s how Eddie’s first ten years of life were wiped out.

Denny stuck a rag over his mouth and there was a chemical on it. He fought, but soon enough he just fell into darkness.

When he woke, he was tied to a mattress in a cellar somewhere. The walls were moist and water was dripping. The rafters overhead were spun with ancient cobwebs. It smelled dank and dirty down there. But he wasn’t really scared until the door opened and the two clowns came in.

They called themselves Bobo and Ripples.

Bobo wore a baggy plaid costume with orange pom-poms down the front, his face painted a stark white. There were little tufts of red hair at his ears. Ripples wore lots of ruffles and ribbons, his face painted with an unhappy clown smirk. Ripples never talked, but Bobo did. He told Eddie all the things they were going to do to him. And true to his word, they did them. Sometimes they made him do things to them. Sometimes they took pictures. Eddie was down there for months and it was an obscene, vile existence.

Then one night they dumped him in a park over in Elmwood Hills and Bobo, smelling of greasepaint and body odor, told him, “If you tell, we’ll find you. And when we find you, we’ll peel your skin off and cut out your eyes and fuck your skull.”

And that’s how Eddie died.

After that, he was never the same. He laughed, but he did not smile. He spoke, but he did not emote. Something had dried up in him. He could no longer feel. He was numb and frostbit and senseless. Sometimes he would cut himself with a razor or a shard of glass and he always bled, but he felt no pain. He felt nothing. Maybe a ten-year old boy had gotten into that car, but what was dumped in that park was just a shell, a rotting husk, something that had been eaten down to the skeleton. Maybe it looked like a boy, but inside there was just darkness and cobwebs and a dripping sound just like in the cellar.

That was how Grimshanks was born.

Because one day, feeling empty as always, Eddie had seen a clown on TV and that clown was him. After that, he thought about clowns and dreamed about clowns and slowly became a clown. Like Bobo and Ripples, he would dress up at night and paint his face. And when you did that, you were someone else. You were Grimshanks. Sure, you could be a buffoon and work the kiddie parties and then at night, you could hunt boys. Boys that willingly got into cars. Boys that needed to be taught a lesson.

But that was all Grimshanks’ doing.

You could not truly be blamed if he got a little out of hand from time to time. If sometimes he taught boys lessons and buried what remained of them in the cellars of abandoned buildings. That was his fault.

By the time Eddie/Grimshanks was thirty, he’d taught six boys a lesson. The first one he’d dumped in the Black River. The others in cellars. Sometimes he dismembered them and sometimes he kept his favorite parts. Then one day, they down-sized him at Stenig and Weinberg. But that was all a lie. They had seen the pictures on his laptop and they hadn’t liked those pictures.

So they fired him.

When he left the office that last, fateful day, nobody would look at him and those few that did eyed him like something offensive and skittering they wanted to crush under their shoes.

So that night, out of frustration and anger, Grimshanks in full costume?he had to be in full costume, otherwise he was just Eddie and Eddie was cowardly and frightened?picked up a teenage boy on Angel Street, just off the University. That boy had gotten into his car, thought the clown thing was funny. Kept thinking it was funny until old Grimshanks pulled into that dark alley and started doing those silly things to him, took out his party favors and told that boy what he was going to do with him. But that boy was smart. When Grimshanks got him pinned down, he jabbed his thumbs into Grimshanks’ eyes and got away.

After that, Eddie just died away completely. In fact, he hadn’t really been alive in countless years. But that boy went to the police and then Grimshanks had to be real careful because the police were watching for him. They’d already figured out the funny clown angle from the greasepaint smudges he left on the remains of his victims.

So Grimshanks became clever.

He rented a ratty, cold water flat down by the river in Bethany where people never asked questions. In that neighborhood, they sold things and bought things, but never questioned. But even so, Grimshanks came up with a real lark of an idea. During the day, he dressed up as a guy named Eddie that he had made up out of thin air…but at night? At night, Grimshanks slithered out in full costume to slake his hunger.

Because Grimshanks was always hungry.

Then the flooding started.

There were police in the streets, frequenting those dead-ends of Bethany they normally did not go to. After two nights of being locked in that smelling, fly-specked room, Grimshanks decided to play a trick on those police who kept knocking at the door. He tied a noose and slipped it around his throat and it was all merry fun. He tied the other end of the rope around a light fixture overhead, got up on a stool and jumped off.

But no one ever found him.

For within days, Bethany was flooded and by the end of the week, Grimshanks’ basement flat was underwater and poor old Grimshanks just floated around down there with that noose around his throat, drifting in the dark, filthy waters, bloating up and blackening. Things nibbled on him and other things tunneled into him and it was no fun at all.

Then, after many days of this, something in the water activated something in Grimshanks. He started to move and his white clown fingers began to tremble. And in that grinning, distended face, two dead yellow eyes opened.

And the fun began again.

29

About ten minutes after Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle went down the block to Wanda Sepperley’s place, Lily felt it growing in her as perhaps it had been growing all day. A secret garden of dread that she tended and tended alone with cold fingers, one that she seeded and nurtured, was about to bring to blossom, feeding it with her pain and watering it with the sap of her soul which now ran as cold and poisoned as the drainage from a coffin. But it belonged to her and she coveted it and no eyes would look upon it and no mind could hope to divine its dark mystery.

None but her own.

The ice cream made and stored now in its wooden bucket down in the cellar freezer, there was nothing but waiting and listening and wondering. Rita Zirblanski was sleeping on the couch, oblivious to all. Her sister, Rhonda, lounged in a chair staring intently at a guttering candle. And Lily? Lily waited without knowing exactly what for, but certain that when the time came, when her garden brought forth vibrant and morose flower, that she would know it and recognize it as such. But until then there was the grayness of that sodden night, the exhalation of the diseased wind against the house, and silence that whispered dire things in the back of her mind.

Lily sat up in her rocking chair suddenly. She cocked her head, a thin smile spreading over her lips which were as colorless as her face now.

Rhonda studied her in the shifting orange light. “What…what’s the matter, Mrs. Barron?”

Lily brushed trembling fingers over her face, amazed, it seemed, by the chill of her flesh and its creeping dampness. “I…I thought I heard someone…”

Rhonda sat up. “Outside?”

But Lily shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

Rhonda looked towards the curtained window. “Was it…Mr. Barron?”

Lily shook her head. “I thought…I thought I heard someone call my name.”

Rhonda stared at her, as if maybe seeing her for the first time. Although she had always liked Lily, there were things about her now that were disturbing. She had always been a woman that walked tall and proud and fine, but now she was hunched-over and weak and contaminated like a dirty millpond. No, not physically. Maybe mentally and maybe psychically, but surely spiritually. There was something coming off Lily Barron, a hot and sour smell like rotting flowers or maybe a dank smell of sweating subterranean concrete…regardless, you could only truly smell it with your mind, but the odor was appalling.

Rhonda, like Rita, did not scare easily, but Lily scared her now. Disturbed her, unsettled her.

Lily stood up, cocking her head again like a puppy sensing its master’s approach. “It’s so quiet…I keep thinking somebody’s whispering my name. You’re not doing that are you?” But before Rhonda could answer, Lily just shook her head. “No, it wasn’t you…maybe it was someone else.”

Rhonda wanted to say something but there was nothing to say.

Lily walked to the window and drew the curtains aside, stared out the window, saw her own ghostly reflection, the rushing sea of Crandon beyond. “The water is up by the porch now and it’s still rising. By morning, it’ll climb the steps…and by tomorrow sundown? It’ll be coming into the house, flooding and drowning and washing away everything. Sinking the neighborhood, this house like a ship, pulling it down into weedy, slimy places. It’ll be dark and muddy down there, Rhonda. Things will skitter and things will crawl…but we won’t be alone down there. There’ll be others down there, people we know and people we miss. They’ll hold our hands and tell us things…down below…then we can drift with them in the hollows and sluices and watery places where things float and bob and call us by name…”

Rhonda was staring at her with wide, white eyes now. Those eyes did not blink. “Are…are you okay, Mrs. Barron?”

Lily nodded. “I’m fine. Maybe I’m tired and restless, I don’t know. God, I feel like I’m in a cage in this house, don’t you? I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe I’m dreaming while I’m awake or maybe I just woke up in the middle of a dream.”

She looked out through the rain-spattered panes, saw the crawling shadows out there, the rain stippling the ever expanding dark pools which were swallowing the city. She saw the swirling tides and spinning eddies as the sea of gray water filled the streets and rushed over the lids of sewer gratings. Leaves and sticks floated, unnamable things which were dim and slow-turning. A wedge of moon tried desperately to break the black tapestry of clouds overhead, silvered light reflected off the murky waters. She saw a ripple out there, then another, a suggestion of movement beneath the leaves and silt.

“Is…is something out there?” Rhonda’s voice asked.

But Lily did not answer her.

She heard a splashing, saw waves of dark water crest into the yard, breaking uneasily over the base of the birdfeeder, making her dying beds of cowslip and goldenrod bob and sway like swamp lilies. She sensed, rather than saw, movement out there. Shadows that would not be still, but rose and fell and slithered away, tangling with the shadows of the huge oaks out there. She heard a splashing, dragging sound like someone stepping through the flooded yard, pushing mounds of wet leaves before them.

But she could see nothing, just a whisper of shadow that melted into the hedges and was consumed by itself.

“You should try to close your eyes for awhile,” she told Rhonda, looking away from the window only a moment. But when she turned back, she saw a spiraling shape rise up from the water. It stood there, staring up at the house with reflective eyes, something made of rags and leaves and draping shrouds. Then it sank back into the water.

Lily made a sound in her throat and turned from the window and smiled at Rhonda. “Close your eyes,” she said.

She went down the hallway to the bathroom, smelling the stagnancy of the sewers beneath Witcham right away. The toilet was filled with black water and sludge which had backed-up, spattered the back of the white tank with oily droplets. Wrinkling her nose, Lily tried the taps. They made a belching sound and spewed a thin trickle of dirty water and then a clump of something. There was a distant bubbling sound coming up from the drain.

Lily listened to it, then put her ear down there to see if she could hear what it was.

The pipes gurgled and oozed and stank of ancient mossy cesspools, but nothing more.

Lily left the bathroom and went down into the cellar, past the junk room and playroom, into the washroom. She lit a candle and looked into the stationary tub. There were about three or four inches of that black, sewer-smelling mud in there, the candlelight reflecting off its greasy surface.

Behind her, there was a bubbling at the floor drain.

She went over there, a stench of rotting leaves and backed-up sewer lines wafting up at her. It reminded her of flooded cellars and black wells.

There was a foaming sucking sound, bubbles popping from it like somebody was down there breathing or blowing air. And then something else, something clotted and thick but sounding very much like laughter, laughter born in lungs clogged with mud. Bubbling and gurgling. The laughter faded away and more of the black, silty water was vomited from the pipes.

And the voice that came next was very clear, dirty and watery, but clear: “Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us. We’re all down here waiting for you…you don’t have to be afraid…just take my hand…”

And then from the drain, more black water bubbling up with a regurgitating sound like an old man’s belly. Lily gasped, sensed movement in those choked, seething pipes. She saw something obscenely white and fleshy coming out of the drain, something that wriggled fatly like a grotesque worm birthing itself from a slimy egg sack. It came out of that blackness, white and swollen and investigative, followed by another and another.

Fingers.

Then an entire hand, bloated and fish-belly white, set with puckered sores and contusions, something like larva squirming beneath the skin. The fingers reached out, splayed as thick as sausages, the nails gray and ragged. On the third finger, there was a high school class ring squeezing it tight like a tourniquet.

Lily felt a horror build in her, a disgust, an absolute revulsion.

Marlene had a ring like that.

The hand kept reaching, coming up farther out of the drain, slimed with silt and dirt. It came up as far as the forearm…and the wrist had been sutured, as if it had been slit open. Perhaps by a paring knife. The fingers brushed Lily’s toe and she recoiled, the feeling of that flesh like the cold guts of a fish. She let out a cry and grabbed a broom leaning nearby. Without thinking she swung it at the hand and swung it again. The impacts were wet and gelatinous as if she were striking a raw slab of liver. With each impact, black juice oozed from the hand. Finally it retreated, exploding in a spray of that inky juice. Bits of white flesh floated in it.

Something rolled across the floor…Marlene’s high school ring.

Uttering a scream, Lily ran up the stairs and slammed the cellar door shut behind her. She leaned against it, breathing hard.

Rhonda was standing in the hallway. “Are you all right?”

Lily swallowed. “A spider…a spider scared me.”

She followed Rhonda back into the living room and Rhonda sat back in her chair, drawing her legs up to her chest. She watched Lily, but did not say anything.

“There’s no reason to be afraid,” Lily said under her breath.

Rhonda said, “What?”

“Nothing. Close your eyes.”

Sucking in a deep breath, Lily went to the front door and unlocked it. She stood there, leaning up against it, filled with conflicting emotions.

“You can’t go outside,” Rhonda told her.

“Close your eyes,” Lily said.

Then she stepped out into the chill drizzle, feeling the individual drops breaking against her face. She walked out into the yard, wet leaves brushing her ankles, then her calves. She stepped off the curb and into the swirling water. As she got near where she knew the sewer lid to be, the water came up above her knees, cold and numbing. The water pooled and sluiced and flowed, gaining momentum, rising and rising. Something brushed her leg and something splashed behind her.

“Marlene,” she said.

In the house, Rhonda watched her from the window, wondering what it was all about but thinking maybe she would be better off not knowing. Lily just stood out there in the falling rain, the water coursing around her, whirlpooling. Dressed in her white nightgown, she looked like a vampire woman from an old movie.

“What’s going on?” Rita suddenly said.

Rhonda turned from the window. “I don’t know…I don’t know.”

Lily could feel the water, cool yet warming, filled with leaves and branches and unseen things, rubbery things and sliding things. And from between her legs, just breaking the surface, she saw a face…or something like a face. It could have been Marlene. It was corpse-white and blurred, huge peeled black eyes staring up at her with a barely-concealed hunger. Slimy fingers gripped her ankles and that mouth, blown open wide and blubbery, formed itself into a grin.

“No,” Lily said. “Oh dear God…not like this…”

Inside the house, Rhonda turned back to the window, but Lily was gone. Just that slopping sea of water and discharge, leaves and drifting things. A great ripple expanded out from where Lily had been standing.

She watched the rain come down, bleaching the color from the world. Then she quickly closed the curtains.

30

If Witcham had been flooding that afternoon, now it was flooded.

Maybe Crandon wasn’t as bad as River Town or Bethany Square, but it was gaining, oh yes, it was certainly gaining. Chrissy and Lisa Bell were making their way through the outer reaches of Crandon and the water was up to their waists, sometimes deeper. Leaves were carried over its surface along with debris and garbage of every kind. They moved up streets and down avenues, past empty shops and deserted houses and submerged cars, knowing that if this had been normal, dry Crandon, then they could have made Kneale Street in twenty or thirty minutes, but with the way things were going, it might take hours.

A tree went drifting by and Chrissy pulled Lisa out of its path.

“Oh God,” Lisa said, “what was that?”

“A tree,” Chrissy said.

“We’re going to drown out here, I know we’re going to drown out here and I’ll never get to make out my senior will.”

Chrissy maybe wanted to remark on the absolute absurdity of that statement, but she didn’t bother. That was just Lisa. She was a walking panic attack. You had to forgive her her excesses. Her world was small and tight and scary on a good day, let alone this madness.

“We’ll get out, it’ll just take time.”

Lisa made sobbing sounds in her throat, but she didn’t start crying. She held it in and Chrissy knew it took great effort on her part.

Arm in arm, they splashed forward into the wetness and darkness.

There was no life anywhere. Buildings rose up dark and silent around them like gravestones and coffins, the corpses of cars and trucks huddled beneath them, webbed in shadow. If there was anyone out there, Chrissy had seen no sign. As they plodded along, she was struck by the feeling that they were the last two people on earth. That this deluge had swallowed them all and what she was seeing now?the flooding, the devastation?was all there was, nothing else. The rain fell and the swelling river continued to expand, drowning the city inch by inch.

“Heather’s dead,” Lisa said, as if it had just occurred to her.

“Yes,” Chrissy said.

And how did you take that in without screaming? Just today it had been business pretty much as usual, except for the rising water, and now it was this. Perpetual darkness broken only by an occasional struggling ray of moonlight, the ever-present rain and wet dog stink of the city…and Heather was dead. Neck broken or head split open, dead was dead. Yes, just today it had been the three of them as usual, Heather, Chrissy, and Lisa. And now that was gone forever, it was just wiped right?

What the hell was that?

Both Chrissy and Lisa were stopped now, out front of a maternity shop, the windows reflecting the world darkly.

“What was that?” Lisa asked.

But Chrissy didn’t know.

She thought it sounded like something in the alley across the street, but she couldn’t be sure. She pulled Lisa closer up against the building until they were veiled in shadow. Whatever was over there, splashing away like a fish rising and descending, was not good. She instinctively knew that.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lisa said.

“Sshh!”

Across the street now, Chrissy could see weird, murky forms moving against the facades of buildings. They looked like people, but there was something there she did not like. Three of them had come up from the water now and here came a fourth. They waded along moving up the street, making hissing and gibbering noises that might have been speech. They were towing something behind them and Chrissy knew it was a body.

That was bad, of course. But what made her go cold right to her marrow was that she could not honestly say that those people were individuals. They almost seemed to be connected with the fourth being a child or dwarf, all wired together from a single skein of flesh.

What the hell did that mean?

“What?” Lisa said.

But Chrissy would not let her see.

Could not let her see.

She took hold of her, pressing Lisa’s head against her shoulder, hugging her like a child and Lisa did not seem to mind.

Those people over there climbed a set of steps out of the water and into a building, dragging that body behind them. There was no doubt, then…all of them were parts of a single whole. Paper dolls.

Then there was silence for a moment or two.

Rainwater dripped from the overhang above, running down Chrissy’s face. A light wind blew and the water roiled and snaked with unseen currents. Then from that darkened building across the way, chewing sounds. Meaty tearing and crunching sounds like a dog gnawing on a bone in the darkness.

Chrissy held Lisa even tighter to her.

31

In Witcham that night there were things that were simply unsettling and those that were disturbing. When Deke Ericksen finally made it home that night after haunting the flooded streets looking for Chrissy, he found the house quite empty. No mom, no dad. Even old Mr. Cheese, their tomcat, was gone.

And that was all very disturbing.

Mr. Cheese?a massive tiger-striped tom with huge paws and a head about the size of a football?had shown up on Halloween night five years previous, bedraggled and missing his left ear, and had been the family pet ever since. That old cat rarely went out even on warm, dry nights, let alone rainy ones.

Standing there in the living room, feeling that something had changed for the worse, Deke stripped out of his wet things, doing his best not to panic. Mom and dad must have gone somewhere, he figured. Maybe across the street to the Stern’s or the Green’s down the block. That had to be the answer to the whole thing. And if they had, there would be a note somewhere.

You know better, man. Much better. There’s no note, no nothing, and you know it. They never go out this late and if they did, they wouldn’t have taken Mr. Cheese with them.

He did not honestly know for sure that the cat was missing, yet he was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Cheese was awake at all hours, the first to greet anyone that came through the door, always scrounging for food. But tonight, when Deke stepped through the door, there was only that hushed sound like the house was holding its breath and the darkness, of course.

Power was out now. Using his flashlight, he got some candles going until the house looked a bit less threatening. But even with the light, it was just too silent. Unnaturally silent. Houses were like networks and when you’d lived in one long enough, you got to know every wire and every connection. How they buzzed when people were about and how they hummed with a dead silence when they were empty. And right now, it seemed, the house was humming with emptiness. It was a lonesome sound that Deke could only hear in his head, yet it was loud, very loud, so loud that it made him feel tense, uneasy. There was a quality to that humming that he had never heard before. There was a sharpness, a shrillness to it that made him feel very nervous. No, his mom and dad were not home. Their room was downstairs and he’d already checked it, just like he’d checked the kitchen and dining room and dad’s little den, traipsing water through the house as he did so.

They were gone.

Unless they were down in the basement or upstairs.

Starting to breathe heavily like the air was slowly being drawn from the house, Deke went to the basement door. Opened it, panned his flashlight around. That nervous feeling was settling into him now with teeth. Slowly then, he went down the stairs, wondering if maybe he’d find them down there, cold and hacked, their blood pooling around them. A year or so before Nicky’s death, dad had installed fluorescent lights down there. Deke was glad the power was out. Those fluorescents would have made all that blood look purple.

Deke found nothing. No bodies, no blood.

The junk room was empty. The workroom empty. The utility room, with the washer and dryer and the dusty bowed shelves where mom stored her canned pickles, was likewise empty. No sound down there but the water that was beginning to trickle in through cracks in the cement walls.

Deke went back upstairs.

Okay, they weren’t down in the basement and they weren’t up here. Neither was Mr. Cheese. That only left the upstairs. The only things up there were Deke’s room, the spare bedroom, the bathroom…and Nicky’s room. They wouldn’t be up there. No reason for them to be.

Still feeling nervous, but exhausted from fighting through the flooded streets for hours, Deke dropped into his dad’s recliner, watching the burning candles and the greasy, flickering shadows they threw against the walls. He was thinking about Chrissy, about mom and dad, but mostly about Mr. Cheese. Funny stupid old cat. Where the hell had he gotten off to? Deke could remember that Halloween night the cat had first shown up. Nicky and he had just gotten back from trick-or-treating and the cat had been on the porch. Nicky, being Nicky and a friend to all animals, had invited the cat in even though Deke told him not to. God, Mr. Cheese had been an ugly cat. Half a tail, one ear missing, patches of fur gone from territorial battles with other toms. Just a big, brutish, nasty looking animal with a set of balls so big he walked bowlegged. Deke didn’t like him and he figured mom and dad would like him even less. And that much was true. Mom thought he might have rabies and dad said he was just a dirty old alley cat, probably full of lice and mites and God only knew what.

But Nicky attached himself to the cat instantly.

He fell in love and the boy’s instincts had been right: despite Mr. Cheese’s appearance, he was friendly and mellow, a real big baby. After a visit to the vet’s and a couple good baths, he was actually presentable. Of course, there was no getting around his appearance which was like some ex-fighter that had spent simply too many years in the ring. Nicky named him Mr. Cheese and that old tom insinuated himself into their lives and their hearts.

They put an ad in the paper about the cat, but nobody ever called to claim him. The only identification he had was a very worn red collar with a silver tag that said “HOOTERS” on it. Dad had laughed about that and mom had only rolled her eyes. Deke hadn’t really got it at the time, not until later when he learned that Hooters was a bar waitressed by attractive young women with tight t-shirts and impressive bosoms. So the tag really was kind of funny. Mr. Cheese apparently had something of a seedy, unspoken past as a tough white trash sort of cat.

Nicky just loved Mr. Cheese.

And for weeks and weeks after Nicky’s death, Mr. Cheese would wait for hours in his perch at the living room window waiting for Nicky to come home as he always had. Mom shut Nicky’s door after the funeral and to this day, she was the only one who went in there. But Mr. Cheese did not forget Nicky. He would sit outside that door meowing to be let in until somebody chased him away.

Deke figured the only way to know for sure if Mr. Cheese was home was to open a can of tuna with the electric can opener. That always brought him running. Unfortunately, there was no electricity. So much for the acid test.

Thinking about Mr. Cheese made him think about Nicky, of course, and that brought him back to Lily Barron, Chrissy’s mom. Her and her stories of dead people living below. Even now, Deke could not be sure what he heard at the Barron house today. It had sounded almost like Lily had been talking to someone in the bathroom. That some gurgling voice had been answering her. But, Christ, that was ridiculous.

It was your imagination. Had to be. She got you all worked up with those crazy stories of dead people talking to her from drainpipes. Your mind did the rest. She was just talking to herself.

Imagination, then.

But what about that house and the phone ringing? That voice on the other end that sounded like Nicky? This was the one that shook him. By the light of day, such a thing was ludicrous…but now? Here in the candlelit darkness with the shadows crawling and the black water rising? What about now? Deke just wasn’t sure. It had to have been a hallucination or something. That made sense, didn’t it? Well, didn’t it? The power was out. No way that phone had been ringing. Christ, maybe he’d imagined the house, too. Maybe he had a fever or something.

Yeah, it sounded good. But he just couldn’t swallow it.

What then?

Was he ready to believe in things that Lily Barron believed in? That dead people had come back from the grave? Man, that was loony, that was damaged, that was seriously fucked-up. Deke was sixteen and, though he would never have admitted it openly, there was plenty in the world he did not know about. But one thing he knew is that the dead were dead. Them waking up and walking around was entertaining as all hell, made for fun movies and fun books, but there was no truth to it. Zombies were bullshit. Even he knew that. The dead did not come back. The idea of it was not only scary, but repulsive.

But what if they had come back?

What if Lily Barron wasn’t so crazy after all?

Deke did not like to be thinking these things as he sat there by the light of candles in the dead of night, but…what if? About all he knew about resurrection was shit from church about Jesus and Lazarus and all that and he had never paid much attention. Other than that, just movies and books.

Last year in Mr. Firringo’s class, American Lit, they’d all been given an American author to research. Deke got Poe. Poe had a thing about premature burials and people coming back from the dead. Poe’s stories “Morella” and “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” of course, all concerned themselves with women returning from the tomb. Poe’s characters were always melancholy, morbid types, given to high drama and emotional outbursts, unnamed nervous maladies and fainting spells.

Somebody always fainted in a Poe story, it seemed, or had a nervous breakdown. But the idea of someone returning from the dead in such brooding, atmospheric tales didn’t seem so far-fetched and particularly since Poe’s characters were pretty much nuts anyway.

But that was the nineteenth century.

Nobody bought shit like that anymore.

Thinking these things and refusing to give them credence even as part of him, deep inside, was creeping closer to believe, he kept thinking about Nicky and Hillside Cemetery getting washed out. His thoughts moved so quickly and took so many erratic hairpin turns in his brain, Deke was not even aware of what was growing inside of him. That nervousness was increasing geometrically until it felt like there was a solid ball of writhing worms in his stomach, one that was expanding and expanding. Jesus.

Chrissy…where the hell are you? Where the hell is anybody?

God, no phone, no TV, no cell, no internet. This was fucking barbaric, this was the Middle Ages again, a world lit only by fire. Just the storm outside and that damn rain and the silence inside, huge and malefic and evolving.

Nothing else.

Nothing else but that muffled knocking sound from upstairs.

32

Wanda Sepperley was really something to watch.

You could hear all those crazy stories as Mitch had, listen to the neighbors swap tales of her, see the old ladies congregating over there on Thursday nights like hens mulling for a rooster, but until you really saw her in action…well, you just couldn’t appreciate it.

When Tommy and Mitch had gotten there, she had been waiting once again, knowing somehow that they would come.

Mitch hadn’t wasted any time: “Do you know where Chrissy is?”

Wanda, knowing she had been visited now as a friend and as a seer, nodded her head, kept nodding it, but she answered no questions. It was not her way. These things took time, took space, took maybe eternities and entire worlds to perform. A simple question? Maybe. But to divine and know and feel these unknowable truths took energy and electricity of the sort that only arced in the lower, pulsing regions of the soul almighty. But how could she explain these things to Mitch Barron and his friend, Mister Tommy? Better explain a summer’s starry night to a blind man or the smell of a crisp Autumn afternoon to someone without a nose. Because next to Wanda, these two men, though righteous of deed and caring of heart, were blind and deaf and could not smell turpentine if it was poured under their nostrils.

So Wanda seized up and shook, but it was no seizure, but maybe an intimate mating of rapture and dream. She became a dusty, stiff thing, a dummy worked by wires in a glass carnival coffin. She shook and trembled and mumbled nonsensical things and what she was doing was driving out the here and the now, letting the forever and the tomorrow fill her like a corked bottle. It was not easy to open up her mind and especially at her age, to fill it with a mesh of spider web, hoping to catch dragonflies and wasps and sewing needles and glittering green night-moths in her net, catch them and slit them open, drain their ruby juice and let it tell her things.

No, not easy, but she would do it. For it was a gift passed down her bloodline and although the ashes of her heart were cool, there was still a vibrant heat to be found beneath.

“Chrissy…” she said after a time, tasting the secret bitter marrow of prophecy on her tongue. “Chrissy…yes, I would know that child. She walks tall and proud, doesn’t she? Crusted with vanity and salted with an immature selfishness, just another child stuffing its pockets with candy…yet, Chrissy walks true and there is a sweetness and a purity in her that would be death to those who would seek to corrupt or harm her. But where is she? In the night and the dampness…her road will be a long one, but you’ll see her again, Mitch, for even now she comes back to you, one step at a time. Be patient and watchful, you’ll be with her again.”

Mitch just stood there, feeling…what? Foolish and silly listening to these things, but yet deep down inside he believed. He did not know how Wanda Sepperley could know these things, but know them she did.

Tommy lit a cigarette and his hand trembled. “See, isn’t that what I told you? She’ll be fine.”

“Fine and right,” Wanda said, a dew of perspiration beading her forehead.

“Sure,” Mitch said. “Sure.”

But it was all crazy wasn’t it? Like going to a sideshow or a fair and having one of those old-time booth witches read your future. Drop in your coin and read the card while the old hag nodded and cackled happily away. It was like that in many ways and in others, it was worlds beyond.

“A mad stew of shit?” Wanda said then. “Is that what you’re thinking, Mitch Barron? Ha! You wouldn’t be the first to laugh in the beginning and weep at the end. Trust, Mitch, just trust what your heart tells you to be true.”

Tommy didn’t have anything to say to any of it.

He looked…worn, tired, as if it had been he that had just read the future, reached out and took hold of those filaments of possibility and fate and followed them to their source, revealing their mysteries.

“But you came for more than that, now didn’t you?”

God, she was good. She really was.

Wanda was old and bloodless and dusty like something stored in an attic trunk, but, dear Christ, she was sighted. And next to her, he was absolutely blind, like an infant just learning to open his eyes, seeing things but not knowing what they were. And what was it like to have a mind like hers? What was that like when your mind was like some line you could cast about in any direction, into the now and the past and the future? A mind that you could toss into the wind like a kite, let it fly and soar and view things from far above? A mind that could look through shaded windows and drift over high rooftops and creep through attic damps? It could pass through walls and minds and follow overgrown paths and sniff like a dog, never losing the scent, but always following it home in the end.

“We came to ask…about a bus,” Tommy told her. “We heard it on the police scanner. There’s a schoolbus of kids lost out there.”

“And you’d like to lead those stray lambs home, would you?”

Tommy shrugged. “Somebody’s got to. People in this town, they’re hiding. They’re all just hiding. I’m not about to hide.”

“Then go in my kitchen yonder,” Wanda said, “bring me that bowl of yellow eggs, a plate, and a bowl. And don’t argue about it.”

Tommy didn’t argue.

He came back with a wooden bowl of eggs, a plate, and a bowl. He set them on the table before Wanda and she just kept nodding her head, her face sallow in the candlelight.

She cracked an egg onto the plate and stirred the yolk with her fingertip. “Something bad there…hah! Feel the cold and the death on my fingertips!” She dumped that yolk into the bowl and cracked another onto the plate. “So much rot there! What a delight! Then and now, such amusement!”

Mitch and Tommy watched her go through five eggs like that, talking to herself, cocking her head and listening as if the yolks were speaking to her, sometimes rubbing a bit of slimy albumen between her thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she would laugh and sometimes frown. Sometimes she’d gasp and other times she’d simply shake her head.

And then she started to talk as she rummaged through yolks, telling them that she was not mad, but was practicing an old world science pretty much forgotten by the folks of today. “Was not the egg the symbol of life that had hatched the world?” she put to them. “Was it not the emblem of fertility and harvest? Could not the power of the egg increase the yield of the crops and make barren women fruitful? Of course it could, you silly men! Shows what you know and what you don’t! Mix corn with egg…yes, corn has substance and egg has meat! Yes, yes, yes! Spill an egg and divine your future! Mix an egg white with your husband’s blood and slurp it down, hence, you will conceive a house filled with laughing children! Surely! Now pierce the eggshell on Halloween night and pour the white into a glass of water and those twisting, slimy shapes will tell you things! Eat an egg before bed and you will dream of a week hence! Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Pour the yolk on a wound, say the words, and cast the shell in moonlight…you shall be cured!”

They were both smoking now.

Wanda took a sixth egg and handled it expertly. She spun it on the table and pressed it to her left eye, smiling all the while. Then carefully as a master chef, she cracked it into the plate and there was a threading of blood in it. Tensing, swallowing something down, she dipped her fingers into the cold tissue, wrapped loops of albumen around her fingers and held the dripping ooze up for all to see. She peered through it at the burning candle, then dropped it back down, piercing the yolk with the nail of her thumb. The yolk ran yellow and thick, but seamed with blood.

“Not much time now,” she said to those dumbfounded faces. “Those children are thinning in number…you must go to them now.”

“But where are they?” Tommy asked.

So she told them.

Mitch felt elated at hearing where they were. Now here was something positive they could do. It beat the hell out of sitting around wondering when those things might show. Yes, it felt very good. Right to his core it felt good…and then, just as suddenly, something else replaced it. Something that made him feel terrified. It opened up in his belly and filled him with a chill fluid. He knew something then, something he could not possibly know. “Lily…I…I can’t leave Lily alone, not with the girls…”

Wanda ran her fingers through the yolk one last time. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I really am sorry…”

But Mitch was already running out the door.

“Go with him,” Wanda told Tommy. “Now comes the darkness…”

33

Knocking?

Is that what he was hearing? A knocking in that empty house?

Yes, knocking. And hearing it, recognizing it, Deke wondered just how long he’d been hearing it. He’d been lost on his private fantasy train, but he was certain that he’d been hearing that sound for some time. Maybe that’s why his skin was crawling and his guts were bunching up…physical reactions to that sound. That awful drumming sound.

He sat up in his chair.

Knock, knock, knock.

He knew what he was thinking some time before he’d allowed himself to acknowledge it. The knocking. His room was next to Nicky’s and sometimes in the night they would knock out Morse Code to one another. But that didn’t mean anything. Not really.

Deke got up, wondering if he was really going to go up there. If he dared go up there. Because there was no getting around one thing: the knocking was directly overhead and the only room overhead was Nicky’s.

Deke walked over to the stairs with his flashlight. He didn’t really believe his brother was up there, but somebody was. As he stood at the bottom of the steps, his heart pounding with a low and muted sound, he heard the knocking again. And then something more. The creaking of bedsprings. He knew that creak very well. It was from Nicky’s bed. Deke had not heard it in a year and a half, but he recognized it instantly for what it was. Somebody had been lying in Nicky’s bed. Somebody had been lying there, knocking lightly on the wall and now…now they were getting up.

Deke’s throat was so dry he could not swallow.

He knew he could not just go up there and meet whatever it was with just a flashlight in hand. There was a shotgun in the basement, but he had no idea where the shells were. He had to think. He didn’t have the time. Whoever was up there was walking across Nicky’s floor, perhaps moving to the doorway even now.

“C’mon, asshole,” Deke said under his breath. “A weapon…something…”

Then he knew. The fireplace tools. Blackened and heavy, drop-forged iron. He took up a poker and had visions of dad stirring the coals in the fireplace so that Nicky and he could roast marshmallows.

Drawing in a sharp breath, he started up the steps.

This was as bad as it could get. There was no doubt of that. He could feel the weight of his body as he mounted each stair, the very pressure of his being. The air seemed hot or electrical around him like it was filled with some stored potential energy that was crackling and about to be discharged.

At the top, his heart nearly stopped.

He heard a shrill, mewling sound and it filled his blood with ice crystals. But it was only Mr. Cheese. Deke put the flashlight on him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Mr. Cheese squinted at the light, wagged the stump of his tail. He was home after all. Always had been. And hear he was, sitting outside the door to Nicky’s room, meowing away.

He’s waiting to be let in, Deke. Old Mr. Cheese is waiting for what’s behind that door to let him in as it always did in the old days…except these aren’t the old days and what’s behind that door is not Nicky. It’s something else now. Something without a soul, something that crawled from a grave.

Mr. Cheese brushed up against his legs and Deke badly wanted to give him a kick, but he didn’t have the heart, he just didn’t have the heart to hurt that poor?

Knock, knock, knock.

From behind the door now. From Behind Nicky’s door. The sound of knuckles wrapping and there was no way in hell anyone but the two of them knew what that meant. Nobody but Nicky, or something pretending to be Nicky, could know the enormity of what that sound did to Deke. How it shattered him inside and made a scream claw dryly in his throat, made him want to drop to the floor and maybe pull himself into a corner where he could weep and suck his thumb with childish abandon.

He pulled air into his lungs. “Nicky?” he said. “Is that you, Nicky?”

Whoever was behind that door made no sound…no sound but sort of a dripping. But Deke knew they were there, he could sense their physical presence, feel it crawling into him like worms into bad meat, staying there and breeding. Whoever waited behind that wooden panel was wet and dripping and stank like carrion pulled from a drainage ditch.

“Okay,” Deke said. “Come on out then.”

The door swung open and Nicky stepped out, small and hunched-over, his burial suit hanging in tatters, just a gassy-smelling corpse that might have been fished from the bottom of a mossy well. Most of his face had rotted down to the bone, but where the flesh had once been, now there was a gray covering of mold. One eye socket was empty, the other set with a staring huge eyeball that was oily and black.

Deke gasped and stepped back.

Mr. Cheese laid his ears back against his skull, hissed, and ran down the steps.

Nicky smiled and most of his teeth were missing. “Hello, Deke, hello, big brother, I come back for you,” he said, speaking with a childlike voice, but one that had been freed of that little boy lisp that made it hard for him to pronounce the “R” sound. Yes, it sounded somewhat like the voice of a little boy, though damaged and moist, but there was a maturity to it now that was not just old, it was ancient. “You know what I did, Deke? Do you know what I did?”

“Nicky, oh God, no…”

“I came home and waited outside for mom and dad,” the thing said. “Yes, Deke, I waited outside. When dad came out to lock the garage, I was waiting for him. I put my teeth in his throat and I drank his blood and when mom came looking for him, I told her what it was like in hell. I told her what they did to her sweet little boy in hell. And then I killed her, Deke. I killed her and ate her guts and when I was done, I fucked her corpse?”

No this was not Nicky.

Deke was still frightened, but the anger he felt at the obscenities spewing from that thing’s mouth turned something black and bitter inside him. Without thinking, he swung the poker at the Nicky-thing. Swung it hard and overhand like he was trying to pound in a railroad spike. The poker came down before Nicky could react. It came down right on the crown of his head and split it wide open, driving that pestilence right to his knees. He sat there on the floor, holding his head which was wide open from nasal cavity to crown, black silt and slime and tangles of worms spilling out.

And the insane thing was, Nicky laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

There was no humor in it, of course. It was a scratching, metallic sound, vile and mocking. The laughter of the damned. The laughter that might drift up through a hole in the roof of hell. And Deke, half out of his mind with the sound of it, kept swinging and swinging and the Nicky-thing did not fight back. It just laughed as that poker came down, smashing its skull and snapping its bones, ripping and pulverizing it until it was just a mass of writhing carrion…flesh and muscle and skeleton that moved on the floor, dismembered and fragmented. But all through it, that skull laughed and laughed.

Deke just threw the poker and tumbled headlong down the stairs, senseless and mindless, overwhelmed by adult anxieties and childhood terrors. He lay on the floor until reality came swimming back and with it, a stark ugliness that he had never known before or even guessed existed. Everything he’d known, everything he’d held dear had been ripped away now and there was nothing, nothing, nothing.

Upstairs, what was left of Nicky still moved, still laughed, still emoted.

“You can’t run, big brother, and you can’t hide! We’re in the water and in the houses and far down below! Not just here, but everywhere, everywhere! We’re all coming through now and we’re all hungry! Deathless and nighted and born of darkness?”

But that’s all Deke could listen to.

He went over to the cupboard by the fireplace and got the can of fluid dad had started fires with. He sprayed it everywhere and then lit the house up with a candle. Drapes burned. The wood by the fireplace. The carpet. The sofa. It all blazed up and, upstairs, that thing was screaming because it knew what was happening, it knew it would be roasted to ash. It knew the flames would send it back to whatever gutter had birthed it.

The house filling with smoke, Deke grabbed up Mr. Cheese and stumbled out into the rain.

34

By the time they reached the Broad Street Overpass that skirted the very outer edge of Bethany Square, Mitch had woven himself into a cocoon. That’s how it seemed to Tommy and that’s pretty much how it felt to Mitch himself. Suddenly, everything was unreal and out of proportion and he felt numb, frigid and thick and senseless. Like he was wrapped in dirty, spitty silk or maybe drugged. Maybe it was the day. Maybe it was seeing dead people walk and watching some crazy old lady divine things from egg yolks. Yeah, all of that, topped off with Lily being gone and knowing, oh yes, knowing that she was gone for good.

“Mitch…listen to me,” Tommy said. “We don’t know anything. We really don’t. Maybe…maybe she…well, I don’t know, but maybe she?”

“Got lost? Went to get a loaf of bread? Forgot to let the neighbor’s fucking cat out?”

Tommy just said, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you don’t know, Tommy, but I know. I know.”

“Because that old witch lady had a vision from stirring runny egg yolks?” Tommy pulled off his cigarette, moving Lily’s big conversion van carefully down the flooding streets, avoiding stalled cars…and anything else that might be out there. “C’mon, old buddy, I bought the show while we were there, but let’s not go ga ga over this shit. There’s no way she could know and…and she never actually said something had happened to Lily.”

“She didn’t have to.”

“But, Mitch?”

“Don’t…okay, Tommy? Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me argue with you, because I don’t have the fucking strength right now. I can barely breathe.” Mitch took a few deep breaths, amazed as how heavy his limbs felt, at the slow roll of his heart. “Mrs. Sepperley didn’t have to tell me shit, okay? I saw it on her face and I felt it right into my guts. That’s enough for me. Lily’s dead. I know she’s dead. I know that my wife is dead.”

Mitch barely got that part out before breaking down into tears. Those waterworks started rolling, but he fought them back with sheer willpower. Now was not the time. There would be a time for grieving, a time for mourning when the true horror or realization set in, but it wasn’t now. He couldn’t weaken now. If he let go, he’d fall right apart. His seams would burst and there would be nothing but a mess left. And until he got those kids safe and found Chrissy, he refused to crumble.

Tommy’s wrong, he thought. He’s wrong and he knows he’s wrong. His heart is in the right place, but I’m just not up to denial right now. I don’t have the strength to deceive myself.

When they’d got back to Mitch’s house?Mitch out front, running and stumbling and just white with terror and, yes, rage?Rhonda Zirblanksi met them at the door, Rita at her side. They both looked pale and confused and shaky. Rhonda told Mitch what had happened. That Lily said to shut her eyes, went outside and stood in the flooded street. And when she looked again, Lily was gone.

Right away, Mitch ran outside, running around and calling Lily’s name and with the state of mind he was in, Tommy figured it was a good thing none of those zombies showed…because they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Tommy went out there after him, of course, but Mitch was wild, completely wild, and after the second time he knocked Tommy on his ass, Tommy dragged himself back into the house. And it was there that Rhonda said what she had been too frightened to say in front of Mitch. That Lily kept saying how she thought someone was calling her name. How the house would sink down to dark, flooded places where there would be people waiting for them. How she’d gone down into the cellar and screamed…and then gone outside.

“She was standing right out in that big puddle,” Rhonda said, tears in her eyes. “There was something wrong with her, but I didn’t know what to do! I turned away for a minute…then she just wasn’t there anymore.”

Mitch had come back about ten minutes later, drenched and beside himself. Tommy poured some Jack Daniels into him and was there for him, for what good that did. But eventually, he had to tell Mitch what Rhonda said. Mitch seemed to understand things that Tommy didn’t then. They went down into the cellar and there was nothing to see but filth backed-up into the stationary drain, some black mud clotting the floor drain.

They stood there for maybe ten minutes and finally Mitch said. “You don’t get it, do you?”

And all Tommy could do was shake his head.

Mitch lit a cigarette and he was shaking so badly he had to use two hands to get it to his lips. “Lily…she’s been in a bad way ever since Marlene killed herself. And somehow, some way, she talked herself into thinking Marlene was down below in the rainwater sewers or some secret lake, who the hell knows. Down there somewhere, waiting for her.”

He didn’t need to go into anymore detail.

Tommy understood…at least, as much as you could understand the mechanics of a delusional mind. The death of her sister had torn her mind and probably her soul wide open. All the good stuff had drained from that jagged rent and what had filled up the void was dark and spooky and demented. Yes, she thought her sister was calling to her. Missed her so much, that even the idea of a ghost or something like a ghost coming for her was just fine and dandy. Jesus, it was a tragedy. A real ugly tragedy. And especially if you’d known Lily before that.

But there were other things that Mitch had not said and did not need to. Things Tommy didn’t dare say out loud. The dead were rising in Witcham, issuing up from flooded graves and walking the streets. In a sane, ordinary world with sane, ordinary physical laws and logic, what they were both thinking would have been ludicrous. The sort of madness that could have gotten you committed. But…what if Marlene had returned? Because such a thing was now certainly possible, wasn’t it?

Mitch had to live with the possibility.

And if, say, Marlene had dragged Lily below into the darkness and dank seas of rainwater and sewage…would she come back, too? Tonight or tomorrow night or a week from now, would she come knocking at the door in the dead of night? Bleached white and waterlogged like the others, nothing but a foul blackness inside of her?

It was the sort of thing that made you want to laugh until you cried and cry until you began laughing hysterically. But it was certainly a possibility, now wasn’t it?

35

“Are you up to this, Mitch?” Tommy said as he came to Coogan Avenue, the shattered barrier there, which certainly looked like something as big as a bus had smashed through those sawhorses.

“Yeah,” Mitch said, not believing it himself. “I’m up to it.”

They stepped out into the wet darkness, clicking on their flashlights. Tommy had his four-ten and Mitch had his twenty-gauge Remington autoloader. Neither of them believed that the guns would do them much good, but they were something. And both men had filled the waterproof pockets of their raincoats with salt. It was crazy, maybe, but they’d seen what salt could do to the newly-risen.

The Zirblanksi twins were with Mrs. Sepperley now. She was old and more than a little frail, but she knew things and Mitch was pretty sure the dead would not mess with her.

“This is better,” Mitch said. “It’s chilly and raining, but it clears my head. That van…it smells like Lily.”

Tommy understood.

They’d taken Lily’s van so they had enough room to pack the kids. It was all-wheel drive, rode up high, and handled the water pretty good.

Flashlight beams panning the murky night around them, Mitch and Tommy started down the hill towards the rising water. Near the bottom, the lake that had drowned Bethany was black and leaf-covered. Some crates and cardboard boxes bobbed in it, stray branches and a couple bald tires, some other things obscured by the leaves. You could smell the stink of the river, the backed-up sewers and the ever-present smell of rot which was even more pronounced down there.

“After you,” Mitch said.

Tommy wiped a sheen of rain from his face and stepped into the mire. Mitch followed him. He wished they’d had time to bring waders, because the water was chilly and slimy-feeling, filled with submerged things that bumped into his legs. Things he just didn’t want to know about. He could just imagine the diseases simmering in that noxious organic stew of standing water and putrescence. It felt thick and muddy, full of suspended sediment. A mist steamed from its surface.

“I’m thinking I ain’t gonna like this,” Tommy said.

And Mitch was pretty much thinking that neither of them would. There were guys, he knew, that got paid to wallow in festering muck like that, but Tommy and he weren’t those kind of guys. He just wondered what sort of germs and contamination he was breathing in.

Bethany was an old place any day or night. Filled with old houses and old, rotting buildings, some restored, but many just decaying like Witcham’s industrial past. The streets here were narrow and winding, cut by snaking alleys and countless archaic cul-de-sacs. But on a night like this…with the flooding and the rain and the lack of electric lights, well, it was simply black and haunted and menacing. The buildings and high houses around them were netted in shadow, leaning out over the streets like they wanted to fall. The flashlights only cut ten, maybe fifteen feet tops into the stagnant brew coming off the water. Droplets of rain lit in the beams like tiny insects, falling and streaking. Things rustled in the shadows, splashed and squished. You could hear water running from rainspouts, things creaking and rattling in the wind.

They moved on slowly, panning their lights about, hearing sounds but never seeing what made them. The weave of darkness was claustrophobic and crushing. They stepped down carefully, never knowing what lay beneath that soup or if they might step into an open manhole or if the street beneath them might have given away to subsidence.

Tommy said, “Remember when I told you how bad that mortuary I worked at was?”

Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, this is worse.”

Mitch believed him. Because he didn’t think anything could be worse than this. Worse than the smell and the dark and the way it made him feel inside. For as impossible as it may have sounded, everything seemed miles away now. Not just people and life, but everything he had been through and even the dire knowledge that he would never see Lily again. All that had been swept away by the stark immensity of this particular, awful moment. It felt like the city was closing in around them, pressing down with a ghastly weight, rising up like a great hand that wanted to crush them. He could feel something like a thousand eyes watching him, studying him, making him feel his own impending death which would not be quick and silent, but brutal and dirty.

“What the hell’s that?” Tommy said, his voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere south of his throat.

Mitch put his light on an irregular series of humps covered in leaves. But not covered enough, because he soon made out a white arm and then an ashen face, a single leaf clinging to its forehead and accentuating its pallor. The eyes were sunken, the lips shriveled like an old lady without her teeth in. A beetle crawled out of the nostril and then crawled back in. The entire body was blown up with gas, immensely round and barrel-like.

They moved around it nervously, just waiting for it to move.

“I guess…I guess I can handle corpses now,” Tommy said. “Long as they don’t move.”

They passed another bobbing body floating facedown in the classic dead man’s float. Its back had been laid open right to the spinal vertebrae. Something had been at it. Something with teeth. The water went from around their waists to up above their bellies as they moved through a dip and then it sank back down a few inches.

If Mitch had closed his eyes, he would have thought he was crawling through a subterranean pipe. The falling rain, the steam, the echo of dripping water. God, he’d never felt so completely unclean like he’d been wading in a septic tank. He had a nasty desire to scratch his skin off.

They moved on, hoping beyond hope that Wanda Sepperley hadn’t led them on a wild and deadly goose chase. The stink was not only pervasive, but palpable. Growing stronger the further they went. It was a flyblown, squalid odor…excrement and piss, rot and wet decay, surely, but something else, too. A living smell like what you might smell at the bottom of a rotting pile of leaves or under a green, mossy log. There was a rich, almost heady vitality to that stink. The odor of something that wormed through the bowels of corpses or perhaps its breath, the breath of something low and vile that chewed on putrefying carcasses.

But really putting a name to it was impossible.

For this was the stench of the resurrected. Things rotting, yet animate.

“I’m not seeing any bus,” Tommy said, the fear so thick on his voice it dripped.

“A little farther,” Mitch said. “I think…I think the street turns just up ahead.”

He pushed on ahead of Tommy, like a knife cutting through spoiled loops of viscera. And as that smell worsened, became impossibly acrid and sweet, he waited for something misshapen with long yellow teeth and bleeding eyes to rise from the muck and take a bite out of him. Now and again, the chill water would become infused with a warm stream like somebody had just emptied their bladder into it. But then it would pass.

Mitch felt it before he saw it, as he’d been feeling it for some time now: the sense that they were not alone. He brought his shotgun up, gripped the stock with his hand.

“Oh, shit,” Tommy said.

Not even ten feet from them, a grotesque and angular form rose up, caked with leaves, its face hanging like gray ropy moss from the yellow bone beneath…if you could even describe it as a face, for it looked more like some morbid fungi that might web the corners of a sunken tomb. Mitch could see its white teeth and the black holes where its eyes should have been. It was holding out its hands as if it wanted something.

So Mitch, feeling all the badness and madness filling him, gave it something.

He gave it a round of birdshot at point-blank range, steadying the Remington with his flashlight hand. The boom sounded like a missile erupting from a silo. It echoed off the faces of houses and buildings, went rolling over the rooftops like distant thunder. The round blew a hole in its belly big enough to hide a cantaloupe in. But the thing did not fall. It jerked from the impact, made a screeching sound, and a great quantity of flesh and meat sprayed into the water behind it.

But that was it.

It swayed back and forth, smoke rolling from the hole in its abdomen. There was a mucid, slushy sound that was infinitely repulsive, reminding Mitch of what a diseased placenta expelled from a womb might sound like. There was that sound and then the thing’s bowels fell out of its belly in a mutilated tangle, like snakes peeled raw, dropping into the water along with a gush of black slime.

Still, it did not fall.

It stood there, a watery sound coming from its mouth as if its throat were filled with soft, soggy things. It was trying to talk and God only knew what horrors it might tell them of were such a thing possible.

Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.

He stuck his flashlight inside his jacket and brought out a fistful of salt. And without further ado, he took two, uneasy steps forward, said, “Here, have some seasoning, you ugly sonofabitch.”

He tossed the salt at it and right away the thing began to cook, to shrivel and smoke and sputter like bacon fat on a hot griddle. The thing coiled and clawed and made a sharp hissing sound that was probably not its voice at all, but the sound of that salt dehydrating it. Its flesh went soft and plastic, as did the tissues below, and then they literally melted from the skeleton beneath, pissing into the grimy waters. And the most ludicrous thing of all, was that skeleton, the framework still stood. It was a horrible thing ribboned in tendon and sinew and mats of bubbling flesh. But it stood, smoking and trembling, and then it simply collapsed into the water, steaming, sinking from view.

Tommy made a gagging sound.

Mitch was glad his belly was empty.

Trying to blink it away, he hooked an arm around Tommy’s elbow and dragged him on forward. They had to reach that bus and they had to goddamn well reach it now. There was no time to freak out, no time to puke or try to make sense of that which was utterly senseless.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

They splashed forward and Tommy seemed to understand that, suddenly, time was of the essence. They had to get it done and get it done now. Sure, they’d only encountered one zombie. And that was enough, thank you very much, but Mitch had this wild idea that they were like rats: when you saw one, the rest of the pack wasn’t very far behind. And maybe it was something more than that, like maybe these things were like wasps or bees. A hive mind. When you did something to one, they all knew it. When one was injured or killed, maybe the others knew it, too.

He was soaking wet and smelled like a rag used to wipe out a public toilet, but his throat was dry. Just as dry as he was inside, filled with dust and time and memory, maybe understanding that one invariably leads to the other. They came to the end of the street where the road split into a Y. They took the right fork and simply because Mitch was going purely on instinct here. Wanda Sepperley’s directions were fairly vague, only saying that the bus was down Coogan Avenue, at the bottom. And when it came to two diverging roads, Mitch had read somewhere that when lost, people almost always chose the right fork over the left.

They came around the corner and there was the bus. The front end had sunk down into the water right up to the hood, a flatbed truck right in front of it. Carefully, Mitch and Tommy moved along the side, hoping that those kids were still inside. Mitch thought he could hear a few muffled voices, but wasn’t sure. He came up to the bifold door and hammered on it with his flashlight.

“Hey, you kids! Open up!” he called out. “We’re here to get you out!”

“Anybody in there?” Tommy said.

A few faces appeared in the rain-specked windows and you could see by the way they did it?very cautiously?they were maybe afraid of what they might see. Tommy flashed his light at them and pretty soon they could hear feet thumping around in there. The door swung open and a flashlight caught Mitch directly in the face.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Sorry,” Bobby Luce said to them. “We thought you were normal, but…but we weren’t sure.”

“All right, c’mon,” Mitch told them. “We’re getting you out of here.”

The kids, seven or eight of them, came scrambling out, not minding the water, just glad to be out of that coffin, glad that the waiting was over. And Mitch could see it on their faces, that the waiting had been the very worst part. The water came up to their chests and he and Tommy led them away from the front of the bus to the rear where it dropped down towards their bellies. Quickly, Mitch formed them into a daisy chain, made them hold hands. Tommy led the way out and he himself watched the back door.

It was a scary, tense business wading through the soup, making for the hill and the van above. But they did it. They actually did it, ignoring the splashing secretive sounds all around them.

And when they reached the top of the hill and Tommy moved them into the back of the van, Mitch stood there with his shotgun and flashlight, guarding them. Before he got in, he looked down the hill to the rising, black water.

And they were down there.

Dozens of distorted forms had risen from the water and they just stood there like wax statues.

The walking dead.

DECAY

1

Sometimes it was the rain and sometimes it was the wind and sometimes it was just the night closing in on them. All Chuck Bittner knew for sure was that maybe, just maybe, he had made a mistake here. Maybe they all had. Maybe they should have waited with the others in the bus for rescue. Because, yeah, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, just up and walk out of there, but now he just wasn’t so sure.

He wasn’t so sure about a lot of things.

Because with the power out, things were very dark, pitch black almost. You could see the shapes of buildings and houses looming around you, but that’s all they were, just shapes. Even the flashlight did them little good with the rain pouring down and the night rising up and that wind howling through the empty places, because…well, because sometimes it almost sounded like human voices out there.

They’d been slogging through the waist-deep water for what seemed hours now, Cal and Kyle Woltrip in the lead, seeming to get a kick out of the whole thing. Tara Boyle was with them and Brian Summers, Jacob Key and Mark Tobin. That was their posse, the ones that had made the heroic breakout from the schoolbus. They had been turned around and turned around again and God only knew where they were now.

Chuck was numb from the waist down. He very much wanted to be out of this. Because he was starting to feel the need to do something he had not done publicly in years: cry.

From the moment they’d left the bus he’d felt oddly exhilarated, excited that they were doing the sensible thing and just helping themselves. Taking charge and not waiting in that damn bus like a bunch of old ladies. But no more than twenty minutes into it, following behind the Woltrip brothers who managed to get them more and more lost with each turn, he began to feel something more primal, something that cut from the inside: fear.

There was no denying it.

And it wasn’t just him.

For not only were they wet and shivering, they were all scared.

At times, the rain came down in a fall of needles, fierce and blinding, and there was nothing to do but cover your head and wait it out. At other times, it was more of a cold drizzle than anything else.

But it all sucked.

It all completely sucked.

They were paused at what might have been an intersection once. Overhead, in the beam of Cal’s flashlight, they could see the swinging mass of a dead traffic light. It swung on its wires, impossibly large and impossibly clumsy looking. If it fell, it would surely crush one of them. Cal put the light on the street signs. Westhaven and 15^th Avenue.

That didn’t tell Chuck much.

He was from Elmwood Hills like the rest of the kids. He didn’t know Bethany and this was Bethany. Maybe he didn’t know much about directions outside of Elmwood, but he did know that Westhaven Street was over in Bethany. Chuck agreed with his dad that River Town and Bethany were just a lot of ugly old properties that should have been razed for new development. Chuck’s dad sold real estate and Chuck figured he would one day, too. And when he did, he’d have Bethany bulldozed to the ground.

Tara Boyle, slumping under the rain, said, “I thought you said we were in Crandon. Westhaven isn’t in Crandon.”

“It is too,” Cal Woltrip said, but you could detect a note of uncertainty under his words.

“It is not! My dad’s going to put a Burger King in Bethany! He told me so! He said he was putting it on Westhaven Street!”

“Lah-tee-dah,” Kyle said. “Do we have to listen to this?”

“You’re both…jack-offs!” Tara told them. “All you’ve done is get us lost!”

“You could do better?” Cal asked her.

“Anybody could do better,” Chuck told him.

“Okay, smartass. Here’s the flashlight. Go ahead, take it. You lead. You get us out of here.”

Brian and Jacob and Mark just stood around forlornly, rain dripping off them.

Chuck swallowed, took the light. “Good, now we have a chance.”

“You don’t know your own ass from a hole in the ground,” Kyle told him. “Just a fag like your old man.”

Chuck turned on him quick, but Cal got in-between them.

“No, no, no,” Cal said. “Let the big man lead us out. Go ahead, Mr. Big Man. Do your stuff. But if you don’t get us out, then we’re all gonna kick your ass.”

Brian giggled.

Tara sighed. “Oh, spare me the drama.”

Chuck turned away from all of them.

They all stepped back, left him out front, all alone.

Well, it was just a matter of…well, he didn’t honestly know. But he wasn’t about to admit that. Westhaven was right ahead of them. If they followed it back the other way, to what he thought would be east, then they would have to come out in Crandon. Of course, if those dumbass Woltrips hadn’t been in charge, they could have followed the hill up out of Bethany to Broad Street.

Chuck, feeling very tense inside, took a step forward. Then another.

2

By God, it was a wasteland.

Bethany was a drowning wasteland.

Chuck Bittner saw it open up before him and it took his breath away. You simply couldn’t realize the extent of the devastation until you were hip-deep in it. Just like you couldn’t appreciate the cool dankness of the grave until you found yourself in one.

A bit of moonlight came through now and about all it did was make the streets look like a flooded cemetery with all those buildings and houses rising up, some leaning and others narrow and skeletal. The waters had claimed Bethany like some gargantuan oil spill, something black and rising and glistening. Nothing but floating leaves and garbage, pieces of houses and tree branches.

“C’mon,” Chuck said.

He moved down Westhaven in a direction that he was pretty certain would take them away from the river. And that was the important thing now. The water was thick and sludgy, lots of submerged things bumping into them. Occasional ripples brushed through it as if things were moving just under the surface. Everything echoed with a rolling, subterranean sound that was more than a little disconcerting.

Chuck was scared.

Oh, he’d never admit it to the others, but he was bad scared. Scared like he hadn’t been in years maybe. Back when he was little and his mom used to hold him when he had a bad dream. A long time ago. Mom was dead now, of course, and Chuck had trouble feeling anything about that. She’d moved out when he was like five and spent her time drinking and whoring (his father’s words). Chuck saw her quite a bit at first, but as the years passed and she tangled herself up with one man after the other, the visits became very infrequent. When she died, he hadn’t seen her in almost three years. But right then, he wished she was there. Not his dad, but her.

They moved on that way silently for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then stopped.

“What was that?” Brian said.

“I don’t know,” Kyle told him.

They’d all heard it and it stopped them dead. Nobody was willing to identify what it was. Or maybe they were just afraid to. Chuck panned his light around. It gleamed off the water, sparkled with raindrops. A few stray leaves blew around before settling into the murky soup.

“It was nothing,” Chuck told them.

But, dear God, he did not honestly believe that for a minute. That sound had been clamorous and loud and sharp. He knew what it sounded like, but he wouldn’t dare put a name to it. Not out loud. But in his head, a voice was saying, You know darn well what you heard. It’s weird and freaky and it just doesn’t belong, but you know what it was…a noisemaker.

Sure, one of those silly contraptions you spun around on a stick on New Years Eve. They were kind of funny, kind of annoying maybe. But out here? Out in this flooded blackness? Such a sound was about as disturbing as anything Chuck could imagine. For those things didn’t make noise by themselves, somebody had to spin them, to wind them around on their sticks. And that could only mean that someone was out there, someone who thought this was all some kind of party. And what kind of person would think that?

The sound came again and again.

“That’s…that’s one of them whaddyacallems,” Kyle said.

“Noisemaker,” his brother put in.

“Out here?” Jacob said.

Suddenly they could all hear Tara breathing so hard and so fast it sounded like she might be hyperventilating. “We better get out of here,” she said. “This isn’t right. Nobody would do that. Not out here.”

And maybe they were all waiting for Cal or Kyle to say something truly inappropriate like, well, nobody sane. But they said nothing and it was just like that moment on the bus when they’d all suddenly felt something outside. It was like that…heavy and ominous.

Nothing but silence and falling rain, the moan of the wind.

Mark sniffed the air. “You smell that? Does anybody smell that?”

Chuck felt something tighten inside, wind up tight like a rubber band to the point of bursting. He was smelling things, too, but right away his mind simply refused what it was receiving. He could not be smelling these things.

Not out here.

Tara’s breathing galloped quickly, then slowed. “That’s…oh my God…that’s cotton candy! Can you smell it? That’s cotton candy! Like at the carnival and the fair!”

“No, it’s not,” Chuck said.

“It is,” she maintained.

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I can smell it…but why out here?”

“I smell other things,” Brian said.

“Hot dogs…that’s hot dogs,” Jacob said, just beside himself.

Mark nodded. “And popcorn.”

But they were wrong, they were all wrong and Chuck knew it. Sure, he had smelled those things, too…at first. Sweet cotton candy and salty buttered popcorn in little boxes, the smell of hot dogs bubbling in grease and wrapped in doughy, deep-fried buns. Maybe ice cream and root beer in waxed cups, too. Like all of the fall carnival in one swooning breath. But he knew he wasn’t really smelling it. It was in his head, just as it was in theirs. And if he let himself go?and he badly wanted to with a childish glee?he might have smelled the smoke of barbecuing chickens and iced lemonade and hot-buttered corn-on-the-cob, maybe even elephants and the dirty straw from the monkey cages, too.

But he did not let himself go, even though a funny, sing-song voice in his head was saying, Aw, kid, don’t be such wet blanket! Can’t you smell the circus and the carnival and the fair in August? Don’t you know the fun you’re missing? It’s all out there, it’s all waiting for you and all you have to do is simply roll with it like the others…

No, Chuck was not rolling with it.

Maybe the others were. Maybe they didn’t know that there was something deranged and perverse about all this, but Chuck did. He knew danger when he smelled it and he was smelling it now like the acidic fumes from a battery that was about to explode in his face. He felt it up his spine and along the back of his neck and down deep in his stomach in a thick, expanding mass that made him want to throw up. But maybe the others didn’t and maybe they were so damn scared inside, they were afraid to admit to it. For what could be dangerous about such things? What possible hell could there be in the smell of sweets and junk food?

But Chuck knew.

Because sweets worked on kids, didn’t they? That’s why perverts offered them to kids so they’d get into their cars. Kids liked things like that…carnivals and fairs and circuses and popcorn and hot dogs and cotton candy. Good fun and games and sugary things. And maybe those sweets tasted good when you shoved them into your mouth, but when that dark, evil car rolled to a stop in the shadowy woods and you were dragged screaming into the trees, smelling the vileness of your host, feeling his or its hot breath in your face, those eyes like dirty coins appraising you like fresh meat and you smelled the sour rot of his breath…well, the kiddie games were over, now weren’t they, boys and girls? Now comes the touching and the defilement and the juicy blackness that would tear your soul out in bloody, soiled chunks?

“No!” Chuck shouted.

The others stopped their daydreaming and their respective fantasy trains ground to a rusty halt. They were all looking at him, thinking he had lost it now. And Maybe he had. Maybe he had at that. And how could he really explain to them that if they kept rolling with this one, they’d roll straight off the biggest fucking cliff they could ever imagine?

They all just stared and he couldn’t seem to find the words to make them understand.

He knew what they thought about him.

He knew what all the kids at school thought about him.

He knew they despised him. Oh yes, despised him. That was the word. Because Chuck Bittner was a braggart, he was overstuffed and full of hot air and superior and uppity. Chuck always bragged, always. My dad did this and my dad did that. We own this and we own that. My dad bought me this and my dad bought me that and we’re going to Cozumel and Disneyworld and I have three new game systems and my own checking account…and what do any of you have? You have nothing compared to me because I’m better than you, richer than you, oh so much more important than you. That’s the way they all saw him and he knew it and he always had. Oh, he pretended he didn’t know how they hated him, but he knew. That’s why some nights he woke up, unable to breathe, because he knew he was alone, terribly alone. They hated him and he had no friends but the ones he could buy with daddy’s money. And sometimes it was just too much, like being the only mouse in a snakepit, knowing those kids would kill him if they could, do just about anything to cut him down to size.

And now they were all staring at him like he was crazy.

Sure, he was a little spoiled brat and he knew it at that moment like never before. He saw himself as he was and he hated himself, too. Really, truly. And that’s what made this all even harder, because they would never believe him.

Never understand that there was danger ahead.

That he knew things they did not.

And that funny sing-song voice said, You’re a spoiled rotten little bastard! Ha, ha, ha! That’s all you are and daddy can’t help you out here! He can’t buy you out of this, now can he?

Though he was numb from the chill water, Chuck was sweating profusely, feverish and just sick about who he was and what he now knew. “Listen to me,” he said. “Please just listen, okay? I know you guys don’t like me, but listen to me. You’re not really smelling those things. It’s all a game, you see? Something out there wants to draw us in. It’s using these smells to get us to go out there where it’s waiting…”

3

“He’s tweaked,” Cal said.

“Had to happen sooner or later,” Kyle added.

Chuck fought for the words to adequately express himself. He wished Bobby Luce were there, because he was good with words. He would have made them understand. Sure, those smells were getting stronger now for Chuck, too, but once you accepted the fact that they were not real, they started smelling like other things…like closed-up, mildewy places and wormy corpses and blood bubbling from slit throats.

“Listen!” Tara said. “Do you hear that? Do you?”

They all began to talk at once, but Chuck could not hear them. He could only hear the tinny, rising melody of a calliope, the sort of thing that always provided the background music for merry-go-rounds.

“There’s gotta be some kind of fair out there,” Brian said.

“It’s nuts,” Jacob said, denying it, yet pleased at the idea.

The music kept playing, the rain falling off to that cold, windy drizzle again. The seven of them stood there up to their waists in that filthy water, smelling not sewage and backed-up pipes now, but sweet things and salty things, and the music played on…so wonderful, so inviting. The clouds even parted and a soft down of moonlight lit up the world, washing everything down with a ghostly luminance.

“Look!” Tara cried out. “Over there!”

“A clown!” Cal said. “A real clown!”

And they all got very excited, calling out to him, even though Chuck warned them not to. Because maybe he was the only one who really saw what was standing under that department store canopy, something hunched and wormy and foul.

Then the clown was gone.

But Chuck had seen it. What it was and what it was not.

“C’mon,” he said, barely able to control the terror inside him. “We better go back the other way.”

But Cal laughed in his face. “Why?”

“He’s losing it,” Kyle said.

“No, listen to me?”

But they did not want to listen.

“Maybe the clown can help us,” Tara said.

“Yeah, he’ll know the way out,” Mark agreed.

“Sure,” Cal said.

But Jacob just stood there. “I don’t know…I don’t really like clowns.”

Which got the Woltrip brothers laughing and Chuck wanted to laugh, too. He felt the laughter bubbling up from his belly, because it really was funny, wasn’t it? The absurdity of this situation? The seven of them standing in that reeking water in a flooded, deserted part of town seeing clowns and hearing calliopes and smelling cotton fucking candy? Hee, hee, hee, it was hilarious!

“He’s right,” Chuck said, trying to get a hold of himself. “That’s no clown…it’s…it’s a monster! Like those things that tried to get in the bus!”

“Tell him to stop,” Tara said, the fear encroaching on her now, too.

“Yeah, shut up, faggot,” Cal told him.

“I’m going to talk to that clown,” Kyle said.

He started moving off and Chuck grabbed him and then both Kyle and Cal shoved him away and he went down, sinking into that cold, stinking water, and rising up quickly, gagging. “You…you can’t go!” he told them.

Then just in front of them, a wave of water moved past like something big had skimmed by just under the surface. Like maybe a crocodile. And that served to sober them up, at least for a minute or two.

And then a voice, piping and musical and silly, said, “Hey, you kids! You gonna stand there and freeze or what? C’mon, it’s dry over here! It’s fun over here! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

The clown was only about twenty feet away this time.

His suit was orange-and yellow checked with great green pom poms running down the front, a bright red ruffled collar and cuffs, and oversized white clown gloves. His face was completely white, the lips painted black, his eyes set inside black harlequin diamonds. On his head was a bright blue jester cap with tinkling bells at the tips. He was grinning happily, a mound of cotton candy on a stick in one hand.

“Cmon!” he said. “I won’t bite you!”

Chuck watched the kids begin to slowly move in his direction. They couldn’t see him as he was and they couldn’t smell that awful odor wafting off of him. They were moving towards him and his grin widened and you could see that behind that smile were teeth, really big teeth. Whatever spells he was casting and whatever dark magic he sprinkled into the wind, oh, it worked just fine.

“Don’t,” Chuck heard himself say, that calliope music so loud now it drowned out his words. “Please, don’t…”

Chuck was looking into the clown’s eyes and seeing what was really behind them, that malignant gnawing emptiness, that slimed pit of bones and carrion that it had for a mind.

Don’t be such a spoiled little party pooper! that sing-song voice said in his mind and he knew it belonged to the clown. Play along with me, Chucky! You’ll have fun! You’ll have lots of good, gobby fun! I promise you that! Grimshanks promises you and Grimshanks always keeps his promises and especially to fine, plump little boys like you, Chucky-fucky-sucky! Lookit the fun your friends are having! Oh, it’ll be a merry, silly lark we’ll have! You can have fun, too! Just like them! You can laugh and gorge yourself with sweets right to the end! Oh, boo-hoo, Chucky-fucky, you’re no fun at all! And I thought you could play with me, be with me! You hate them as much as I do! Why not play my games with me? I’ll show you what you do with these sweet-meats, I’ll show you how to fuck and suck and slit and tear them! I’ll show you how to play with their great big globs of greasy grimy kiddie guts and fondle their underparts and make balloon-animals from their entrails! Hee, hee, hee, ho, ho, ho!

“Shut up!” Chuck said, hands pressed to his ears. “You just shut up!”

But the clown voice, oh so unfunny now, would not shut up. How about that Tara? it said. I bet she’s got a sweet, saucy little cunt for us to chew and bite! Would you like that? I’ll teach you how to make them scream! What hurts and what feels good! Just you and me, Chucky-fucky! We’ll fuck ‘em and slit them and rip them wide open and then bury what’s left down in dirty, damp cellars! Take my hand, you randy little prick! Because I love you! I alone love you! They won’t be there for you when you fall, but I will! You’ve tasted the darkness and smelled the fear and know what it’s like to be shivering and alone! Just like me! Remember one thing, you humpty-dumpty little cockfuck: when you fall, they won’t be there to put you back together again, but I will! I’ll pick up your pieces and lick the sweet juice from every one, lick, lick, lick, and lick!

“NO!” Chuck screamed into the wind and rain. “NO! I WON’T LISTEN!

YOU CAN’T MAKE ME LISTEN!”

And then everyone stopped, because the clown was gone.

The music had stopped.

And the breeze just smelled like dankness and rot again, dead things and moldering things, sewers and nitrous cellars.

“Where did he go?” Kyle asked.

They had all scattered now. They were no longer closely bunched together where even in this terrible situation there might have been a modicum of safety. Now they were scattered out. Kyle in front, Cal at his side. Tara and Jacob four feet away from them, Mark off to the left and Brian to the right. And Chuck standing far behind, gasping and shaking and ready to lose his mind.

Another wave pushed through the rotting leaves in front of them. Then another splashed behind. Something brushed against Chuck’s ankle and he let out a cry.

You know where I am, Chucky! the clown said in his head. Tell ‘em all where I am…here, there, and nowhere! Tell ‘em how I hunted down boys in the night, Chucky! Tell ‘em what I did when I got them in my car! Go ahead, Chucky, tell ‘em! Tell ‘em all about Grimshanks! Tell ‘em how I died with that fucking rope around my neck, the water rising and things chewing on me and tunneling up my ass and down the head of my dick! Tell ‘em about it! Tell ‘em how I slink through sewers and giggle outside little boy’s windows at night, the moonlight winking off my teeth!

“Get out of here!” Chuck called out to them. “Everyone! We have to go now!”

But they were stunned and dazed and torpid, like dusty toys on a shelf that needed a good winding. They looked around, the fear sinking into them and cutting them open, making them bleed like Chuck was bleeding only it was too late now, too goddamned late and they just didn’t know it.

The water splashed and the leaves sluiced and the moonlight winked out above. And then there was darkness like that which could be found in deep graves and inside zippered body bags. The blackness of death and something even beyond death. A ravening, claustrophobic blackness that wrapped hands around your throat and sucked the wind from your lungs, pressed you down into sunless crevices and buried you beneath rotting cellar floors where a sweet and profane voice promised you that death would not be the end, but a blasphemous beginning.

There was a fountain water in front of the Woltrip brothers that sprayed them with leaves and silt. Chuck put the light on the disturbance and immediately regretted it. The water boiled and bubbled and the clown rose up not three feet away. But he did not rise like a swimmer from the depths, but with a corkscrewing motion like he was standing on a slowly turning pedestal.

He rose to full height, slicked with slime and mud, tiny glittering red beetles scurrying down his face which was an anemic clown-white, inflated from the gases of decay. The flesh itself was set with minute cracks and tiny punctures, droplets of black juice running from them and gathering in a spiderweb tracery. His lips were huge and blubbery like those of someone suffering an extreme allergic reaction. And the teeth behind them, long and narrow and yellow and terribly sharp, set in gums flecked with gray sores. But it was his eyes that the Woltrip brothers saw and felt. Set in those crayoned black diamonds, they were sunken back into the skull, pale and viscous and slimy like egg sacs, pulsing with a circuitry of pink veins.

“Hee, hee, hee,” the clown said. “Now it’s just you and me…”

Kyle fell back a few feet, water surging around him, but Cal did not. Or could not.

And that’s how Grimshanks wanted it.

When he spun his web, he did not care for his meaty fat flies to get away. Not when they were so close. Close enough to touch and drool over.

One of the other kids screamed and the clown mocked it with roughly the same sound as a man vomiting down a mineshaft. As his grin widened with malevolent delight, that network of tiny cracks and crevices spread out until his face began to resemble old pine bark, corrugated and flaking. Those dead eyes blazed, an oily ooze dripping from his mouth.

“Bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish, how many pieces do I wish?” he asked Kyle, his breath high and hot like a gangrenous wound. “Just one…”

Kyle never had a chance.

He was dead from the moment the clown selected him. Those huge white hands darted out and grasped Kyle on either side of his head. Chuck had thought the clown wore gloves, but he wore no gloves. These were his hands…white and bloated and pulpy, strings of tissue dangling from them. He jerked Kyle to him and crushed him in a loving embrace, hugging him to his gas-filled belly. And then without further ado, those teeth slid from the gums and sank into Kyle’s throat. It sounded like pitchforks spearing a soft pumpkin. Kyle trembled and gurgled, maybe trying to speak and Grimshanks tore his throat out, swallowing down something, blood spraying into the air and catching Cal right in the face.

Chuck held the flashlight out, illuminating it all.

He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

Grimshanks stared right at him as he squeezed Kyle to him, crushing the boy with such pressure that Kyle’s guts bulged from his mouth like those of a stepped-on toad. Then he began to take bites out of him, slashing with those teeth and tearing out strips of flesh. When the flashlight finally fell from Chuck’s hand, the last thing he saw was Grimshanks peel Kyle’s face from the bone beneath, shaking it from side to side in his jaws.

The light had failed and thank God for small mercies, but still you could hear that abomination eating Kyle, chewing and slurping, yanking things out of the boy that sounded like wet snakes and snapping bones in his teeth.

Tara was screaming.

One of the boys was, too. But there was no time for that. No time at all and they all seemed to know it. Jacob grabbed Tara and maybe she grabbed him and they started trying to run in the water which was about as easy as tapdancing through molasses. They stumbled and fell, pulling each other up, and Mark and Brian were with them, Chuck behind them telling them to move, move, move! They sloshed through the water, making for the nearest building which was really their only chance.

Behind them, the clown continued chewing on Kyle, his mouth packed with meat and blood, and through it all, he sang like a boy whose mouth was stuffed with Jello: “Lambsie dotes and dosie dotes and little Lambsie divy?”

It was all horrible.

The five of them tried to move away as fast as they could, but it was no easy bit. But they moved together, trying the doors in the buildings they came to. But opening a door that was held shut by water and accumulated mud was nearly impossible.

“Hurry!” Chuck kept telling them. “Hurry!”

“Why won’t he go away? Why won’t he just go away?” Tara was saying.

The drizzle faded and the moonlight broke through again. As the others tried doors and windows, Chuck looked back to make sure the clown was still where they’d left him. He was. Only now he had Cal and what was left of Kyle was floating in the water around him. He kept dunking Cal into the drink with those gargantuan white hands. “This little pig went to market!” Dunk. “This little pig stayed home!” Dunk. “This little piggy had roast beef, but boo-hoo, Grimshanks had none!” He held Cal under again and when he brought him back up he was just limp and flopping. “This little piggy cried, ‘Wee, wee, wee, wee!’ All the fucking way home!” And then he dunked Cal back under, held him by the head and bobbed him up and down in the area of where his crotch might be.

Chuck didn’t even want to think what that might represent.

The kids, all crying and moaning now, kept moving along, Chuck ordering them to do so. There wasn’t much holding them together and there wasn’t much of a chance, but something inside him and maybe inside them all made them keep going, trying more doors and windows.

And when Chuck looked back again, the clown was gone.

Just the remains of Kyle floating around and Cal face down in the water. But no clown, no goddamn clown. He could have been anywhere. In front of them, behind them, waiting to reach up and snare another snack. There was just no way to know. No possible way. The water surged around them, ripples spreading out and this was even worse than seeing that monster face to face.

And then that sing-song voice rose up, echoing and echoing: “Where is Grimshanks? Where is Grimshanks? Can you see? Can you see? He is right behind you, he is right behind you…big, big surprise!”

This time it was Chuck who screamed.

For the clown was indeed right behind them. It was floating along, up and out of the water, the tips of its comically oversized clown shoes dragging across the surface of the water. It floated slowly in their direction like a ghost, its eyes yellow and glowing, its stark-white face spattered with blood, a strand of flesh dangling from its jaws. “Hey, boys and girls, how do you do? Lookit the silly fucking thing old Grimshanks can do!”

As they watched, drawn down into themselves with limitless horror, that bulbous and hideous clown began to mimic its own grisly death. Its white rubbery neck stretched and stretched until it was easily three feet long and you could actually see where the noose cut into it, even if you couldn’t see the noose itself. The clown’s eyes rolled back into their dark sockets and its head dangled bonelessly to the side on that broken neck. You could see where the neck bone bulged under that white flesh, the skin there lividly purple. The clown’s swollen black tongue hung from its mouth.

It was dead.

Hanging from an obscene rope, twisting slowly from side to side. And then there was a cracking sound as the neck realigned itself and those eyes opened and the mouth slit open in a grin. The mouth continued to open until it seemed wide as a manhole and then a spray of human remains and black vomit gushed out in a stream and struck Jacob in the face and with enough force to knock him right into the drink. The others fell away from him and he rose back up, still covered in that oozing filth. He was screaming, plumes of steam rolling from his face that was popping and blistering as if the clown had spit acid at him.

Then Grimshanks dove on him and held him in those doughy white hands, hugging him while Jacob steamed and his flesh sputtered. “Do you wanna watch, Chucky-fucky? Do you? Do you, huh?” And then that fissured white face grinned and the tongue came out, black and glistening like a fattened jungle snake. It rolled out of the mouth six, seven inches and kept coming, licking Jacob’s face. And the effect of that was like a knife, for Jacob’s burning face split right open as the tongue slavered him, one of his eyes melting right out of its socket and sliding down his cheek.

Jacob was liquefying.

Maybe the clown’s tongue was sharp as a knife, but its saliva was horribly corrosive and Jacob’s face went to hot tallow that slid from the skull in hot runnels. Then the clown reeled in its tongue and its head suddenly jerked up in the air four feet, swaying from a long, trunk-like neck in imitation of a Jack-in-the-box. The head giggled and darted at the others, trying to take a bite from them.

Shouting and shrieking, the kids stumbled along through the water.

And it was Brian that found deliverance.

An open window.

He went through first and Tara followed, Chuck pushing Mark in behind them. Then he went through, landing in stinking water on the other side. Mark and Chuck both grabbed the sill and forced it down, but it had expanded from moisture and they could only close it just over half way. There was still a ten-inch gap and the clown started to squeeze through right away. There was no possible way he could fit being so round and puffy, but he kept pushing, bulging through the opening like a bubble of white rubber.

But by then the others were gone.

They were in some kind of office building. Struggling through nearly four feet of water, they felt along the walls in the corridor, finding one locked door after another. The moon had slid into the clouds again and the blackness was absolute. Then they found a lobby and a set of stairs. They fought their way up, amazed at how free they felt out of the water. But they were still heavy and wet, though they didn’t seem to notice.

“Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!” the clown called after them. “I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he ‘live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread! Hee, hee! Ho, ho! Ha, ha!”

His voice and ensuing laughter echoed through the building, screeching and perverse. They could hear him coming up the stairs now, the water squishing from his big floppy shoes. More water running from his suit and the holes in his hide. He pushed a wave of warmth before him that was sickening like spoiled pork.

“Tara? Where is my Tara?” he called after them. “I love Tara my little pussy, her snatch is so warm! And if I don’t hurt her, she’ll do me no harm! So I’ll not fuck her or suck out her guts! But pussy and I, very gently we shall play!”

Tara just went hysterical at the sound of that voice echoing and echoing. She began to slam herself against the upstairs walls, screaming and spitting and clawing out at anyone who dared touch her. “Why doesn’t he stop? Why doesn’t he stop?” she sobbed and cried. “Why the hell doesn’t he stop?”

They took hold of her and dragged her down the hallway and into some kind of storage room they found. There was another entrance on the other side. Chuck locked the door, precious good that would do them. The other door was open and they fell through it and right away a flashlight beam struck them dead in the faces.

“Hey, you guys,” a kid’s voice said to them. “That clown’s going to kill you! If you don’t want to die, you better come with me…”

“Where?” Brian said in a squeaking voice.

“Hurry!” the kid said. “The lady’ll help us! She’ll take care of us!”

They heard the clown bashing his way through the door, happily singing “Higglety Pigglety, my black hen.” They needed no further coaxing. There was nothing worse than the clown and the degenerate things he would do to them if he got those pulpy white hands on them. Death was one thing, but there were worse things than just dying. Things your soul would simply not survive.

So they ran after the kid, wondering vaguely where it was he might be taking them.

4

When Miriam Blake was just a kid?and being that she was pushing eighty, that was back in the lower Paleolithic?she’d gone to the Holy Covenant Catholic girl’s school over in East Genessee about three blocks from the brewery where her father worked and the linen shop where her mother sewed curtains. The school was run by a befuddled, much put upon priest named Father Dobson, who was known as “Dobby” to just about everyone. Dobby was a little round man with a brilliant shock of white hair. The girls all loved him because he was sweet and patient and didn’t seem capable of raising his voice. Which was in great contrast to the Sisters of Holy Covenant who were loud and bossy and bitter, quick with the paddle and not above foul language when they wanted to make their point. It was rumored that they rode broomsticks to mass and stirred cauldrons of bat’s wing and dead man’s eyeballs in their spare time. Miriam’s mother had gone to Holy Covenant and one time Miriam had heard her mother tell her father, “Oh, poor old Dobby, Sister Margaret and the other witches are still showing him where to squat and what to wipe.”

Old Dobby?who had dropped dead of a heart attack on Christmas Eve of 1942 while saying midnight mass?seemed happiest in the chapel where he was in charge and not in the school itself where he felt like a sacrificial lamb. The chapel was a high white-washed church that had been well over a hundred years old by the time Miriam attended services there. It was connected to the school by a narrow tunnel in the back. Inside, it smelled of age and old books, polished wood and dust. The belfry was filled with bats and when the wind blew, the entire building would creak and groan. Dobby ran choir practice on Wednesday and Friday nights. And after the latter, he would gather up the girls, shut the lights off and tell ghost stories. The chapel was, of course, very atmospheric in the darkness…creaking and shifting, old timbers groaning and shadows flitting about.

Friday nights were always Miriam’s favorite time of the week when old Dobby would do his damnedest to scare the girls half to death. While they held onto each other, he’d tell them one gruesome horror story after the other. They’d hear about the foolish girl who wept in a country churchyard by night because her sisters were all married and she was not. Then one night, the corpse of a man murdered on his wedding night swept her onto a skeleton horse and took her off to the land of the dead to be his bride. They’d hear about the woman who was possessed by a demon and ate her own children and the madman who buried girls alive. A perennial favorite was the one about the guy who’d had a growth removed from his belly and kept the growth in a jar of alcohol in the cellar where it was warm and moist, not realizing the growth was actually part of his twin brother who had died in the womb. Down there in the darkness, his brother grew and burst from the jar, a creeping thing that “looked like a fungus pretending to be a boy,” as Dobby put it. They’d get real quiet and real tense over this one. Dobby would say that the thing was down in the chapel cellar, right NOW. Which worked perfectly because the chapel cellar was cobwebbed and drippy and dark.

“It’s coming, girls…can you hear it coming?” Dobby would say. “It’s on the second stair, crawling its way up. The third stair and fourth stair. Can you hear the squishing sounds its feet make? Its fingernails dragging over the stair post? It’s dirty and smelling and dripping with goo. There are worms living in it and it has no eyes. It’s at the top of the stairs, girls…can you smell it? Can you hear it breathing? CAN YOU? It’s coming now, dragging its way up the aisle. I can heart it whispering your names…Lisa, Mary Jo, Doris, Kathleen…dear God, which of you will it take down into the rotting tunnels beneath the cellar? Which one? Which one? Can you smell its foul breath and feel its cold fingers at your throat…don’t scream, don’t even breathe or it will hear you…it wants…it wants…it WANTS YOU, MIRIAM!”

At which point, all the girls would scream bloody murder. Some of the girls would come away from these Friday night spook sessions scared out of their wits, many would have nightmares. But as much as the Sisters chastised old Dobby, he would not relent. Maybe the school was their’s, but the chapel, the choir, and the ghost stories were his and his alone. The girls needed a bit of wicked fun, he would say. A good scare does wonders to strengthen the heart. The sisters could never talk him out of this and Dobby scared the shit out of girls at Holy Covenant for upwards of sixty years and it was his talent for horror stories that filled the choir to bursting, not the love of singing hymns.

This is what Miriam was thinking about as she held court in her living room by candlelight. The night was dark and wet outside, filled with awful shapes that knocked on people’s doors…and inside, only slightly less spooky. For the candles flickered and the shadows jumped and Miriam almost felt like she was back in the chapel of Holy Covenant, could feel old Dobby sitting nearby.

“There’s danger out there, I’m saying, danger like none have ever seen before,” she told her captive audience of Margaret Boyne, her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the school superintendent. “It happened not an hour before you came. There I was minding my own business and there came a knock on the door. Oh, I knew it was trouble straight off. For who knocks on doors in the dead of effing night but the sort of things you would never want to invite in? It scared the flipping beejeesus right out of me. But did I answer that door? I did not. But I did go and look, God have mercy, but I did. I crept up there slick as a cat on a rat and peaked through the side panel window…and do you know what I saw?”

Russel just stared with wide eyes like a little boy on Halloween night and Margaret crossed herself, something she was doing a lot of this night. Lou Darin just sat there with his arms crossed, looking stubborn.

Miriam stroked the twelve-gauge shotgun on her lap. “Well, I’ll tell you. There was a man standing out there or what I thought was a man. But wet and dirty, stuck with leaves and clots of mud like he’d just crawled out of a ditch. He was all twisted up like maybe his back was broke, long hair falling over his face, things crawling on him. He stood there knocking. Very patient, in no hurry at all. Then he looked down and saw me and…I think he smiled at me, grinned, something. But it wasn’t a smile you expect to see this side of the grave and don’t you effing dare humor me with that smirk of yours, Lou Darin. For I saw it! It was a dead thing and that face hanging like rags…it was dead, a walking corpse.”

Lou Darin was still not convinced. First it was Mitch Barron and his Saturday night spook stories and now it was Miriam, of all people. Lou was willing to admit that there was some awful business out there, but the living dead? No, that was not reasonable or sane.

“We have some individuals out there driven mad,” he said. “Gangs of crazies looting and robbing and probably murdering. That’s all it is.”

“Well, Mr. Doubting Thomas, you are just the pick of the litter, aren’t you?” Miriam chuckled. But if there was any humor in her, you would not have known it. Her wrinkled old lady mouth was hooked into a permanent sneer like maybe she’d suffered a pinpoint stroke and couldn’t work the muscles loose. “You were with Russel and Margaret, weren’t you? You saw those children coming out of the water same as they did…how do you explain that?”

Lou Darin just shrugged. “Kids,” was all he would say.

But it was pretty hollow and they all knew it.

For Russel and Margaret’s version was a little different. They’d been coming out of the Boyne house when they saw those “kids” and Russel said they were both falling apart, the skin just hanging off of them. They were both carrying things that they were chewing on. Neither Russel or Margaret could say what the one thing was, but the other was certainly a dead cat.

“It was gnawing on the thing,” Russel reiterated. “It was squatting there in the street, all that water rushing around it. I think…I think it was a boy. It had ripped that cat’s belly clean open and it was stuffing its face in there, chewing. I saw it.”

“Of course you did, dear,” Miriam said. “The dead are walking, they’re climbing up out of their graves and they hate the living. They will murder us and make us like them. They will eat us and lick our bones.”

Lou Darin was very uncomfortable with all this. He thought himself quite reasonable. And reasonable people did not believe in ghosts and dead men walking. That was the realm of superstition and folktale. And those things were not part of who and what Lou Darin was.

“We just better stay here and wait this out,” Russel said. “When morning comes, we’ll be able to figure things out.”

“The sunlight will drive them back into their holes,” Margaret said.

“We can only hope, we can only hope,” Miriam told them, though she did not sound at all convinced. “This is the doing of those eggheads up to Fort Providence. Make no mistake about that. Genetic engineering and cloning and God only knows what. Maybe it’s that and maybe Hell has opened its gates.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said.

“Is it, Mr. High and Mighty? Is it really? Are we back to that again, hmm? Well, then, since you’re so brave and rational, why don’t you go out there? The rest of us will stay here and rattle our gourds and conjure our spirits…you go out there and see for yourself.”

“I’m not about to go out there.”

“Any why not? There’s nothing to fear.”

They all looked over to the door that Miriam, ever resourceful, had secured with a couple boards laid across it and bracketed just like in an old-time frontier cabin. Course, she had to do that because she had blown the lock off with her shotgun. Nobody was mentioning that or the ugly black eye that Rita Zirblanski had given her. Better off to pretend otherwise.

“Well?” Miriam said. “Go ahead, Mr. Hot-Diggety-Dog.”

Lou was in a spot here and he knew it. You could only espouse theories so long before somebody wanted some proof, some evidence, and now they were expecting him to provide it.

“I’m not going out into the storm and catch my death while I wait for the zombies to show up,” he told them, trying to sound logical. “I’m a little too old for that nonsense and so are all of you.”

Which made Miriam chuckle. “Scared, eh? Well, rightly so, I’m thinking. There’s death out there and things walking that have been beyond the veil and have returned again. So it’s okay to cower with your yellow tail between your legs, Mr. Lou Darin. Nobody will slight you for common sense.”

Lou reddened, but could not bring himself to say anything.

“Listen to me,” Miriam said to one and all. “We can hope that day does come and hope that the National Guard will get us out, but we should be thinking also that those things might not happen. That what’s happened here might have gone beyond Witcham now.”

“Oh God…the whole Midwest?” Margaret said.

“Maybe the country,” her son added.

“Exactly.” Miriam nodded her head. “We’ll never know what sort of devilish horrors those eggheads were up to out at Providence. Opening doors that were meant to remain closed, letting things crawl through that should never have moved amongst men and women. But these things have happened before. The door of hell has opened a crack from time to time and we shouldn’t any of us be surprised.”

Lou Darin was having to clench his jaws shut not to say anything.

But Miriam saw him. “No matter, Mr. School Superintendent. No matter at all. For that door creaks open from time to time, only now those idiots have swung it wide. What I tell you now, my mother told me on her death-bed. During the First World War?which was just called the Great War before WWII showed up?over in East Genessee on Flank Street, there lived a tailor named Robert Hultz. He was a German immigrant and my mother grew up not three doors down the block from the Hultz tailor shop. Now, Hultz, seeing the devastation his own countrymen were causing Europe, sent his only son off to war. Conrad Hultz, my mother said, was a fine young man who tooled around on a motorcycle and was engaged to a pretty flower shop girl named Rose Kline. She promised to wait for him, but he never did come back. Poor Conrad died in France in 1918 during what they called the Battle of the Argonne. Back then, bodies were not returned to family and Conrad was buried on a French hillside with hundreds of others.

“Now all of this was bad enough on Mr. and Mrs. Hultz?she would die not three years later from an embolism and her husband would hang on another ten?but it was absolute and utter devastation for poor Rose. She rented an upstairs room from a family named Connor across the way. Well, Rose began to get a bit soft upstairs. People would run into her on the street and she would speak in great length of poor Conrad…as if he was still alive. Telling them about the fine picnic she and Conrad had had down at Millbury Park by the river or the plans for their wedding and honeymoon. A real effing tragedy, I’m thinking. Well, now here’s where things go from bad to worse. The Connor’s started becoming a bit concerned for Rose would sit up in that room of hers talking to people that were not there until all hours of the night and often just sit staring at a candle in her more lucid moments, wishing and wishing for her lost love to come back to her.

“Maybe she wished too godblasted hard for the Connors started telling the neighbors how they heard someone pacing up in the attic, saw a white face peering in through the windows, had found bouquets of dead flowers outside Rose’s room. Awful things like that. One night, well past midnight, there was a phone call at the Connor house. Mr. Connor worked for the railroad and was on call, so he was one of the few back then with a private line. Well, the phone rings and he answers it, thinking it’s the Chicago North-Western calling him in, but it’s not. Just a weird, windy sort of voice that he knew was Conrad’s, he claimed. It said to tell Rose that he was coming home. That the war was over. That was all. But enough to scare the Connor family half out of their wits. Well, it wasn’t long before people were no longer laughing off Mr. Connor’s story, for quite a few had seen a young, ghostly, quite pale man walking up the streets. One claimed that much of his head was missing, as was his left arm.

“And Rose? She carried on night after night, speaking with someone in her room and Mr. Connor had gone up there one night at wit’s end and he heard another voice answering her. Yes, the same voice from the phone. It sounded windy and distant, clogged up with something like somebody speaking through a mouth filled with blood. And the smell coming from under that door…flyblown and dirty. Well, it got so Rose had this nocturnal visitor just about every night. And that girl, who had yet to see twenty-one, had white streaks in her hair. She was completely mad. During the day, she would start at just about any noise and begin to panic when the sun went down. And how does this quaint little story end? With Rose screaming one night towards morning. They found her in there, ragged and bloody, her eyes wide and her mouth hooked into a scream. There was black dirt on her and graveworms as if something dead had lain atop her. And I’m guessing that something was Conrad Hultz who had finally bedded his fiance, something rotting and revolting and full of maggots with half its head shot off, something that made love to Rose and chewed on her as it did so.

“Well, a fine horror story, eh? I thought as much and I asked my Aunt Lydia about it. She looked like she was going to have a stroke. Her face went all gray and tight. It was true, she said, all of it. For Conrad had come back to claim his bride. Maybe all that wishing Rose had done by candlelight had kicked open the door of hell just wide enough for him to crawl through and, Lydia said, maybe it wasn’t Conrad at all, but just something pretending to be him. The sort of things that are out in the streets now. Who can say? Who can really say? But this much is true: The Connor’s moved out of that house and never came back. There were things they saw and things they heard which were even worse, local gossip had it. Nobody would live in that house after that. All sorts of wild tales about unwholesome smells and things whispering in the walls by night. An infestation of flies and worms that could not be put down.

“Anyway, one night, as a Halloween prank, my mother, Aunt Lydia, and a few other daring girls went up into that boarded-up old house some ten years after the Connor’s fled one dark night, leaving most of their possessions behind. They went up to Rose’s room to hold a seance as girls will. Lydia said it was a simply awful night of blowing leaves and howling black wind as Halloweens tend to be in this part of the country. A perfect night. Well, the girls were petrified, but they saw it through. They set up their candles and began calling up spirits. Did ghosts begin flitting about and knocking in the walls? No, nothing like that. But the room grew cold and dank as the grave and they heard sounds from the attic as the Connors had. And a smell of bad meat started rising up, a horrible smell that made you want to vomit, Lydia said. Rose’s old bed was still shoved in the corner and about then one of the girls screamed. For there was something on the bed, something covered in a graying old sheet, something that was breathing. Lydia said that’s when they ran. For whatever was under that sheet was trying to speak, except it sounded like its throat was full of dirt. And whatever was under there, it began to rise up, the sheet stuck to it. Lydia claimed that my mother was the last out of that room, that she looked back and saw something with a face like a spoiled, oily mushroom…just white and oozing. That as my mother ran out the door, a hand brushed the back of her neck and the fingers were wet and cold and pulpy like being caressed by a slime mold. Lydia said there was something like mucus on the back of my mother’s neck with little black spores growing in it. From that day on, my mother scrubbed her neck vigorously. I remember her doing so when we were children.

“So that’s my story, boys and girls, take it or leave it,” Miriam finished by saying. “But with what’s out in the streets, I’m thinking you just better effing take it.”

Russel and Margaret looked afraid, breathless.

Lou Darin just shook his head. “Nothing but a story. Dead people don’t come back and that’s that.”

Miriam looked like she was about to scold him like a foolish little boy that didn’t believe that fire would burn, but something stopped her.

There was a knocking at the door, a slow and heavy pounding.

The color drained from Miriam’s face. “All right, you cocksure sonofabitch, now’s your chance. You say the dead don’t walk…then go and answer that door. Do you hear me? Answer that effing door!”

The knocking came again.

Lou Darin did not move. He just looked like he was about to cry.

5

At the Styer Funeral Home, which was about seven blocks from Kneale Street over in Crandon, there was only the sound of the rain falling. Jason Styer?who had, eighteen months earlier embalmed Nicky Ericksen after he fell through the ice and supervised Nicky’s interment at Hillside Cemetery once the snows had melted and the ground thawed?was upstairs in his rooms above the funeral parlor. The power was out and there was little to do but listen to the rain against the windows and read by candlelight. Atmospheric, but impractical.

Styer had decided not to leave Crandon, at least until the waters rose a little higher. He was of the same mind as many others who thought the rain would just stop and all would be well. Besides, if and when they retreated, there would be a lot of work to do and Styer knew he would be busy. And rich. Because if a flood did nothing else, it produced a lot of bodies. Styer did not relish any of it. He wasn’t morbid nor unfeeling by nature, but business was business.

When he heard something below, in his place of business, he arched an eyebrow, but little else. The dead did not frighten him. As his father had said again and again, it was the living you had to worry about. So, with that in mind, he went back to his book.

Then the sound came again.

Just a suggestion of something. But something that wasn’t quite right and laid bad in his belly. Unmarried and reclusive by nature, Styer was a man who liked quiet evenings by the fireside, book in hand. He was a man who knew the feel of his lodgings, his business below. Knew every nail and plank and tile. Knew how they felt and sounded day or night. And at night, they were generally silent as a tomb.

But not tonight.

Setting the book aside, filling his insides with something like concrete, he listened, knowing he would have to go down there. Knowing if he did not do it, there would be no sleep this night. He kept listening. Could hear the wind and rain outside rattling the eaves, making the sign out front sway and creak. The ticking of the clock on the mantle.

But something else, too.

Below, there was nothing really worth stealing. Nothing but the tools of the trade, chemicals and instruments. Nothing more. Just two bodies. And they did not move. He paid them no more mind than a stack of kindling. For, essentially, they were about as dangerous.

It was the flooding that concerned him.

The general disintegration of law and order. It brought the crazies out. The looters and thieves and God only knew what.

He went into his bedroom, pulled out his father’s Colt. 38, loaded it carefully and calmly, then went downstairs, flashlight in hand. On the fifth step, moving as quiet as a tomcat, he heard a weird rustling noise. Whatever it was, it ended quite abruptly as if they (or it) heard him coming. At the bottom of the steps, he pushed open the door. It led into the front of the funeral home where the office and lobby were.

He paused there, listening.

He could hear nothing but the rain and wind. But there was something and he knew it. And who knew, really, what the storm might bring out? Maybe nuts who were eager to desecrate a corpse. It happened. It was rare, but it did happen. Everything in him was electric, supercharged, alert to an almost supernatural degree.

He went down the corridor past the viewing rooms to the back of his establishment

Even with the door closed, he could smell the chemicals, the residual stink of putrescence now that the air conditioning had gone out. Quickly then, Styer threw the door open and stepped inside. He reached for a battery lantern on the shelf and turned it on. Quivering, elongated shadows rose up around him, shrank back into their holes as the light flickered, filled the room with brilliance.

The corpses were still on their respective tables, covered in sheets. Just an old man who’d had a heart attack the day before and a young woman that had overdosed.

He had been secretly fearing that someone had slipped in and stolen them. College kids from the University maybe. Sometimes, they got a little crazy. But both cadavers were still there. But there was something strange about the old man…the sheet was stirring slightly, moving with a subtle whispering sound.

It couldn’t be.

The flesh at the back of his neck crawling, Styer stepped over there and flung the sheet away. The body was unmoved…though one arm seemed to have slid down from the chest, the fingers open now. The chemicals, that’s all. But what was that-

Styer stepped back.

There were five or six beetles lurking in the shadow beneath the old man’s chin. Others were hiding in his hair. A few more crept across his belly. Styer brushed them away and crushed them underfoot. Like roaches, they made for the shadows. As he turned back to the body, there were more beetles. Two of them sitting on his nose, rubbing their forelimbs together, making an obscene clicking sound. Others came out of his frowning mouth, his armpits, his crotch.

Infested, that’s what.

Styer had never seen insects exactly like them. Maybe the flooding had brought them out. The insects were large, though. Black and glistening, the size of cigar butts. It was crazy, though. Plain crazy.

One of them crawled up Styer’s leg.

Another ran across his hand.

He let out a cry as one leaped into his face, tried to land on his cheek.

The old man’s supine cadaver was swarming with them now, dozens of them. They moved over him like ants on a mound. Like maggots massing on a dead possum. Moving and chittering and hopping.

Something landed in Styer’s hair.

Then a second and third something. He clawed wildly, ripping out locks of hair. More of them fell on him. His face. His neck. Down the back of his shirt. He started to scream, to shriek, to dance in wild, almost comical circles as they nipped him and hung on with spurred legs.

A huge clicking cacophony rose up and saturated the air.

Styer looked up.

The ceiling was covered in a lustrous, shining assemblage of them. Hundreds, if not thousands. You could not see the tiles up there, just that surging ocean of beetles.

Styer let out a scream and saw he was not alone.

A man stood there, a very tall man. He was dressed in something like a long black slicker, only it was greasy and glistening like leather. His face was cadaverous and perforated with holes, just gray and flaking and set very tight on the jutting bones beneath. It set off his eyes which were yellow and huge, almost phosphorescent.

“Jesus…” Styer uttered.

The man smiled and a stink came off him like wormy viscera. “Not quite.”

Styer pawed beetles off himself, wild-eyed and terrified now, his chest tightening unpleasantly. This guy was dead. He was…well, he was a zombie.

The man pulled the sheet off the young woman and the flesh had been chewed from her chest and throat right down to the musculature beneath.

“What?” Styer said, trying to make sense of it. “What…what is this? What are you doing?”

The man grinned and it was awful. “Doing? Why, I’m eating, of course. But I hate to eat alone.”

Then Styer looked up and that seething mass of beetles fell down on him in a hailstorm of biting bodies, covering every inch of him. On the floor, he writhed and twisted, but soon the waters of that hideous creeping sea washed over him and he went under for keeps.

“Desecration,” the dark man said, pulling long red worms out of the holes in his face with skeletal hands. “Desecration.”

He dropped the worms onto Styer’s corpse.

After a time, the beetles abandoned the remains of the undertaker and surged up and over the dark man, became him until you could not see his form, just that vague manlike shape sculpted of thousands of beetles, creeping and massing and chittering. Properly clothed then against the storm, he left with a distant sound of piping.

6

The last thing Mitch remembered was driving those kids to the precinct house downtown. Maybe they should have taken them to the hospital, but the precinct was a good bet. They pulled the van into the police garage and got the kids out. They were choppered about twenty minutes later to the National Guard tent camp outside town. No point in trying to find their families, not on a night like that.

Afterwards, while Tommy chewed the shit with George Lake, his cousin who was a cop, Mitch sat in the van. Smoked and brooded and…that was really the last thing he remembered.

And now he was awake.

And it was no gentle rousing from an afternoon nap here, he jerked awake, rattled with panic. That dream. That godawful dream. Tommy was nowhere around. He was still sitting in the van. Alone. Pulling off his water bottle and wishing it were whiskey, he had a smoke and began to remember his dream.

It was about Lily, of course.

He was dreaming that Chrissy was gone and they had the house to themselves and it wasn’t raining outside. They took a bath together in the garden tub Mitch had nearly broken his back putting in. Then they made love there with candles burning, lots of suds. That part had been good. He seemed to recall they spoke of the trip to the Rocky Mountains they’d always talked about taking. Other things he could not remember. Lily kept talking and as she did, the color drained from her face, her body, until she was perfectly white. Then she began to bloat up, bits of her dropping away and floating around in the suds until she looked like some horrible B-movie zombie.

That’s when he’d come awake.

He sat there in the van, just physically drained and emotionally wrecked. His heart was pounding and his face was wet with tears. Chrissy was missing and Lily…Lily was probably dead. No, forget the probably, she was certainly dead. Dead and he would never see her again.

And how was that for a door prize to this madhouse?

Lily was dead. This was how all the good times and bad times ended, this is where the struggles and love and laughter and pain and triumph ground to a halt. It had started on that beach eleven years ago when he’d met Chrissy, then met her mother and fell in love and it had all gone terribly fast, hadn’t it? So fast, just thinking of it all left him dizzy and disoriented. It passed through his brain in some kind of crazy blur, like being on a subway train and watching station after station whir by with dazzling speed. He saw all the memories whipping by and it left him gasping. Why hadn’t he tried to slow it down? Why hadn’t he tried to dig in his heels and slow it all down so maybe he could have enjoyed it more, lived it more, maybe held some of it in his hand and kept a piece in his pocket for the horrible, dark times ahead when he would really need it? Just a bit of it to get him through the night?

Dear God…how could it be over? How could it end like this?

Like anyone else, Mitch had maybe wondered in some back room of his mind which of them would die first. And maybe what that would be like. But he’d always seen it as some impossibly distant point in the future when they were both white-haired and used-up. Not now. Not while they were in their prime. Christ, maybe forty-four seemed old when you were twenty, but when you were forty-four and healthy and on top of your game, it seemed like you were in your prime. And it was not natural to be throwing dirt in the face of the love of your life when you were in your prime. It was just…well, it was fucked-up, that’s what it was.

Mitch sat there, sweating and shaking, drawing from his cigarette and just dying inside. There was a great aching swell in his belly that went right up into his chest. He felt feverish, yet numb and cold and hot and too many thing to catalog. His skin felt tight like it couldn’t fit over the skeleton beneath anymore.

But was Lily really dead?

Was that the absolute truth?

And, yes, he knew it was. He could sit around pretending that she might turn up unharmed, but in the end that was only self-denial and self-denial was just the suspension of truth. Self-denial was keeping the razor of acceptance from laying your wrists open. You could hold it back only so long and when that blade finally cut you, it could be really bad. Better to let it cut a little at a time, rather than letting it gore you in one fell swoop.

Finally, if he hadn’t before, Mitch accepted.

And in accepting, there was torment beyond anything he knew or could imagine. Nobody ever claimed that life was fair, but this pretty much tipped the scales a bit much, now didn’t it? You wake one gray morning hearing that cold rain falling and falling, worrying about your wife who’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown ever since her dirtbag nutso sister killed herself, and by the end of that day you see the dead walk and things crawl out of the cellar of hell. And to cap it off, one of them?possibly?calls your wife out into the storm and that’s all she wrote, man. End of story. End of the romance, end of the road. This was the big zero and eating lunch with the damned and trying to see by the light that failed.

Mitch opened the door of the van and stepped out into the police garage, buzzing fluorescent lights overhead casting an unreal illumination over him. He saw the battered green bench where they’d sat with Tommy’s cousin earlier that day. He dropped himself into it, wanting badly to fall to his knees on the concrete floor and cry his eyes out.

There would be no trip to the Rocky Mountains and no retiring to the Carolinas where Mitch had family. No more nights spent talking in bed or big Sunday morning breakfasts or lazy Saturday afternoon naps or backyard cookouts. No, in fact, there was no more anything.

And this was how the grief finally set its hooks into Mitch Barron. How it found him and held him and would not let him go, just kept whispering memories into his ears and taunting him with what could have been but would never be. Odd as it sounded, it was like being castrated. Having your balls cut off and held out so you could see them, see what you had and would never have again. And the really ugly part of grief is that this was only the beginning of the pain and torture and ugliness that would eat his mind away slowly in economical, bite-sized portions.

“How you doing, Mitch?”

He looked up and Tommy was standing there, looking uncomfortable, looking like he was on the edge of tears himself. Caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Wanting to grab his old friend and give him a hug, but unable to because of how he was brought up, the things that had been pounded into him by society. Men did not cry and they did not hug other men regardless of the circumstances. It was positively antediluvian and ridiculous, but still those archaic working class values and mores held on tight. Tommy was fighting against them, but in the end he simply lost.

“How you doing, old buddy?” he said again, choking on his own words.

Mitch stared up at him through red-rimmed eyes. “Not so good, not so good at all.”

Tommy swallowed. “You look like shit, too.”

Mitch wiped some moisture from his eyes, laughed despite himself. “Tommy, you’re a fucking asshole.”

“I know I am. Sometimes I wish I could be something else,” he said, seeming to mean it. “But, you know like I always say, my mother told me to go with my strengths.”

There was a few minutes of silence, then Mitch said, “I’m not leaving this town until I find Chrissy.”

“Sure, but Wanda Sepperley said she’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, but I got me a feeling in my belly that’s telling me otherwise,” Mitch admitted. “I got to find her. You with me on that?”

“Of course I am. Where do we start?”

“Let’s go see Wanda again.”

7

“All I’m saying, Neiderhauser, is to give peace a chance,” Henry T. Oates said now that his command was decimated, his mission scrubbed, and his raft done sunk. “You gotta quit trying to cornhole every unfriendly you meet, son. Now, next worm-sucking zombie you find, try hearts and flowers first. Because, as the Lord is my witness, one-two-three-four, we don’t want your fucking war! Sing it with me, Neiderhumper: One-two-three-four, we don’t want your fucking war! Louder, you ass-fucking communist flag-burning red limp-wristed pinko, louder! With conviction, I say! ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, WE DON’T

WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR!”

Neiderhauser stood there, making a sound that was close to a whimper.

Oates spat into the water. “Why, you war-mongering, peace-hating, red neck right-wing mother-raper! I’m thinking you’re enjoying this, Neiderhumper. I’m beginning to think that you are one Grade A, Class One lifetaker with absolutely no respect for human life. And, to tell you the truth, you are scaring me, son. You are making my pink, un-probed asshole pucker tighter than a virgin’s first kiss.”

Neiderhauser continued to stand there, the water up above his knees, that dead expression on his face. After they made it out of All Saints Cemetery, where Hinks had been pulled into the drink by that rabid pack of dead things, the Zodiac raft was in rough shape. The flotation chambers up near the bow had all deflated and they had a bad list that made it real tough to get any speed out of the old girl. But she’d gotten them out of River Town and into the fringe of Crandon before she gasped her last breath. And that was something.

Now they were on foot, all that remained of the squad, Neiderhauser and Oates. At first the water was up to their waists, but now it was down near their knees and that was saying progress, in Oates way of thinking.

Neiderhauser was in shock or maybe just fucking crazy, Oates was thinking. Hinks had gotten like that, too, after the tango in the alley. Now Hinks was dead and Oates’ squad consisted of just Neiderhauser and him. And wasn’t that just sweet? Oates had marched through the shit before with bodies dropping quicker than panties at a frat party, but he’d never lost so many men so quickly. Sure, Witcham was a hellzone, but command wouldn’t understand that and would like it even less.

Tell you what, Angela, Oates thought, imagining his wife once again, they’re not gonna sink me on this one. Don’t recall the captain saying I was taking these boys into combat and surely not against dead people. No, I will not be hung out to dry on this one, for Henry T. Oates might be one foul-mouthed, ballbusting, intolerant sonofabitch, but he is not stupid. And he will not be taking the fall for this.

Oates was standing at the intersection of two streets, studying his pocket compass with the luminous dial, knowing he had to head east to make it back to whatever civilization still remained in Witcham. West was River Town and the swollen Black River and east would carry them out of this. But to go east meant heading down a very narrow street with lots of abandoned vehicles and crowded buildings, too many places for unfriendlies to be hiding. And it was dark, damn it was dark.

“Well, I tell you, Neiderhumper,” he said. “This is certainly a pickle we’re in. I’m not liking what lays just ahead, but I’m not seeing a choice either.”

Neiderhauser just stood there impassively.

“Are you with me, son?”

Yeah, Neiderhauser was in shock. Just too much death and insanity shoved down his throat at once. It had sunk his mind down somewhere south of bad. He was physically there, but that was about it. Oates had seen it before. He remembered when he was with the 101^st over in Kuwait. They’d opened up on a Republican Guard unit with recoilless rifle fire and heavy machine guns, finished them off with a mortar barrage. They’d been driving old Russian trucks, those ragheads, and when the party was over with, there was nothing but a lot of mangled metal, burning bodies, and clouds of black smoke spiraling into the air. The stink of cremated flesh made quite a few of Oates’ platoon go to their knees and vomit. But there was a black guy named Robbins from Des Moines who was one tough boy, a real hard-charger. He went over to the trucks and caught sight of an Iraqi hanging from the wreckage of a truck, impaled by a shelf of twisted metal. He was on fire. In fact, his guts had been blown out and they were on fire, too, his bowels draped over the cab and on the ground, smoking and sputtering like those snakes you light up on the Fourth of July.

Robbins just lost it.

First he started crying, then screaming, then he fell to his knees and did the craziest thing Oates had ever seen: he yanked out his dick and started pulling on it. Poor thing was shriveled-up like a sun-scorched blacksnake on an Alabama turnpike, but Robbins kept pulling on it. And it did not seem to be out of any sexual need, for that dick would not grow, but maybe to assure himself that it was still there or maybe that he was.

The other men got real uncomfortable about it all. Oates walked over there and said, “Robbins? Daddy says no pee-pee pulling in mixed company, so put that little thing away.”

But Robbins kept at it. His eyes were glazed and he did not seem to aware of anything around him.

“I said, put that fucker away,” Oates told him. And when raising his voice an octave got no response, he went wild. He pulled Robbins to his feet and slapped him across the face and kept slapping him until that poor bastard fell down, sobbing. Afterwards there wasn’t a damn thing to do put shoot him up with some Demerol and medvac him out.

Combat and death got to men like that sometimes.

And that’s what had happened to Neiderhauser. Thing was, there was no medvac out here, wasn’t even a radio, and being that the squad was down to two, Oates needed Neiderhauser and needed him in command of his faculties.

“Listen, Neiderhumper, I’ll get you out of here, but you got to snap out of this shit because we just don’t have the time for a fucking touchie-feelie encounter session and a good cry. So I’m telling you?no, fuck that, I’m ordering you?to find your balls and act like a goddamn man. Now are you going to do that or am I gonna have to traumatize your ass with some of that world famous Sergeant Henry T. Oates cock-knocking therapy that’s known far and wide?”

Neiderhauser did not move.

“All right then,” Oates said, shouldering his rifle. “I am not gonna stand here playing fucking Statues with you like a couple kids in the park. No, sir.”

Oates walked over to him, slapped him across the face and then promptly kneed him in the belly. Neiderhauser doubled over with a gasp and Oates punched him in the back of the head with enough force to drive him down into the water. Neiderhauser came up swinging. He caught Oates on the side of the face and nearly flattened him. He swung a few more times and Oates just kept slapping him until he came out of it.

“What…the…fuck,” he kept saying as Oates put an armlock on him and held him pretty much immobile. “What…the fuck…did…you…do…that…for?”

“Because I had to, son, only because I had to.”

Neiderhauser stood there, panting, the rain running down his poncho. “I…I lost it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I’m okay now.”

“Sure, you are. Now let’s get out of here.”

They had powerful halogen flashlights taped to the barrels of their M-16s and they turned them on, heading down that winding street. With all the water, there was just no way to be quiet about it. They splashed along, all that racket echoing off the faces of the buildings, announcing their presence to anyone that might be listening.

Nothing but black water everywhere, rain falling into it and stirring up a mist that blew lazily over the surface. The lights created too many shadows and sometimes it was hard to tell if they were just shadows or something else entirely.

Oates heard a splashing just ahead.

“Oh, boy,” he said.

They came around a truck and three forms were standing there…a man, a woman, and a child. They were holding hands like they were waiting for the bus. But there was no way in hell they were normal, for they were pale and stinking, their eyes glittering like wet stones.

“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.

The little family let go of each other’s hands and started moving in Oates’ direction. There was something impossibly blank about those faces in the beams of the flashlights. Yes, they were decaying and bleached white, but they had a stupid, idiotic look about them as if they were doing things without knowing why, driven on by forces they could not comprehend.

“Take a walk,” Oates told them. “I hear there’s a Halloween party downtown.”

They did not even acknowledge that he had spoken or seem to understand. They just plodded forward, not stiff and shambling, but almost gracefully as if they had lived in deep water all their lives.

Oates sighted in on the child, a little boy. Swallowing, he gave the kid a three-round burst to the head. It blasted away lots of meat and skull, but that was about it. The kid kept coming. Neiderhauser opened up on the adults. The rounds chewed into them, but they kept coming, smoke boiling from the holes in them.

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.”

Good old Jacky. You could count on the guy to be a violent, intolerant sonofabitch. Stir, out of stir. On the streets, in a club. Even in a city that was sinking in a flood, same old Jacky, always ready to straighten some guy out that didn’t dance when he snapped his fingers.

Thing was, Harry didn’t blame Roland.

Roland had done the right thing. Jacky was bad enough behind the prison walls, but he was no better outside of them. He was an animal, a predator. He wanted something, you got in his way, you went down. You could smell the trouble and badness wafting off a guy like him. You hung with him, he’d involve you in shit that you didn’t want any part of.

When they hit the city?driving a Department of Corrections van, no less?both Roland and Harry had been pretty rattled with what they had seen. But not Jacky. He took it in stride. The dead were walking? Yeah, no shit? What’s that to me? That’s how it was for Jacky. He was crazy like that. You could have dumped a guy like him in the hottest stretch of hell and he would have immediately acclimated himself, been forming a tough crew and running rackets by the end of the week. Harry wished he could just shrug it all off. But as hard as he’d gotten in Slayhoke, the dead coming back to life just scared him white inside.

They ditched the van right away.

Jackie drove it right into a flooded section of River Town and watched it sink up to its windows. Problem solved. After that, they needed a new ride. Jacky said that the entire Black River Valley was at flood stage, Witcham going under, so nobody would be looking for a couple runaway cons. It was the perfect time to jack a car and drive out of the valley. Nobody would ask questions and nobody would stop them.

On foot in Crandon, just off The Strip, the business district, Jacky had slipped off to take a leak and that’s when Roland had taken his walk. But before he did, he pulled Harry aside and said, “Listen, man, you and me, we been tight. I’m telling you now to ditch Jacky first chance you get. You saw how he was inside and he’s gonna be worse out here. He ain’t right in the head. Guy’s a fucking psychopath. You stick with him, he’ll have you robbing banks and raping women. Get you in a bigger mess than you already in.”

With that, Roland ran off into the night.

Jacky wasn’t happy about it, was downright pissed and evil when he found out, but he got it out of his system by tossing a brick through a deli window. Power was down, no alarms. Harry and he sat in the dark by flashlight, eating cheese and sausage, drinking wine. After years of that slop in the joint, real food tasted great.

When they finished gorging themselves, Harry said, “Okay, we’re out. We can make this happen. The mess this city’s in? We can walk right out. So what’s out plan gonna be?”

“We need a car, then we’ll see,” Jacky said. “You never bopped with me outside the joint, Harry, but you better believe I know how to live.”

“I believe it. You did pretty good inside, all them hacks eating out of your hands.”

“You know why they did that, Harry?”

“Because you owned ‘em, you fed ‘em the green and they danced to your own tune.”

“It was more than that. I wasn’t paying off the cons out in the yard, but they showed me respect. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Fear, Harry. They respect me because they fear me.”

“You can be a bad dude, Jacky.”

“You wanna remember that.”

They made their way back outside and one of the first things they saw was some old guy with a stalled car. A red Crown Victoria. Big, nice old ride. It had stalled in the water. There was only about a foot of it there on Michigan Avenue being that it was high ground, but the old guy had hit a puddle and soaked the distributor.

Right away Jacky went over there. “You need help, mister?”

The old guy got out of the car. “Christ, she stalled on me.”

“Need to dry your distributor off,” Harry told him.

The old guy popped the trunk and he had a few suitcases in there, looked like he was leaving town and that was probably a smart thing. He got some rags for Harry and Harry went to work by flashlight, popping the cap and drying it out. While he was doing so, Jacky hung over him, that crooked grin on his hard face.

“Nice ride, eh, Harry?”

“Sure.”

Jacky went over to the old guy who was leaning up by the trunk.

“Sure want to thank you boys. I owe you one.”

“No problem,” Jacky told him. “You got a crowbar, my friend needs it.”

The old guy was only too happy to help. He found it in the trunk and handed it to Jacky and right away, Jacky got that evil gleam in his eye when he had a good piece of iron in his hands. Maybe the old guy saw it, too, by the glare of the trunk light.

“Thanks,” Jacky said and swung it at the old man, knocking him to the ground where he thrashed in the water. Jacky hit him two more times, splitting his head open. “Life ain’t fair, you old fuck.”

“Jesus, Jacky…you didn’t need to do that,” Harry said.

“Sure, I did. That distributor dry?”

Harry swallowed. “Sure.”

They got in, Harry behind the wheel and drove off slowly.

Harry wasn’t liking this. Already, Roland’s warning was coming true and it was only just beginning. Jacky was only getting warmed up.

“Should be a sign here somewhere,” Harry said, “show us how to get to Highway 6. That’ll lead us to the freeway and out of the valley. I remember it when they brought me to Slayhoke.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“I wanna get the hell out of here, that’s what,” Harry told him.

“I say we stay awhile, this city’s wide open. Let’s have some fun.”

Harry knew it was going to be trouble. There was no other way with Jacky Kripp. So when the headlights splashed over two teenage girls walking up the side of the street, Harry felt something go bad inside of him.

“Stop the car,” Jacky said.

“We gotta get out, Jacky.”

Jacky put this gray steel eyes on him. “I said, stop this fucking car.”

Harry did.

Jacky unrolled his window. “You girls okay?” he said, putting it on real smooth and full of concern.

The tall one was dark-haired and the short one was blonde. They both looked like they’d been dragged through the underbelly of hell, soaking wet and shivering.

“Our car,” the brunette said. “It went into the water.”

“Hop in,” Jacky told them. “We’ll take you home.”

They never thought for a moment what they were getting themselves into. The town was flooding and they thought help had finally arrived. Who could blame them for hopping into the back seat where it was warm and dry?

“What’s your names, girls?” Jacky asked them, one arm hung over the back of the seat.

The blonde looked to be in shock or something. She just stared off into space and the brunette kept her arm around her. “This is Lisa and she’s had a rough time,” the brunette said. “I’m Chrissy. I live over on Kneale Street.”

Jacky grinned. “Chrissy, eh? Oh, now that’s a pretty name. A real pretty name. Ain’t that a pretty name, Harry?”

And Harry felt that bad stink coming off Jacky suddenly get much worse.

9

At Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus, in the wee hours of an awfully long and strange night, the basic facts of the matter were being threshed out.

“What you got here is a haunting,” Hardy James was saying. “Goddamn whole city is haunted and that’s the name of that particular tune.”

Hardy had been going on about this for some time now, following this thread of reasoning and filling in the blanks with bullshit, as was his way. But that was Hardy. He was nothing if not a legendary bullshit artist. Though his name was Hardy James, he’d been known through his seventy years as “Hardy Jim” and “Jim Hardy,” though now in his declining years, “Hardy” was all you ever heard. He’d been rambling on about ghosts and hauntings, mainly reeling off things he’d caught on the Discovery Channel during Halloween week along with the plots of a few old movies, spicing the whole thing up with his own brand of high-smelling bullshit.

“Sure as hell,” he told his audience. “Ghosts. And if they’ve come back, then you can bet there’s a good reason for it. They want something and they won’t go until they get it.”

“Ahhhhhh…ghosts. That’s a bunch of shit,” Knucker said, cracking her bony knuckles. She generally started most sentences with “Ahhhhhh” as if she had to wind up something before the words would come out.

“Haunted?” Hubb Sadler said. “What kind of cockfucking nonsense is that? I ain’t seen no ghosts. Just them other things and not one was carrying its fucking head around or dressed in a sheet.”

Knucker chuckled. “Ahhhhhh…that’s just bullshit, Hubb. Don’t pay no mind to Hardy Jim here. He just likes to talk. You give him an opportunity and he’ll make up a story.”

“You should mind your mouth so you keep your friends,” Hardy told her. “Besides, you got a better explanation? Dead people walking around and what not? You telling me that ain’t a haunting?”

“They’s not ghosts,” Hubb said. “I don’t know what they are, but they’s not ghosts.”

Hardy thought it over for a time. “Okay, then zombies. Just like on TV. The walking dead. I seen a show about that. They got zombies down in Haiti. It’s not shit, either. They got ‘em working in the cane fields. Some lady on that show, some colored lady, she said she was driving up the road down there in Haiti and she’s sees her brother chopping cane. Only thing was, they buried her brother a month before. But there he was, eyes all glazed and funny, and him chopping that cane.”

Hubb pulled off his oxygen mask. “Them shows ain’t shitting real, Hardy.”

“This one was. One of the documentaries. Zombies work the cane down there. Witch doctors rise ‘em up and steal their souls or something. The rich guys that own them plantations, they hire them witch doctors to bring ‘em back. Cheap labor or something.”

Hubb said, “Zombies? Jesus, of all the cockwongling nonsense I ever did hear.”

No, Hubb was not believing that zombie shit. Witch doctors and all that sort of crazyass late show nonsense. Besides, where the hell would you find a goddamn witch doctor in Witcham or in all of Wisconsin for that matter?

“Witch doctor, my fat hairy ass,” he said.

After what they’d seen that afternoon when that crazy kid put his Intrepid right through the front door and what came afterwards, no one?not even old hardassed Hubb himself?doubted the enormity of what was happening in Witcham. The city was flooding and, yes, the dead were walking. But zombies and witch doctors. Jesus, now that was like them Saturday afternoon horror shows he used to see when he was a kid over at the Rialto. Always had Bela Lugosi in ‘em. Crazy, cheap shit with titles like Voodoo Man and Zombies on Broadway.

Well, it had been some kind of day…but Hubb just wasn’t up to any of that Bela Lugosi shit.

But something was happening and those people out in the streets…well, by Christ, they were dead and they were walking.

After Mitch and Tommy and most of the others left, Hubb got the Intrepid pulled out of the front of his store and then spent the next few hours answering questions from cops who wanted to know what had made their officers out front literally melt. But what could Hubb or Hardy or Knucker tell them?

Nothing.

So that’s what they did tell them.

With Knucker and Hardy’s help, he had shored up the great rent in the front of the building with sheet metal and plywood fixed into place with drywall screws. That was a start. They were safe.

But what came next? That was the question.

Same question they’d been chewing on all night. The lot of them?Hubb and his crew, Hot Tamale and her husband, Herb?just too damn wired-up on caffeine to do much sleeping.

“Ahhhhhh…zombies,” Knucker said. “That’s a laugh. Comic book shit.”

“Well, that’s what they gotta be.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because they’re the walking dead, woman. And that’s what you call the walking dead. Zombies. Jesus H. Christ, your mother didn’t raise ‘em for smarts, now did she?”

“Ahhhhhh…shut up.”

“Or looks,” he said. “Show said them zombies do what their masters tell ‘em, unless you give ‘em salt. That sends ‘em back to their graves.”

“Salt?” Hubb said.

“Sure, salt. Makes ‘em remember they’re dead.”

“I believe it,” Hot Tamale said.

She had been silent for some time which was just not like her and now she was speaking. They all gave her the floor. She stood herself up, a real sight in her skin-tight cherry red outfit.

“See, this afternoon, I talked with my cousin Liz,” she told them. “Those dead ones don’t like salt. She said one of ‘em came out of the basement of a store over in Elmwood and some lady threw salt at it and it shriveled right up. Just like a fucking slug, she said. Salt. They don’t like it much.”

Hardy nodded. “Makes all the sense in the world, don’t it? You get slugs coming up out of the ground and you salt ‘em. Kills ‘em or drives ‘em off. Same with these zombies.”

“Well, now we got something,” Hubb said, as happy as Hubb could be. “This makes some shitting sense.”

“Ahhhhhh…but that don’t answer why or how.” Knucker looked at them all, each in turn. “Well, does it? Does it answer why they’re coming back?”

Hot Tamale fielded this one. “Well, it’s the same as I said today. It’s that Army base. It’s Fort Providence. This all started after that explosion. Those eggheads out there have been messing with things they should have left alone. Has to be.”

“I been hearing things for years,” Hardy said.

Hubb pulled off his mask. “We all have. Crazy shit. But what in the royal fuck could they be doing out there to bring dead people back?”

“Experiments,” Hardy said. “You know, like Frankenstein.”

At any other time there might have been some laughter, but not now. Well, if you could wrap your brain around zombies, Frankenstein and things like that weren’t so far down the road, were they?

“I’m thinking about that salt,” Hubb said. “Well, you can’t just go around throwing suckcocking salt at them pissers. Not practical.”

“How about rocksalt?” Hardy said. “Load it in shotgun shells instead of the pellets. How’s about that?”

And for the first time in a long time, Hubb Sadler grinned.

10

Sometime after Harry Teal, Jacky Kripp, and Roland Smythe escaped from Slayhoke Penitentiary, the National Guard rolled in. Rolled in, scoped it out, and retreated, setting up a half-ass perimeter and immediately calling for reinforcements. What they saw there was beyond anything they could hope to deal with. The men were about coming out of their skins. There were things happening behind that high razor-wire that just could not be.

So the Guard called for back-up.

What they got was not a ragtag collection of State police and county boys, but a first class fighting unit that knew exactly what they were getting into. What they got was the 4^th battalion, 1^st Air Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. A legendary group of ballbusters and lifetakers that had been shitting on the enemies of the United States since the hot and heady days of the Vietnam War. The 4/1 was commanded by Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle, a scarred-up intolerant vet who’d cut his teeth in Vietnam’s Central Highlands with the 4^th Infantry and had been involved in just about every conflict since. If there was a war and there was a body count, you were sure to find Pearle nearby, circling like a buzzard, just grinning his kill-happy smile at the stink of death, which through the years had become to him what Brut or Old Spice were to other men: a personal fragrance.

The 4/1 was originally given the task of securing Fort Providence Military Reservation, which, as Pearle told his adjutant, Lieutenant Waterman, had become “one ugly stripe of hell.” They were to go in and kick ass and take names, surround and secure the installation so that another unit out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina?a nameless entity whose troopers wore no insignia and dressed in black fatigues?might go in unimpeded and set about “pacifying” things. In other words, they were cleaners and the base was to be scrubbed top to bottom so that the particularly ugly stain that had soiled the base would not smudge the Army in general…and particularly those that authorized what was going on there in the first place.

But, given the situation at Slayhoke and the possibility of what was going on there spreading too far and gathering the interest of the media at large, the 4/1 was diverted to Slayhoke.

“Well, ain’t it just the way in this man’s Army?” Pearle told Waterman as they helicoptered to the location in the driving rain. “You get a crack team of nutcrackers like my boys and the powers that be waste ‘em puddle-jumping from one shitsplat to the next here in God’s country. A prison riot of all things.”

“Not just a prison riot, Sir,” Waterman reminded him. “I think most of the convicts and guards are dead. At least they were. Now we have those goddamn zombies all over the place.”

Pearle looked over at him and looked over at him hard. “Oops-de-doo, Bob. I think you just said a naughty word that is not to be spoken over unsecure channels.”

“Sorry, Sir.”

Pearle kept staring at him, something beneath his skin that was savage and bloodthirsty very badly wanted to burst free and maul Waterman. But that was Pearle. A tall, thin, wiry man that exuded something from his pores, maybe, that was just downright disturbing. You knew instinctively not to cross him. He did not shout and he did not swear. There was an icy coolness to him that could make your skin crawl when he put those eyes on you that were just flat and dead and gray as slate. Looking into them was like peering into a tomb. You saw death in them and not just death, but an unpleasant appreciation of death, a secret joy over that state of being that he had offered up so freely and plentifully in his career.

There were not many men who could meet those eyes for more than a moment or two and Waterman was surely not among them. So he looked away as something cold slinked in his bowels.

Pearle smiled. “Look at me, Bob.”

“Sir, I?”

“Look at me,” he said. “I am ordering you to meet my gaze and I’m giving you exactly two seconds to comply.”

Waterman did, those eyes boring right through him. Slash-and-burn eyes that would leave nothing left standing in your soul if you looked into them long enough.

“I wasn’t thinking, Sir,” Waterman managed. “I’m sorry, Sir.”

Pearle kept smiling. “Sorry don’t cut it, my friend. Don’t cut it at all. What we have at this prison is a riot instigated by unfriendlies and I’ll ask you to keep that in mind. I do not wish to hear that other word. You may refer to these individuals as “Walkers” if you so desire, but if I ever, ever, ever hear you use that other naughty curse word in front of me or my men, I will surely draw my K-Bar from its sheath and free you of your much-beloved but seldom-used jewlies. Are we on the same page here?”

“Yes, Sir,” Waterman said, deflating inside in a rush of tepid wind.

“Excellent,” Pearle said, looking away. “Excellent.”

When they hit the ground and the men and equipment of the 4/1 had been deployed and they had linked up with the National Guard unit that was essentially shaking and pissing its own boots on that makeshift perimeter, Pearle took charge. Took charge of his men and those of Captain Sheebly, the Guard commander.

“Here’s what I want,” he said. “First off, reinforce this perimeter. Frankly, it’s sad. It’s pathetic. I’ve seen two-year old girls fresh off the nipple build a better fortification with wet beach sand. Hop to it. Your men are bunched together, Sheebly, and that is surely a sad state of affairs. You have gaping holes in your perimeter. I want them plugged. I want the fifty cals and the sixties in place. I want fire teams ready to respond. I want flamethrowers every seventh man. I want that outer perimeter mined. Tell your boys to set their Claymores and be ready. Last and surely not least, bring in those earthmovers. I want a four-foot by four-foot trench dug right around the prison wall. And when that’s done, you bring in that tanker and you flood that trench with hi-test. You got me on this? Good. Now I want all this yesterday. Hop to it.”

Nobody needed to be told twice.

While Pearle stood there waving his K-Bar fighting knife around like a conductor directing a symphony of death, men scurried every which way like the industrious little ants they were. When Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle took charge, things happened. And if you could not accept that and become part of the solution, then you were definitely part of the problem.

And you sure as hell did not want that.

11

Before the 4/1 was deployed, they were briefed.

Briefed as to what to expect at Fort Providence.

And it was like no briefing anyone had seen before. What the officers and NCOs of the 4/1 were shown and told was about as classified as classified got. So top secret that not only would said files go right into the classified burn-bag at the close of the briefing, but so would anyone else that looked like they might want to spread the news. Pearle sat there drumming a pencil against his knuckles. He was a good soldier who did things by the book and definitely knew when to speak up and when to zipper his mouth duly shut. So he listened while the intelligence people from S-2 had their say. He did not so much as raise an eyebrow when it was all laid out for him, even though he was thinking that what he was being told was strictly drive-in movie fare.

When the slicks from S-2 were done jabber-jawing, Pearle opened his mouth. “First off, gentlemen, am I hearing you correctly here? Am I to understand that a United States Army medical research facility has been overwhelmed by something that generally provides fodder for bad movies or cuts sugar cane in Haiti? Am I hearing you correctly?”

Simmons, an S-2 major, assured him that he was. “Yes, Colonel. The situation at Fort Providence is of a most extraordinary nature.”

Pearle looked at Waterman, arched an eyebrow. “No, Major, you are most certainly wrong in your assessment of the situation. A group of Middle Eastern urine-drinking, camel-riding, Allah-worshipping extremist ragheads that were able to breach the security of this country and fly planes into the Twin Towers was extraordinary. This is inconceivable and downright distressing.”

Simmons licked his lips. They were very chapped as if he spent a lot of time licking them. “It is, Colonel. But the point is that this is a real situation. And we need you to take your men in and secure that base so that another group from Bragg can…sanitize things there.”

“And might I ask who this nameless group of sanitizers might be called? Are we talking Berets here or Delta Force? Or might this be a unit that is truly nameless?”

“Colonel,” Simmons said. “The identity of this group is unimportant. What I will show you now is what concerns us today.”

“By all means proceed,” Pearle told him.

Now that the colonel and his people had received their introductory chat, they viewed a series of videos that were not only extraordinary, but inconceivable and downright distressing. And maybe that didn’t even cut it. As Pearle watched, his men more than a little nervous around him, he decided that had it not been for the very clinical, almost sterile approach to the subject matter, he would have thought what he was seeing was thrown together by Hollywood effects people.

It was that unbelievable.

They were shown video of what appeared to be a woman who was strapped to a table in some sort of containment facility. She was naked and appeared to be psychotic. She was straining at the straps that held her, her yellow teeth snapping, foam that was dirty gray spraying from her mouth. Her flesh was white as ivory, swollen in places with lumps and set with odd punctures from which an obsidian liquid ran like tears. And her eyes were just black holes, shiny and somehow vicious. She was screaming and writhing on that table, almost bonelessly, thrashing her head from side to side. And this was how they saw the massive wound above her left ear. There was a great cavity there, most of the skull blasted away.

She should have been dead; but she was not.

“Zombie,” someone said.

And although this word would later become taboo, at that moment in time nobody disagreed. For yes, this woman was dead…yet she was quite animated.

She fought for a time, then she relaxed.

She looked right at the camera with those black, almost gelid looking eyes, and began to laugh with a wet, gurgling sound. Ink-colored saliva ran from the corners of her lips, accentuating the bloodless pallor of her flaking skin. Then she started to speak, the words guttural and horse and almost indecipherable.

“That’s Arabic,” Waterman said.

“Is she from the Middle East?” someone else said.

“No,” Simmons said, clearing his throat. “This woman was an American soldier from Alabama. She had never been to the Middle East. At the time of her death she had no language proficiency other than that of her native tongue. The wound in her head was caused by a training explosion. It was instantly fatal.”

Waterman just shook his head. “Why is she speaking Arabic? How can she be speaking Arabic?”

“And fluently by the sound of it,” Pearle pointed out. “With a localized accent that you hear amongst Sunni populations in Beirut…if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not,” Simmons said. “We don’t know how she’s able to speak the language. But many of the…newly risen, have faculties they did not possess in life.”

The woman kept speaking, laughing now and then. If anything, she reminded Pearle of that little girl in the movie that puked up the green stuff.

Waterman, a West Point graduate who had studied Middle Eastern languages, said, “That’s not Arabic now…it’s…it sounds like a mishmash of Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew. If you slow it down a bit, I might be able to translate some of it…”

But Simmons looked uneasy at that. It was obvious he did not want Waterman translating it. And all there got the feeling that it had already been translated and Simmons didn’t care much for what she was saying. To prove this, he shot through the video to the next snippet.

This stream seemed to be taken outside.

Simmons said it was taken a few days after the explosion at Fort Providence. It showed a team in white protective suits walking down empty lanes in the rain or examining the carcasses of dead animals in the grass. They took samples and drew fluids. The same with the cadavers of men and women. They seemed to be dead. Then the team stood over the corpse of what might have been a man, but so badly damaged and decayed that he had no limbs, just a trunk rolling in the grass, his chest ripped open, ribs on display. The skin of his face was sheared right down to the muscle beneath. But his eyes were shocklingly alive and aware. And the most unpleasant part of that was that he was speaking in a very calm, though flat and dead voice:

“…lays there and waits, that’s how I do it. Lays there and waits until my time comes and then I open my eyes and have my bit of fun. I likes the little boys best, don’t I? Loves to get my hands on them, slits them open and plays with them slimy, coiling things that slip out. Likes to watch ‘em die like that. What good fun that is. Watch ‘em die and pulls on my cock the whole while. Naughty by name and naughty by nature, that’s what old Jim is. You there…Doctor Holmes? You haves a fat little boy at home, don’t you? Sweet bit, I’d get my teethes on him, cut his throat while I lays on top of him. Little David, lovely little David…does he likes them clowns? There’s a funny little clown coming to town, what a silly lark that one is…”

Simmons killed the audio then while that corpse continued to speak. Not agitated or violent, just chatting away as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Everyone was a little shaken by what they saw and more particularly by what they heard.

“Who the hell was that?” Waterman said. “Why was he saying those things? He had a British accent.”

Simmons licked his lips again. “That was the remains of Private Charles Ardansky from Youngstown, Ohio. He was not a British natural. Nor had he ever been out of this country. He died in the explosion…and then, woke up in that state, speaking that way. He was nineteen years old.”

“But that was the voice of a middle-aged British man,” Waterman said, still unable to wrap his brain around any of it. “That was no nineteen-year old boy from Ohio. And Holmes? He was one of the men in those suits? How could Ardansky know about his son?”

Simmon said, “The newly-risen know things they did not know in life. They often speak in voices other than their own.”

“But that’s…that’s like demonic poss?”

“Hold your tongue, Bob,” Pearle warned him. “It’s not our job to figure the hows and whys. So zip it up, by God.”

Even when the video was in good condition, it was sometimes scratchy-looking like an old movie. Next they saw a couple men dressed in desert camouflage fatigues that were very dirty and burned-looking. They were standing in the middle of the road outside a nondescript building in the rain. Simmons said they were both members of an Army Ranger battalion that had been KIA in Afghanistan.

And Pearle didn’t say it, but he was thinking, Sure, killed over in that hellhole serving God and country, so you boys shipped their bodies home and brought them back to life at Providence. He did not know the precise mechanism of resurrection and Simmons was avoiding the subject just as he was avoiding discussing the research program that had brought all this into being. But that was the Army. Simmons probably didn’t even know himself.

The two dead men were in pretty rough shape. The one on the left was very bloated and white and there were clearly maggots nesting in his face. The one on the right was missing his left arm…though when the camera zoomed, Pearle saw that was not the case at all. Something was growing from the stump like a vestigial limb, but thin and rawboned, fingers snaking around at the end of a spadelike hand. Not five of them, but seven.

The team moved in. They carried tanks on their backs connected to hoses in their hands. They sprayed the two dead men down with a yellowish mist and the effects were immediate: they melted. There was no other word for it. They began to steam and sizzle and went down. By the time they hit the ground, most of their flesh had slid right off the bones beneath like liquid plastic. They continued to flop about for a time, but soon enough they stopped moving.

“What was that stuff?” Waterman asked. “What was that? Acid?”

“An experimental toxin,” was all Simmons would say.

Waterman opened his mouth to ask more questions, but Pearle gave him a look and he shut up. Pearle figured he was going to have to have a talk with his adjutant. Man had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Wouldn’t bode well for his career in this man’s army. Pearle’s other men weren’t saying a thing. Seemed that you couldn’t make them speak. What they were seeing had permanently sealed their lips.

“Appeared that that trooper had seven fingers,” Pearle said.

“Yes, mutations are another problem,” Simmons said. “As you’ll soon see.”

The video cut away again and now the cameraman was descending down a flight of stone steps in what appeared to be a cellar. Cardboard boxes feathered with mildew, dusty beams, drooping cobwebs. A few members of the white-suited containment team were examining something in the corner…something incredible. It looked like a dog, a swollen hairless dog. Its jaws were wide, teeth barred. The canine anatomy was unmistakable…but it wasn’t a dog. Not anymore. It didn’t seem to have any limbs. Long, glistening white threads grew out of its hide. Some hung slack and others were taut, growing up out of the dog’s hide in nets where they were attached to the walls like spiderwebs.

It was bad. Plenty bad.

But what was worse was that the dog was not dead.

As the team members began poking it with metal probes, it began to move with a flabby motion, those white threads coiling and snapping like tentacles. They thrashed in the air like they were looking for something to grab. The team members gave them a wide berth. The dog’s body was just a fleshy, colorless protoplasmic mass that roiled and squirmed. Its head moved on its neck, jaws opening and closing, a tongue like a hollow tube slapping around. It was making a noise…a low, bestial screeching sound.

A few of Pearle’s men made noises like they wanted to be sick.

“It’s bad the first time you see these things,” Simmons said, the understatement of the year.

Back on the screen, the dog was sick or dying, barely moving now and Simmons explained that they’d shot it full of poison. It lay there, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling from its mouth. Its flesh was quilted with protrusions and rolls of fat. The threads coming out of its hide were hanging from it like dead worms. The team had rolled the beast over and were examining its underside. What at first looked to be a double row of teats were not teats at all…but eyes. There were no less than ten eyes that were moist and yellow staring up at the camera. It was like something from a sideshow this side of hell. And then one of those eyes blinked and Waterman nearly fell out of his seat.

“What the fuck is this?” he said, standing up now. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“It’s as Major Simmons said,” Pearle explained. “A mutation. Now sit down. I will not repeat myself and, Bob, you don’t want to make me do that.”

Waterman sat down.

The video cut again and the team had opened up the dog. Wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, autopsy gloves, one of them was digging into the dog’s carcass. He began removing a series of dripping, squirming little things. Pearl knew they were pups, but the full impact of that didn’t hit him until the camera zoomed in on one being held up by those gloved hands. Yes, it was a pup, a hairless and eyeless little thing whose flesh was entirely transparent. It did not have limbs as such, but looping things like feelers. It was an atrocity. Not just some mutation born of radioactive fallout, perhaps, but something that seemed to be evolving into a form very un-dog like.

After that, Simmons killed the video.

Nobody said anything for a time. They just sat around in shocked silence. Pearle kept his eyes on Simmons. His eyes were angry, they were accusing. There were things he wanted to say and questions he wanted answered, but that’s not how it worked and he knew it. That was not protocol. And Pearle was nothing if not an obedient soldier.

Simmons finally said, “So, gentlemen, that’s why we’re sending you to Fort Providence. What is happening there must not only be contained, but eradicated. I’m sure you can image what might happen if this was allowed to spread…”

12

So that was the briefing that prepared them for Fort Providence and the ugly pickle jar the Army had its hand caught in. But as it turned out, the 4/1 never made it to Fort Providence. For what was happening there had already spread out of control. And a particularly virulent source of infection was the Slayhoke Penitentiary.

13

As luck would have it, Pearle had everything in place before anything happened. In fact, he had things not only in place but buttoned up and snapped down. The perimeter was strengthened and fortified. Anti-personnel devices were set, gun placements ready to rock. Flamethrowers stood ready. And the trench had been dug. The trench was a little trick that Pearle had picked up in Vietnam. Many firebases were protected thus. If the machine guns, mortars, minefields, and airstrikes failed, you lit the trench. It took one hell of a motivated enemy to wade through a trench of burning gasoline or diesel fuel.

Thing was, Pearle’s boys were starting to feel a little foolish standing around and waiting. They had prepared for a siege and no siege was coming. The NCOs told them to look alive. Lights were concentrated on the outer wall of Slayhoke. Men scanned the few pockets of darkness with night-vision devices. Other than that, there was little to do but listen to the rain falling or to sneak a quick smoke under a tarp, drink a cup of coffee or bitch about the Army in general. And there was plenty of that going on. Now and again, there might be a shriek from inside the prison, but little else.

Pearle had nearly a thousand of his men surrounding Slayhoke and all of them were itching for a fight. Just ready for the mother of all turkey-shoots when those convicts tried to break free. It was really gonna be something. Of course, none of the enlisted men had been privy to what went on at the briefing and Pearle decided to keep it that way.

Van Thal, an ambitious young corporal from 3^rd Platoon, Bravo Company, came right out and said it to Pearle. “Sir, if you don’t mind me saying, I think we’re overdoing this. These are convicts, sir. They are not soldiers. Shouldn’t we just saturate the prison with tear gas and take them as they come stumbling out?”

Pearle was not angry with the question. “You would think that would be sufficient, wouldn’t you, Corporal? But here’s something to live by: don’t ask, don’t wonder why. We do things as we’re told to do them. And when that ragtag bunch of…individuals shows, son? Again, don’t ask and don’t wonder why. Just open up on them like they’re the Hun coming to sack your town and rape your women. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pearle was more than a little concerned as to what might happen when zero hour approached. He told his NCOs to keep an eye on their men, keep them motivated and trigger-happy. But don’t let them ask questions.

Exactly ninety minutes after everything was set, it started.

Later, Pearle would remember it as more than a feeling than any noise or sight. Just a bad feeling that withered his short and curlies and filled his guts with something toxic. Shortly thereafter, there came a distinct moaning sound from behind the walls and then a wailing that rose in pitch. At first maybe just one or two voices, but like a choir, dozens more joined in until there was a screeching wall of noise. The sort of noise that made everyone sit up and pay attention. Because whatever could make a mournful wailing like that, was not going to be anything you wanted to meet up with on a dark, rainy night.

Pearle himself waited there next to one of the gun emplacements?a big life-eating. 50 caliber machine gun, the sort of overkill hardware that commonly cut men right in half?and saw the first walkers come through the gates at a most leisurely pace. Only a blind man wouldn’t have noticed something very funny about this first individual. The walk was all wrong. It was more of a limping shamble than anything else as if locomotion was not coming easily. The walker kept coming, a threadbare and withered thing, its flesh and what remained of it clothing hanging in rags and streamers.

“What…what the hell’s all over his face?” somebody with a spotting scope cried out.

Pearle had his own scope and saw it, too. That face was covered in what could only have been moss. A green, slimy moss that hung off what was beneath like a beard, spreading down over the chest and torso like a pelt. It swayed on the flesh and bone beneath from side-to-side as the thing walked. A single eyeball was exposed, shining like an oily marble.

There was an easy forty-feet from the perimeter to the gas trench and another thirty to the wall itself. Pearle had told his NCOs to make sure that the flamethrowers were not used unless the unfriendlies breached the trench. And he was not lighting that up unless absolutely necessary. He was going to try everything else first.

The walker kept coming and now a half dozen others were coming through the gates and the lights were picking out the shadowy forms of many more still within the compound. Nobody was even thinking of engaging this particular enemy until Pearle gave them his blessing.

“Okay,” he finally said to a sniper sitting nearby. “Pop that boy’s cherry.”

The sniper, a tough little Hispanic from New York’s Spanish Harlem named Ramon Alguerro, looked from Pearle to his target. He pressed his eye to the scope of his M24 sniper rifle, sighted the walker in. He pulled the trigger. A 7.62mm slug blew a hole dead center of the walker’s chest, but he did not go down. He jerked with the impact, but that was about it.

Alguerro shook his head.

No, it didn’t make sense for that round was dead on. It should have blown his heart right out his back with a goodly portion of spine. But if it did, it sure as hell was not slowing this guy down.

“Holy shit,” somebody said.

Alguerro wasn’t having this. He worked the bolt on his rifle, inserted another round and popped the walker again. This time right in the forehead. The chest-shot had been an easy killshot, but so was this. Nobody kept walking after this. The slug landed right where Alguerro put it. Everyone saw it hit the walker. It was like planting a round in a watermelon: the top of his head exploded in a spray of tissue and bone. The walker went down. Fell over straight as a post.

“That’s more like it,” Alguerro said.

But Pearle was not quick to congratulate him on a fine shot. Because this was a test. That’s all it was. Pearle needed to honestly convince himself that what he was dealing with here was indeed a walking dead man.

The corpse sat up.

“What the fuck?” Alguerro said. “Is anybody seeing this?”

Oh, they were, all right. You could almost feel a shudder pass through the soldiers. More than one man crossed himself and a few others began to pray under their breath.

Pearle said, “Seems we have an enemy here that don’t care much for dying.”

More of the walking dead were pouring out of the gates now, all moving with the same leisurely pace. They were in no hurry. They came forward, the rain falling around them, many of them moaning like B-movie ghosts. And every man poised at the sandbag perimeter just watched as the dead came forward, getting a good look at those pale swinging arms and ruined faces that looked like birds had been pecking at them.

Outside the south wall where there really was no wall but a high reinforced chainlink fence topped by razor wire, the soldiers were able to see exactly what was happening inside the prison. They saw the prison mortuary building and the muddy, submerged graveyard. The dead that had risen that afternoon and assaulted the prison had, for reasons unknown, returned to their watery graves and now they were rising again. They came up out of that dirty, standing water, slicked with mud and clay, their skins barely concealing the bones beneath. They came up out of the ground like worms. Hundreds of them. An army of the flyblown dead that pressed themselves up against the fence, water running from the numerous holes in their hides.

And it was this more than anything, that made the soldiers panic.

These were hard-chargers. These were sky soldiers, troopers of the 1^st Air Cavalry Division, a unit that had killed more men than heart disease…or nearly. They had put the hurt to the Viet Cong and the NVA, Serbian guerrillas and Iraq’s Republican Guard. One thing you could certainly say about the 1^st Air Cav: they came, they saw, they kicked ass with extreme prejudice. And now they were beyond themselves. Men were screaming and folding up. Men were discharging weapons without authorization. Men were throwing their weapons and deserting. The skein that held together this tough, proud unit was unraveling on a large scale.

And there wasn’t shit the NCO’s or officers could do about it.

Back where Pearle was, just opposite of the main gate, he watched the dead swarm out like flies.

“Gas masks!” one of the NCO’s called out. “Gas masks! Gas masks!”

The men put on their masks, Pearle included, and the first volleys of tear gas canisters burst amongst the dead in hissing eruptions of white smog. More volleys followed. Thump! Thump! Thump! The smoke spread out in patches of fog and twisting plumes. It glowed in the lights trained on it. And the dead walked right through it, the smoke funneling out behind them like they were on fire.

Another test and this one a failure, too.

If Pearle did not believe what he was told at the briefing, he believed now. No men could walk through a wall of gas like that without so much as a shudder or a cough. The rain began to dissipate the clouds of gas and now there were easily forty or fifty walking cadavers emerging from the gates and spreading out in something like a rudimentary siege line.

They know we’re here, by Christ, Pearle thought, truly afraid of an advancing enemy for the first time in his hard-bitten life. We ain’t gonna stop ‘em with guns and gas. They know we’re here and their coming to chew on our livers and eat our stomachs out.

“FIRE!” he shouted. “FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”

Nobody needed much prompting on that score. The fifty calibers opened up with steady roar, cutting the dead in half and making others literally vaporize. The light machine guns and automatic rifles followed. Tracer rounds lit like fireflies. Mortar teams shelled inside the compound with high-explosive and white-phosphorus rounds. Grenade launchers landed ordinance outside the wall. The dead were pulverized, bullet-ridden, blown to fragments. But they did not die. Body parts writhed on the ground. Hands dragged themselves forwards. Heads screamed obscenities into the night. The no-man’s land on the other side of the ditch became a blazing graveyard of dismembered corpses that could not know death.

The soldiers were losing it now, shouting and crying and many breaking and running, knocking sergeants flat as they tried to stop them. This was the meat of the matter and it was too much for some. Men suffered nervous breakdowns and some just went crazy with terror and pulled into themselves. And others leaped over the sandbags and charged the dead with fixed bayonets. Officers and noncom’s screamed at them, threatened them, physically and verbally abused them, but it did no good. For hell was offering up its own and it was simply too much.

More walkers poured forward, some of them little more than skeletons. Some with creeping funguses where their faces should have been. Many were half-eaten and many more bloated and spongy things that called out to the soldiers, telling them exactly what they would do to them when they finally reached them.

The firing continued and the dead were pierced by shrapnel and bullets, but they did not stop coming. Here were throngs of skeletal things and things like wraiths that had pulled themselves up out of the prison boneyard. Here were hundreds of convicts that had been very much alive that morning marching alongside guards. Punched with bullet holes, they still came on, black blood spurting from their wounds. Some were blown to fragments by tripping landmines, but most came forward with a deadly fixity of purpose. Nothing was going to stop them. They were coming to feed. There was a feast in the offering and they planned on getting their fill.

Pearle was just beside himself.

He ran up and down the top of the sandbags, shouting and screeching out orders to troops that were simply too mad or too frightened to obey. He kicked men that were in shock and slapped those that were not putting out a steady volume of fire.

“THIS IS NOT S.O.P.! THIS IS NOT S.O.P.!” he screamed. “YOU CANNOT

DESERT ME! YOU CANNOT ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD! YOU CANNOT LOCK UP ON

ME! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? DO ALL YOU SIMPERING NIPPLE-SUCKING MAMA’S BOYS

UNDERSTAND THAT? I CANNOT HAVE YOU DOING THIS! IT IS NOT S.O.P.! NOT

S.O.P.! NOT S.O.P.!”

But in the light of what else was happening, the once high and mighty and somewhat dangerous Colonel Pearle seemed completely trivial. Men actually laughed him. Some of them were completely mad. Soldiers had contorted faces and chattering teeth and tearing eyes, they laughed at everything and anyone and particularly the walking dead. They were not to blame for thinking Pearle was a buffoon placed before them for their mutual amusement.

But mad or not, Pearle was not about to put up with it. Just to show them how totally humorless he was, he pulled his sidearm?a silver-plated Browning Hi-Power?and shot a young rifleman right through the left eye.

The dead were closing in on the trench now.

White phosphorus shells erupted around them, lighting many on fire. Yet, they came on, the phosphorus blazing on them, leaving trails of white smoke in their wakes. Some of those in better shape began moving quite quickly at the trench. They were not slow in mind nor in action. They knew, perhaps, that if they got across that trench and rushed the perimeter, they would simply overwhelm what soldiers remained. A great number of them came forward, burning from sprays of phosphorus and from contact burns. Their flesh sizzled and popped. Some of them fought madly to put the flames out, but others didn’t seem to care.

It was at this moment in the 4/1’s turkey-shoot that they noticed something else: the dead seemed riddled with worms. Not just your average maggots, though those were certainly in attendance too, but long, red, elastic-looking worms that filled empty eye sockets and draped from mouths, moved beneath those ashen mottled skins and coiled from wounds. These were the same type of worms that Harry Teal and the others from the prison mortuary crew had discovered feeding on the corpses in the potter’s field graveyard earlier that day.

But whereas those worms were simply parasitic?one of Mother Nature’s little helpers that sped along the process of decay?and essentially harmless to living things, these worms were different. They had changed. Mutated. They had been like living red licorice whips before, now they were thicker, bloated almost. Oily red things looking for flesh to despoil. It was almost like the dead were hosts for them. And some of the walkers…they were infested. Literally infested. Their bodies were set with dozens and dozens of holes and bullets had had nothing to do with it. These were not bullet holes, but worm holes. Tunnels the worms had created as they fed on the corpses.

In the bright lights and spotter scopes, they were plainly visible sliding in and out of the corpses.

And then they saw something that was perhaps worse. If anything can truly be worse than the living dead infested with looping red worms. The ground beyond the trench was not only scattered with the still-moving litter of the dead, arms and legs and fingers and heads, but with free-moving worms. Many were sliding free of the shattered anatomies they had once fed upon, but many, many more seemed to be independent.

Pearle saw them.

Dozens of his men saw them.

What was at first dozens of those wriggling worms moving at the trench became hundreds, then thousands and finally a boiling red nest of them. They were interlocked and coiled together in a great rolling peristaltic wave that must have contained millions. That squirming wave poured forward and there was no doubt what the end result of that would be. If it reached the perimeter…good God, the men would be hip-deep in a ravenous, invasive sea of carrion worms.

If the walkers hadn’t been enough, this certainly was. Men bolted in numbers now and more than one overzealous NCO pulled his M-16 and shot his own deserting men.

It really was a miracle that the gas-filled trench had not went up by this point. Pearle, confused and disoriented, ordered one of the men with flamethrowers to ignite the trench. He did so just as the worms were but inches away. The gasoline erupted in a fuming cloud of fire and black smoke, the flames racing along the trench and encircling the prison in a blazing ring.

It worked wonders on the advancing worms. The majority of them near to the trench were cremated instantly and the others went back the way they came.

But the dead?

That was a different matter.

They did not hesitate. They did not like the fire, but it did not stop them.

Pearle went out of his mind at it. “NOT THE TRENCH! THEY CANNOT

BREACH THE TRENCH!”

But they did.

They waded right into the burning trench, dozens and dozens of them. Some were immediately overwhelmed by the flames and sank into the flaming gasoline. But others made it through, human torches that charged the perimeter only to be met by gouts of fire from the flamethrowers. But the burning gasoline only had a limited lifespan. The rain was diluting it steadily. Already the flames were dying down and in some places, so many walkers were trapped in the inferno that they suffocated it. And the others used their writhing remains as bridges.

The dead poured forth again as the rain fell in gray sheets.

They were met by clattering machine guns and the popping of small arms fire, walls of fire spewed from the flamethrowers. Still they came. In whole and in part. The air was thick with the smoke of rifles and burnt ordinance, the stink of phosphorus and cordite and incinerated flesh. But the most prevalent smell behind the sandbagged perimeter was the stench of vomit and feces from the men fouling themselves.

And the dead surged forward, as tenacious as any enemy the 4/1 could conceive of.

They could smell the fear on the soldiers and they charged forward, broaching the sandbags and the soldiers met them with bayonets and knifes, shooting until they ran out of bullets and then swinging their rifles like clubs. But the dead were overwhelming. They refused to die. They fell on the men in hordes, dismembering the defenders, tearing out throats and vomiting sprays of black acidic juice into their eyes. Pearle saw Waterman get disemboweled and then saw no less than six of the dead claw and snarl amongst each other as they fought over the steaming viscera that fell from his opened belly.

It was insane.

Close-in fighting against the legions of the dead.

A battle amongst the dead and dying and undead in a rain-swamped position.

They lurched and hopped forward, white-faced things set with holes. Eyeless things. Things like mummies and wax dummies and scarecrows with their stuffing hanging out. Distorted faces and leaping shadows and shrieking nightmares. Things whose faces were creeping white tissue or glistening with hundreds of undulating, feeding red worms. Water ran from them and that black, viscous blood…if that’s really what it was. You could shoot them and stab them and slash their limbs free, but they did not die. Hands still clutched and legs still kicked. Torsos inched along the ground like slugs and heads shrieked into the night.

Surprisingly, through it all, very few men deserted. The ones that had maintained their posts fought on, most of them wounded and hysterical and blood-thirsty. They wanted to kill. They needed to kill. Flamethrowers hissed and the dead…and the living…went up. Grenades exploded. Weapons discharged. Smoke rose into the night in great seething clouds. Fire blazed everywhere. The dead fought with the living and scattered at their feet, the wreckage of war: limbs and bodies and scraps of pustulant white flesh that refused to know death.

In the end, the walkers dragged off the corpses of soldiers, those dead and those near-death. The 4/1 held and Pearle was still alive, damn them all. The walkers had gotten what they’d come for. When it was over, fires were still burning and the air was a repellent brew of smoke and steam from burning bodies and the dank smell of falling rain, the smell of rotting meat and spilled blood. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Parts of bodies. Limbs and trunks. Mostly from the soldiers themselves. Pieces of the walkers were scattered from inside the sandbagged perimeter right to the prison gates, slithering and worming bits of non-life.

Pearle rallied his forces.

Using entrenching tools, they shoveled the dead into the ditch until their area was clear. Then they lit it all up with the flamethrowers. When it was all burning high and bright, Pearle looked please.

“God bless America!” he called out.

And the rain fell and the perimeter flooded and the mud sluiced in rivers. And behind the prison wall, there was the sound of feeding. Of chewing and tearing, licking and sucking.

It went on all night.

14

“Arrogant, I was, Mitch Barron,” Wanda Sepperly said with some pain knitted beneath her words. “Old age has not only made me soft in the head, made me lapse into dream and lost memory at the goddamnedest times, it has brought me conceit and confidence that I should have no truck with. Do you see what I’m saying to you, son? Is that light bulb popping over your head like in the funnies when I was a girl? I’m saying to you that not only am I often right, but oftener wrong.”

Mitch and Tommy sat at Wanda’s kitchen table while she examined the carcass of a chicken, sprinkling spices and powders into pans of water she had set out. There was weird smell in the air like cinnamon and sage and dried flowers that came from the burning incense pots in the living room. It was so strong in there, it practically made you want to gag. When they came in, Wanda Sepperly told them that they’d have to learn to live with and like that smell, for it was a smell that those outside could not stand. They would stay away, she said, for her medicine was stronger.

Mitch came because he had to find Chrissy.

Maybe Lily was gone, but something told him that Chrissy was not. That she was alive. Wanda had told them earlier that Chrissy would come to him in her own time, but Mitch wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe he wasn’t a seer or a gypsy fortune teller or the neighborhood witch, but he had a real ugly feeling in his guts and he could not seem to shake it. When they got to Wanda’s, she was still awake despite the late hour, candles burning and incense stinking. The Zirblanski twins were sleeping in a back bedroom. “Don’t you worry about waking me, Mitch Barron,” she had said. “The old sleep poorly and such is a fact of life.”

Thing was, once again, she knew why they had come.

“Yer thinking that your young miss is in danger, eh? That crazy old Mother Sepperly is a few plates short of a picnic and has the bats in her belfry? Well, right on both counts. Right as rain. Sometimes I know and sometimes I think I know. And sometimes I’m just too damn old to know the difference.”

She went on that way for some time while she gathered her pans of water, her chicken, those spices and what not. By candlelight she spoke of age and error and things gone amiss. And the whole while, Mitch sat there smoking, practically coming out of his skin. He was breathing deeply, trying to calm himself, hearing Wanda and watching the banks of fluttering candles, shadows crawling through his soul and dread growing in him like river grass. He felt so utterly helpless at the whim and witchery of this woman, for she could not be rushed and he knew it and all the while that dread set its teeth into him and showed him the pain of not just losing Lily, but losing Chrissy. Flesh and blood or not, she was his daughter and he felt that he was losing her. It was an awful feeling, simply awful. Like being towed out to sea by some monstrous wave and watching the shore getting farther and farther away. No matter how hard you kicked and paddled, it only diminished in the distance. That’s what it was like. Chrissy?and his hope of getting to her?was fading with each passing second and it made him feel powerless, impotent.

“Where is she?” Mitch finally said, his nerves filled with an electricity that he was certain would fry him. “Where the hell is she?”

Wanda put those brilliant blue eyes on him. “That,” she said, “is what I’m trying to find out.”

She dipped the chicken carcass into one of the pans of water and held it up by its twined legs. She just held it there, studying the water that dripped from it. Her eyes had gone funny, misty like moonlight seen through a veil of clouds. It was bright and powerful, that moonlight, but something had darkened it, obscured it. But Wanda kept at it, feeding the coals into the hearth inside her, stirring up sparks and flames, getting a blaze to rise. She dipped the chicken back in, left it there a few moments.

“Do you know what they come to me for, Mitch Barron?” she asked. “Do you know what that gaggle of ladies, young and old, come to me for? What is asked and what is wanted? And do you know why it is always the women and not the men? Why it has always been the women and not the men that come to the village wise-woman or the witch on the hilltop?”

“No,” he said, not really caring.

Wanda smiled and he was almost certain that she knew what he was thinking. “What’s that, Mitch? Gaggle of old hens? Is that what you call my customers? Oh, you nasty shit of a man! Old hens! And me…what’s that? The Old Witch of Kneale Street? Mitch Barron, there should be shame in your heart! Shame!”

Wanda was laughing her ass off now.

Tommy was just shaking his head. “Yeah, what kind of fucking neighbor are you, Mitch?”

Wanda stopped laughing, caught her breath. “Oh, ho, ho, ha, ha! You kill me, Mitch! Sure you do!” She studied her chicken and then looked at him again. “Listen to me, Mitch Barron, it is not the bollocks and cock that wield the whip and it never has been! The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world! It has always been so and will always be! Never the rooster, but the hen! The hen! These women come because they have a spirituality men can never know of nor feel, for it comes with the carrying of child, the birthing of child, with need for unity and continuance of heart. The women come looking for my hand to guide them and my eyes to see what lies ahead. For that path, son, is set with potholes and reaching tree roots that would trip you up, you and those you love. And the women know this, Mitch Barron, neighbor of mine! Men are dull of mind and short-sighted, but women must plan in their hearts, they need to know of future happiness and despair, of love and children unborn and tragedy waiting to swallow their brood whole!”

Tommy looked over at Mitch. “Isn’t that what I’ve said a hundred times?”

“Sometimes you’re funny, Tommy,” Mitch told him. “But this isn’t one of those times.”

Wanda shook her wet chicken at Tommy. “And you have nothing to speak of, Tommy Kastle! I know you think I’m the neighborhood witch and have said as much to Mitch! Why, you said it just after you left my house today, didn’t you? Sure enough! But Mitch…Mitch told you that you had yet to meet the real witch of Kneale Street! Yes, Miriam Blake!”

Tommy just grunted. “Crazy bitch took a shot at us.”

Wanda stared into her pan of water, the droplets that fell from her chicken. “Oh yes, I know that. Don’t I have ears and eyes and a soul that wanders, picking wool and lint from other’s lives? But neither of you boys should be too quick to condemn Miriam. No, her views are extreme and her tongue is sharp, but only because she tries to keep alive the spirit of her husband. Do you honestly think that poor woman likes being some gun-toting, brainwashed hag? She does not! She carries on as she does, keeping her husband’s misguided beliefs and ignorances at full flower. Roger Blake was a fool, not worth two pinches of dogshit in a brown paper bag on a good day…but he was the only thing Miriam ever had to call her own. So she keeps him alive in spirit! But inside? Oh, she is tired and bitter and lonely. Don’t be too quick to judge her, that’s all I say.”

Mitch didn’t really give a shit about any of that and couldn’t honestly make himself care. Miriam Blake was a nutty old bag, end of story.

“So we have to find your girl, Mitch, yes we do,” Wanda said, soaking the chicken again. “But how to capture a girl in mind and spirit? How to read the ripples she leaves in her wake? Should we look for prophecy and prediction in tea leaves and coffee grounds? Should we divine by egg yolks or dropped sticks? By wind and water, wax on a mirror or straw burned in pyre? Should we call up haunts and cast the runes and study the bones of suicides or the menses of young girls? Or should we read moles and fingernail clippings like my Grandmammy Helda? Study the cauls of babies and birth cords as she was known to do?” Wanda just shook her head. “No, we’ll not do that! We’ll read the flesh and the entrails, the skin and gut and bone and hair! For as above, so below, as within, so without!”

Mitch and Tommy just sat there, dumbfounded as usual. Was she on the level or was she just senile? Mitch couldn’t help but feel ridiculous as Wanda studied her chicken carcass for revelation.

“What does this flesh tell you, Tommy Kastle?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Not much.”

“But you see the bumps on the skin?”

“Sure, all chickens have bumpy skin.”

Mitch just nodded. Chickens were bumpy. Once you plucked the feathers away, their flesh was yellow and oddly reptilian to the eye and to the touch.

“Sure, bumps!” Wanda said. “But if you look closely and you know what to see, those bumps form patterns that you can read! Yes they do…”

Her chicken was obviously not from a store. It was headless and plucked, but it still had its guts. Wanda produced a knife and slit it open. Then expertly she slit free gizzard and loops of bowel, examining them carefully. Holding the heart and liver in her palm, squeezing pockets of yellow fat in her fingertips. When she had cleaned out the cavity, she sorted through the cold meat and dropped organs into pans of water, watching the grease settle and coagulate.

“Hocus pocus, you think, Mitch?” she said. “Worse than reading egg yolks? Maybe, maybe. But divination is age-old and trusted. In the Bible, did not the Witch of Endor call up the ghost of dead Samuel via necromancy for Saul? And did not the dreams of Jacob serve the Pharaoh? And did not Jesus himself foresee his own crucifixion and resurrection? And what of the prophets of Israel and their grave warnings? The Greek oracles? King Oedipus and Delphi, the plagues of Thebes? Cicero and Plato and Plutarch? To divine is to be of God and it is as old as the bones of all men.”

Mitch didn’t know what she was talking about exactly.

He hadn’t picked up a Bible since Sunday School and the Greek philosophers just weren’t his thing and never had been. But he listened and accepted, knowing that time and age meant very little to this woman, for she was blessed with something timeless and ageless. She dipped her hands into the greasy, gutty water, balancing intestines in her hands, but not speaking. You could almost sense spirits congregating around her, deathless shades tearing through webs of mold and slipping from ancient tombs to be at her side. There was a vitality and an energy around her and inside her, it kissed that sallow old skin with a blush of pink and her eyes sparkled like sapphires. There was a smell of cold meat in the air, spices and herbs, flaking cerements and blood dried to sand. There was a sweetness and a bitterness, and just beneath it, a foulness as of riven crypts.

The spit in Mitch’s mouth had dried to a film now, for he was smelling things and sensing things, feeling things unseen rustling around him. And then he saw something that he would never have believed if somebody had told him about it.

Tommy saw it, too, said simply, “Shit…”

It was like the other incident where Wanda read those egg yolks, only worse. She had stiffened up, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. She trembled and made a moaning sound deep in her throat. There was a faint hissing sound as of steam and the air stirred around her, her hair blowing about, her dress flapping. And that’s when they saw it…white gossamer filaments coming from her fingertips and mouth and eyes. They grew and curled in the air, knotted and bunched, seeking each other out and joining in a wiry cage that encircled her head. The filaments looked physical, had substance like maybe you could hold them in your hands. But at the same time they seemed ethereal and appeared slightly transparent as if they were made of mist or cigarette smoke. They moved and pulsed, swimming and sliding like cobras in water.

Ectoplasm, Mitch heard a voice in his head say. That’s ectoplasm, ghost-threads.

And then as soon as they had appeared, they faded and were gone.

Wanda’s eyes focused and she looked at Mitch and Tommy. Those eyes were blazing and filled with a weird cerulean light. “No, not shit, Tommy Kastle. But the all and the everything. The talent and the gift that has come down my bloodline to me. The ability is in my blood and in my soul. I was taught by my mother as she was taught by hers down countless generations of women. That is how I know as we’ve always known, how I can see when you are blind…”

Wanda went off on another monologue about good luck and bad, about signs and portents and what was written on the wind and carried by the ashes of hearths. She told them that the caw of a raven brings death and disease and two crows circling a house means marriage and birth. Pigeons clustered on a roof are waiting to capture the soul of someone who will soon die and the whippoorwill calling in the dead of night is an indication that malign forces are gathering. The gentle hum of July bees brings good tidings, but the buzz of August wasps and hornets bring evil to the listener. Spiders are sacred to the memory of Athene and must never be killed, chortling frogs foretell passion, just as a gathering of vermin indicate pestilence and cattle sickening in the spring always foreshadow abnormal births or malignant growths to those who own them.

Finally, Mitch said, “Did you…did you see Chrissy?”

Wanda sat down, plucking a cigarette from Tommy’s pack. She snapped off the filter and lit it with a candle. She looked very tired and very old as if the process had taken years from her. “Yes, I saw her. She’s out there now. I cannot say where, but near enough to Upper Main Street I was told. There is danger for her. Paths to freedom and paths to bondage and death. But only she can choose.”

“I guess we’re making for Main,” Tommy said.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Mitch said to her.

“Oh yes, oh yes.” Wanda dragged off her cigarette. “I underestimated before what was about, what had taken hold of this town. I say to you know it is ancient and terrible. That there are those that called this up by practicing forbidden arts.”

Mitch said, “Fort Providence?”

Wanda nodded. “There is a beginning there. An ugly beginning. Seek it out, Mitch, then you’ll know.”

15

The kid who saved them from the clown was named Nigel.

He was a skinny little nothing kid who seemed perfectly at home in the new, devastated Witcham. He was really amazing. Flashlight in hand, old ugly Grimshanks battering his way through that door, Nigel led them down the corridor and then down a back staircase, out a window and back into the water. The route they took from there was circuitous?down flooded alleys and across avenues, up a fire escape and into an old apartment building.

“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “Just follow me! I know the way! I’ll take you to the lady! She’s the one that helped me!”

Nobody argued.

Nobody questioned.

Because really, when some demonic clown from a circus just this side of Hell wanted to maybe skin you and eat you and make balloon animals out of your intestines, what was there to argue or question? You accepted. Any port in a storm, as they said.

And that’s how they came to the dim, candlelit flat on the third floor. The one that smelled of fresh baked bread and platters of cookies hot from the oven. And that’s also how they met Mrs. Crowley. Dear, sweet, coveting Mrs. Crowley who was everyone’s grandma and favorite auntie. She sat in her rocker, knitting of all things, wearing a cranberry-colored dress and support hose that bagged at the ankles. Her hair was gray going to white, lustrous and full, a few stray fingers of it escaping her severe bun and tumbling to her shoulders. Everything about her was kind and comforting, even her finely-wrinkled face and sea-green eyes which were deep and relaxing like a country swimming hole you knew and trusted.

There was a fire going in the hearth and Brian, Chuck, Tara, and Mark stretched out before it like cats come in out of the rain. The wetness steamed from them. The heat and dryness felt so good, like warm fingers gently unlocking kinks in their backs and knots in their joints, massaging the feeling back into their numb limbs. It was all overwhelming and wonderful and how could you possibly question any of it?

“You poor things,” said Mrs. Crowley. “What an awful night! Thank God Nigel found you or you would have all caught your death!”

The heat loosened Tara’s jaw and she started talking. And once she started, it was pretty hard to get a word in edgewise. “…I didn’t think we’d ever get away. What’s going on this town? What’s happened here? I know the rain wouldn’t stop and River Town and Bethany were flooded…but there’s things out there! I saw them! We all saw them! We all saw the clown!”

“Terrible, terrible business,” said Mrs. Crowley. “Well, have no fear, my ducks and darlings, that awful clown won’t get you here! He knows better than to come sniffing around old Mrs. Crowley’s door! He comes knocking and it will be all tricks and no treats for him!”

“But…” Brian began. “But he’s not normal, he’s something else. He’s like some kind of monster.”

“He is,” Mark added.

“A monster?” Mrs. Crowley tittered over this. “Now, you boys and girls are too big for such nonsense! Monsters, indeed. Oh, you do go on.”

“But he was!” Tara said.

But Mrs. Crowley just shook her head, studied them all in turn through her square-rimmed spectacles. “I’ll have no more of that! You’ve been through a lot! Now what kind of world would it be, my ducks and darlings, if such things were! Ghosts and ghoulies and haunts and witches! Hee, a world that would chill my blood to ice!” She looked over at Nigel. “Did you hear this business, my boy?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Madness, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Chuck was thinking that someone around here was crazy or maybe everyone. Sure, their story maybe sounded a little wild when you unwound the guts of it before a blazing fire with a kind old woman in a nice, dry apartment. But there was no way anyone was going to convince him it hadn’t happened. Things had attacked the bus and they had gotten lost in Bethany and that clown…no, it had been real.

“Nigel!” Mrs. Crowley said. “I think that hot cocoa is ready! Bring a platter of cookies!”

Nigel scampered away into the shadows and they heard him bustling about, the clatter of trays and the liquid filling of cups.

Mrs. Crowley looked right at Chuck as if she could sense the confusion settling into him. “And what of you, my fine young master? You look like the responsible type, a practical sort…what do you say of these things?”

Chuck opened his mouth to answer, to fully disagree with her, but then he closed it. Leaning forward as she was, shadows wreathed over her face from the guttering candlelight, there was something almost sinister about her that made him almost afraid to cross her.

“Well?” she said.

He licked his lips. “We saw some things, weird things. I don’t know. I’m just glad we’re here and we’re safe.”

Mrs. Crowley grinned. “Now that is sensible. For you are safe and sound here. And in the morning, back to your families you go! I’ll sweep you straight out the door!”

“My mom and dad will be worried,” Tara said.

“So they will, so they will, child,” the old woman said. “But what choice is there? No phones, no nothing. Just the night and us gathered here, our candles keeping the shadows at bay. Of course, you’re hardly prisoners, if you wish to go back out there to what waits in that stinking water…”

“No way!” Mark said.

“Smart boy. We’ll have great fun. We’ll have cookies and cocoa and tell stories and when you’re tired, I’ll tuck you away safe and sound! Certain I will!”

Chuck looked around, smelling the cookies now and the cocoa. His stomach began to growl. You couldn’t see much of the apartment in the candlelight, but the rooms were large and high-ceilinged. Old fashioned, really. The wallpaper floral and gaudy, the woodwork carved oak. The chairs were plush and comfortable, the fireplace like something out of a fairy tale. The atmosphere was one of comfort and rest and protection. You knew instinctively this was the sort of place you would never be turned away from. The door would always be open and arms would always enfold you. There would be soft, warm blankets and deep feather beds. When he closed his eyes, he could no longer smell the fetor of the streets. He smelled fine memories and warmth, old books and yellowing photographs sitting on dusty mantels. The trace odor of baked muffins and soups bubbling away on stovetops.

Over the hill and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.

And that was funny, wasn’t it?

Isn’t this what gramma’s house was supposed to look like? Isn’t this what your imagination always described after years of being weaned on fairy tales and quaint childhood fables? Wasn’t this it? Wasn’t this the place he himself had seen in his dreams but thought he would never actually visit? His own grandmother lived in a time-share in Key West, took her vodka neat, and liked to argue things like annuities and blue chip stocks with his father. Her idea of a home cooked meal was to be found on the menu at Perkins and when she had cookies for you, you generally had to cut the plastic wrap free before you dug in because they always came from a store.

But this woman? Mrs. Crowley?

She was the real thing.

Brian asked her what she was still doing in Bethany, why she hadn’t gotten out with the others.

“Well, I knew there would be trouble and I’ve been here far too long to go running off with half-cocked notions,” she explained. “I am here to help and help I will! As to see is to sow, I always say. Old Mrs. Crowley leave? Ha! It’s not in her old bones! She’s a stain on these very walls that no hand can scrub free!”

“I was just wondering,” Brian said.

“Well, let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?”

Chuck swallowed something down that just wouldn’t stay. Was it entirely his imagination or had there been some kind of threat in her words? He couldn’t be sure. But as warm and toasty as he now was, the old lady’s tone made the goose pimples rise on his arms. He didn’t know what he was thinking exactly. Sure, she was a nice old woman and wasn’t that enough?

Well, wasn’t it?

Yes, yes, of course it was.

It had to be. Yet…yet he felt almost threatened by all this. He likened Mrs. Crowley to a friendly old dog, but a strange dog that you did not know. Maybe it wagged its tail and smiled up at you in that comical way dogs have, but you still took a chance by petting it. You still took a chance by trusting it. Because when you petted it, it might wag its tail and lay its head against your leg…or it might sink its slavering fangs into your hand.

Stop it, he told himself, you’re just being stupid!

Yes, of course he was. Tara and Mark and Brian were perfectly happy. They knew that Mrs. Crowley’s place was an oasis, that outside these upright and sensible walls there was death. Things beyond death, white-faced and hollow-eyed that reached from the shadows and rose from the stinking water, grinning with yellow teeth. But he still could not relax completely. There were bad things outside, but what about inside? Trust did not come easy to him now. He was suspicious. He worried about himself, he worried about the others. Sure, him, Chuck Bittner whose old man was a ruthless moneyed stuffed shirt that spent his days acquiring more money and more capital by screwing people out of theirs. Chuck had been a selfish, conniving brat for ten years now, all his life, but something had happened out in those flooded streets and in that storm, something had woken up inside him and made him realize how silly all that was.

He cared about these kids even if they couldn’t stand him…or who he had been. And maybe that was part of it. He needed them to survive, he needed to help them survive, and if for no other reason than that they could see that he wasn’t so bad after all. That when this was done with, maybe they would actually like him and call him friend.

Chuck didn’t know what had happened inside him.

But it was there. It was real and, yes, it was very important.

So he was suspicious, paranoid, he did not trust. He felt responsible for these kids. He had to lead them home, no one else, only him. They seemed fine with all this, with Mrs. Crowley and her grandmotherly ways, but they’d also thought that clown was just Bozo or Clarabelle or Cookie, friendly and harmless. And they’d been wrong, hadn’t they? Terribly, dangerously wrong…

The cookies and cocoa came and the other kids dove in.

Who could blame them? Platters of hot steaming cocoa that smelled chocolatey and rich. Trays of peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies and mint cookies and lemon cookies. Cookies with cherries on them and white frosting, chocolate kisses and vanilla swirls. And all of them warm to the touch as if they’d just come from the oven and they must have.

Chuck watched Tara and Brian and Mark stuffing their faces, greedy fingers putting delicious cookies into greedy mouths. Cups of cocoa were raised and ooohed and aahed over. The faces of the kids were grinning and happy. They were laughing and crying tears of joy.

Nigel just watched.

Mrs. Crowley just watched.

And Chuck watched them suddenly horrified by what was happening here. They watched the kids like a couple slat-thin, ravenous wolves watching the three little pigs gorge themselves on goodies and treats, their fat pink bellies ready to burst. Fattening them up, a voice in Chuck’s head said, fattening them up for the stewpot. Whether it was true or febrile imagination run wild, he suddenly wanted to scream at the intimation of horror he felt. When he looked at the cookies, one word popped into his head: bait. Like when you were fishing, you impaled that worm on the hook, hiding the barb that would catch your fish, that would rip through its mouth in a bloody spray and hold it fast. And then his eyes drifted over to Nigel and he remembered a documentary they’d seen in school last year. How when cattle were led to slaughter, a decoy cow was used. A cow trained to lead the others into the slaughterhouse where they would be stunned and gutted and carved-up.

And that’s what Nigel was.

A decoy.

He had led them here and they had followed him, they had trusted him. If a dark, perverse stranger asked you to get into his car, you ran away. But if another kid said, hey, my dad’ll give us a ride, get in. Well, you went, didn’t you? Because that kid was part of your tribe and you could trust him.

It was about this time, as Chuck’s belly filled with white ice, that he noticed something else, too. Mrs. Crowley and Nigel…they were both drooling.

“Aren’t you going to have some cookies, Chuck?” she asked him, wiping her mouth with a hand that was skeletal and yellow-skinned.

“I’m…I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are,” she said.

Chuck looked at Nigel. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Nigel shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”

Mrs. Crowley held out a platter of cookies to Chuck. “Have one,” she said, her face very pallid and fissured like dry bark, her eyes behind those spectacles filling with blood. “It isn’t polite to refuse.”

Chuck slid back in his chair, an inch, maybe two or three. He was terrified now, knowing the secret and wishing he didn’t. All a carefully-constructed ruse to pull them in. That’s all it was. This apartment was nothing but one of those Roach Motels you see on TV where the roaches check in, but they don’t check out.

And Chuck thought: How did you bake those cookies and heat that cocoa, Mrs. Crowley? I might just be ten-years old and maybe I don’t know everything, but my dad owns lots of rentals and I know a stove needs gas or electricity or even a tank of propane to operate with. There’s not a bunch of hamsters running on a wheel inside it. And there’s no electricity and no gas now, Mrs. Crowley…so how did you make this happen? Am I supposed to believe that you have one of those big black potbellied stoves in the kitchen like Little Red Riding Hood’s gramma? That you feed it sticks and kindling?

“Have a cookie,” she said and it was not an invitation, but an order.

Chuck felt like he might throw up. Because her breath wasn’t sweet like mints or chewing gum, it was repellent and fetid. It smelled like the fumes coming from a dead cat that had exploded with the gases of decomposition. Like she had been chewing on that cat, licking the graying meat from its bones and sucking the spoiled, jellied brains from its skull.

He almost threw-up.

He looked at the others and they saw nothing, were aware of only the fantasy that had been skillfully woven around them. This was reality to them. They looked fat and happy, their eyes dreamy, all slouching sleepily in their chairs.

“Oh, that was good,” he heard Brian say.

Tara made a purring sound like a contented tabby.

Mrs. Crowley was sitting forward in her chair and her dress was ragged and dirty, clots of earth falling from the hem. Her face was ghostly white, the color of a moist, fruiting fungus you might find beneath a rotting log. And like that fungus, it was puckered and pitted, things scurrying just beneath the skin. Her eyes had gone a sickly yellow, threaded with fat red veins, a shiny membrane covering them.

“Have a cookie, you little shit, or I’ll jam it down your fucking throat!” she snarled at him.

“No, no, no,” Chuck said.

The other kids did not even notice what was happening. They looked at each other and laughed, yawned, talked about what they were going to do when they finally got home, never realizing they were fattened flies hanging in the web of a spider and that they would never, ever go home again.

“Have a cookie,” Nigel said.

He sat there with the others, a dead little boy in a black burial suit that had grown dark pockets of mold. His face was shriveled and white, his grinning mouth exposing blackened teeth, his empty eye sockets filled with pale, squirming things.

Chuck looked at the platter Mrs. Crowley had shoved in his face.

There were no cookies on it.

Not a one.

There were only the carapaces of dead insects…slabs of festering, greenish meat boiling with maggots…things like decayed eyes and organs and loops of bowel crusted with spots of mildew. Some mummified fingers. Small black ants crawled over everything, a living carpet of them.

Chuck screamed.

All the platters were filled with carrion and insects.

The other kids smiled happily. Brian said something and a plump maggot wriggled out from between his lips and fell to his lap. He brushed it aside like a stray crumb. Mark took a last swallow of cocoa and it spilled down his chin, except that it was blood, a thick and syrupy blood like that which might leak from the belly of a corpse.

In some back room of his mind, Chuck could hear Grimshanks the clown’s grating voice, Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

Mrs. Crowley laughed, dumping the platter on Chuck’s lap. He cried out, scattering worms and beetles and rotten meat from his legs.

“You don’t like the drink and food what is offered, young man?” she said, her voice scraping and dusty. “You do not like the meat and blood offered? The meat is high and gamy and pleasing to them what favors it…”

Mrs. Crowley plucked a finger from one of the trays, held it out to him in her own scabby hand. Yellow mucus-like strings of drool hung from her lips. Carefully, with a tongue that was split open with cracks and spotted like that of a hound, she licked the ants from it and then popped the finger in her mouth. With a crunching, pulping side-to-side motion of her jaws, she ate it.

“The meat is good,” she said, a strip of skin caught in the corner of her lips. “Long have I dreamed of the meat and marrow and organ stuffs. Long have I wished for the time of the feeding and the filling. Bad little boys and bad little girls! Ah, sweet gravies and blood soups, bone meal and meaty stews, fleshy joints and well-marbled cuts ready for the spicing!”

Chuck didn’t know exactly how he kept from swooning, from folding up and going quietly mad. He was cold and hot and shaking. Droplets of sweat the size of BB’s rolled down his face.

Nigel was nibbling on a bone, possibly an ulna or a tibia, working his oily black tongue into one shattered end and sucking out the salty globs of marrow. Eyeless and infested with crawling things, he was happily lost in his own macabre little world.

Chuck jumped to his feet.

“Oh, ho, ho!” said Mrs. Crowley, her insect-ravaged face covered in a fine fuzz like that of a sporing penicillin mold. “Will the brave boy run off? Aye, is that what he would do? Well, go, Chucky-fucky! Run and run and run! Abandon your friends to my cauldron and my oven! We thank thee for the offerings made! For the juicy hearts we would eat raw and the stomachs we would boil to soup and the soft, butter petals of fine young brains we would nibble! In your name, Chucky-fucky, we give praise and thanks!”

The other children, again, did not notice a thing, even though Chuck screamed their names again and again.

“Shut up with yer mouth, boy!” Mrs. Crowley said, rising from her seat, bent and broken, bones thrusting from her hide. As she grinned, the threadbare gray skin of her face split open, hung in loops and threads. She reached out to Chuck with her yellowed, arthritic claws. The fingernails were splintered and filthy, dirt packed up underneath them. “You’ll not break my spell, you insufferable little shit! Not now! Not now! They are happy! Your friends are happy and content and we shall leave them that way, eh? Happy little lambs hanging from my beams, fattened and smoked and salted! Aye, deboned and stewed and sliced thin!”

Chuck stumbled through the shadows to the door, his head filled with a wild roaring sound. He could hear the gentle snoring of the other kids now and as he fumbled at the lock, something like a sliver of ice punched through his heart because he knew what awaited them. He knew there would be cages where they would be fattened like turtles in swill barrels. That they would be dressed out and cooked up in a big, greasy black pot.

And he was abandoning them.

Mrs. Crowley was advancing on him, flyblown and stinking, shuffling along in her ragged dress with the aid of a cane carved from a hickory stick. “Nibble, nibble, like a mouse,” she said, cackling. “Nibble, nibble like a mouse!” Her head was cocked to one side, the flesh yellow and pebbly and oddly reptilian like that of chickens. Her neck was a withered stump, her face toothy and red-eyed like some garish Halloween decoration you taped up in a window when the nights began to grow long and cold.

“Go ahead and run, you little pussy! Run away, run away, run away all!” she screamed after him. “You think I’m just some dead thing which thought to move? Wrong, you are, sweet young master! I’ve inherited this bag of bones as I’ve inherited a dozen others! And when this hide falls to worm and ruin, I’ll slide below into those dark spaces and low places and brood over my eggs! But I’ll be born again, I’ll rise quick one last time twenty year or fifty year from now with a new skin and I’ll get you! I always get all the bad little boys! I’ll slip into your room by the yon dead of the moon when you’re old and wheezing and I’ll chew your throat out and make merry with the soft and slimy and chewy things in your belly?”

The door opened and Chuck stumbled out into the corridor.

Yellow witch fingers crept around the edge of the door. “Nibble, nibble like a mouse,” said the old hag herself. “Nibble, nibble…”

Then the door slammed shut.

And Chuck ran.

16

As they cruised Upper Main, Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine that woke up in the morgue? Sure as shit. Stanny McCoy. Guy liked to drink. I mean he really liked to drink, Mitch. Been in and out of detox, couldn’t hold a job. He was one of those guys you see pedaling around town on an old bike with a basket full of cans he dug out of dumpsters and ditches. They’d throw his ass in detox over at St. Mary’s. A month later, they’d spring him and he’d be back on his favorite barstool, pissed to the gourd. Well, one day he passes out over in Chatterly Park, middle of a January night. Ten below or some shit. Some Public Works guy plowing snow the next morning sees Stanny leaning up against a tree, frozen right to it. Well, cops and ambulance guys declare him dead. They had to use a salamander heater to peel him off that tree because he was iced right to it. Anyway, they find Stanny a drawer all his own over to the county meat locker. Fifteen hours later, he comes around. Scared the shit right out of the guy pulling the graveyard shift, Stanny moaning and scraping around in the icebox.”

“He live?” Mitch asked.

“Sure as shit. Spent like two weeks in St. Mary’s, recovering. Lost a couple toes, nothing else. They said it was the booze that kept him alive. The booze and the cold lowered his body temperature, made him sort of hibernate. Then he thawed and woke up. You know what my mom said to him?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Well, Stanny, I hope you see the evils of liquor now, I hope this changes things for you.’ And Stanny says, ‘Oh yuh, oh yuh, that’s for sure. From now on, I only drink inside.’ And that’s the God’s honest truth, Mitch.”

Mitch stared out the windshield, seeing too many shadows prancing about out there. “And is there a point to that story, Tommy? A…whaddyacallit…moral?”

“Sure,” Tommy said. “Stanny was right. Fuck this noise, let’s go get drunk.”

“I wish I could.”

“You got a plan, Mitch? Any kind of plan?” Tommy asked him. “I mean, even if you don’t have a clue, you could pretend otherwise…just for my sake.”

A plan.

Yes, what exactly was the plan?

Mitch didn’t know. This was probably some wild goose chase perpetuated by the visions of some crazy old lady that saw prophecy in egg yolks and chicken guts. But it was all he had and a starving man will gladly eat crumbs. He looked at the dash and the glowing green display of the digital clock told him it was almost three a.m. That meant roughly another four hours of darkness this time of year. And with the rain and mist and gloom, probably more like five. For even today at noon, it was so gray out it had looked like twilight.

Lots of darkness and then only scant light.

He didn’t know what to do. He could only follow Wanda Sepperly’s vague directions as to where Chrissy might be. Thing was, Upper Main was nearly two miles long and with two feet of water in the streets that was steadily rising, it seemed like forever. Main was dead. Being that the University was just off of it, Main was thronged with bars and clubs and what have you. It was busy day and night with student trade and traffic. But tonight it was pretty much deserted. They’d seen a few cars, some people on the streets from time to time, but they hadn’t slowed down enough to stop and chat. The way they were moving…or not moving, just sort of shambling around or standing dead still made Mitch pretty sure that they probably weren’t people at all.

He loved Chrissy.

God knew he loved her.

But it was all eating at him and he began to feel claustrophobic and the need to flee Witcham became very strong. It wouldn’t be too difficult, he figured, to talk Tommy into driving them out of town and to the National Guard camp everyone had been talking about. If the highway was still passable, they could have been out of the Black River Valley in an hour.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

He’d sooner have stuck a gun in his mouth and jerked the trigger. Because that would have been far less painful than leaving his daughter, his daughter, to the horrors of Witcham and hoping she would make it out on her own.

But how long could they keep looking?

How long before the stress and bullshit, the horror and madness and, yes, lack of sleep, would nail shut the coffins of their brains? Because it was coming and he knew it. His limbs felt heavy and his eyes gritty. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate and when he did, his mind was filled with reaching shadows.

He wondered how long before he gave in. How long would he stay in Witcham? Until it was so utterly swamped that he would have to climb up on the roof? And if he stayed, did not give up?and he knew he would never do that?what then? What would the future hold? The storm system would pass, probably within a few days or a week at the outside. Would Tommy finally abandon him and would he be alone and insane, just waiting and waiting for a knock at the door that would never, ever come?

Don’t you dare give in, he told himself. You can’t afford to. You have to find her and there really is no other choice. You lost Lily…but you won’t lose Chrissy. You will NOT lose Chrissy.

And if he waited long enough, maybe that knock would come. Tomorrow night or the night after, only it wouldn’t be Chrissy, but maybe Lily. Lily dripping wet and bloodless, eyes sunken in, a cadaverous grin on her features. Stinking not of that lilac body scrub she used, but of damp graves and damp earth.

And what would that be like?

Dear God above, what would that be like?

I left her alone and went over to see Wanda, he thought. I left her alone even though I knew she wasn’t right in the head, that something had gone bad in her, something had poisoned her right to the core. I left her alone and maybe I knew it deep down that it was wrong, that I was inviting disaster.

But I did it anyway.

Right away, though, a voice said in his mind, Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mitch. That’s just grief and guilt talking and you can’t afford those things right now. Yeah, maybe in retrospect leaving Lily alone was not such a hot idea. But even had you been there, you could have only watched her so much. Sooner or later you would have dozed or went to use the head and she would have slipped away because what’s happening in this town is far beyond you. Whatever it is, it brought about the terror and death and grief it feeds on. A self-perpetuating atrocity. Maybe Wanda’s right just like those others have been saying and it all started out at Fort Providence. That was the seed, but it’s gone far beyond that now and it isn’t something as simple as dead people rising. They’re rising because the Army maybe stupidly kicked open some door to hell that should have forever remained shut, but now whatever has come through is holding that door wide and it’s just beyond the Army and the President of the United States to slam it shut. Maybe there’s a logic here, a rationale, and maybe this whole thing is part of some goddamned cycle and if so, it’ll play itself out.

And, boy, Mitch was liking that, if not necessarily believing it.

Tensing inside, energy long absent filling him, he said, “We’re going to find Chrissy.”

“Of course we are,” Tommy said.

“I mean it. We’re gonna find her.”

“What’s our plan?”

“Just drive,” Mitch told him. “I don’t know how and I sure as hell don’t know why, but when we get close I’ll know it.”

“We’ll just keep driving then,” Tommy said.

17

Shortly after Oates and Neiderhauser made the second floor, one of the dead ones walked out of a doorway like maybe it had been waiting for them all along. It had been a man once, you could see that in the jumping beams of the flashlights taped to their rifle barrels. Other than that, you couldn’t say much. It was pasty and flaking, looked like it had been slapped together out of papier-mache and poorly at that, its face pulpy and distorted, a gray jelly hanging from its mouth.

“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.

“Listen, Mr. Zombie,” Oates said, “why don’t you just go on back to whatever you were doing and we’ll kindly pretend we didn’t see your ugly ass. Hmm? What say?”

The dead guy said something, but with all that jelly bubbling from his mouth, it was really hard to say what. He held his hands out to them like he was in search of a dance partner, but you wouldn’t have wanted to hold those hands…they were white and puffy like they were made of bread dough, squishy and boneless.

“Neiderhumper,” Oates said, “I’m guessing this civilian is definitely unfriendly. Do you copy that?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Feel free to terminate his ass. You hear that, Mr. Zombie? Consider yourself terminated.”

The dead guy understood that much.

He made a growling sound in his throat and stepped forward, ready to give or to take. He opened his mouth with a wet, sticky sound and his lips parted, but were still connected by strings of flesh. His teeth were bared and ready to bite.

Neiderhauser opened up on him.

The first rounds chewed into him with little effect except to spray a lot of tissue against the wall. Then Neiderhauser compensated and brought his M-16 up, blasting that face right off the bone beneath, including the thing’s eyes. Mutilated and blind, it flayed out with its hands. Oates stepped out of its way and watched as it drunkenly passed him and found the stairs, tumbling right down them with a squishing sound. Below, you could hear it slamming into the walls looking for something to kill.

Oates was far enough gone by this point that he started chuckling. “Well, wasn’t that a trip?” he said.

Neiderhauser giggled.

Oates was losing it and he knew it and maybe he had lost it completely after his brush with the little dead girl downstairs. But he wasn’t so far gone that he wasn’t noticing a few things. That little girl had been possessed by something, was the very incarnation of evil, in his humble opinion, but Mr. Zombie just seemed to be some crazy, violent shithead. No cunning, no tricks up his sleeve, just something that walked that shouldn’t that was probably just as confused as they were as to why he was walking around at all. And this gave Oates some pause, made him think that some of these things were just crazy and others were very smart.

And was that good or bad?

What do you make of that, Angela? These dead ones are just like their living counterparts. Some of ‘em are just violent kill-happy freakos and others are cunning. What do you make of that, Angela dear-heart?

He followed Neiderhauser down the corridor, both tense as they passed too many closed doors, any one of which might contain the sort of surprise that would turn your hair white. Then, through an open doorway, they saw a dead woman lying on a mattress.

“Dead,” was Neiderhauser’s assessment.

“You sure, son? I’m thinking mouth-to-mouth might revive her.”

Neidehauser giggled again.

Because it was funny, see? All this was so goddamned roaring funny that if you started laughing, you just might never stop. The woman in question was sprawled on a ratty mattress, bloated up with gas, her skin gone a spotty grayish-green, her eyes little more than black holes sunk in her face. There were flies all over her, buzzing away happily.

“Hey, Elvira,” Oates said. “Any chance you might want to pull the train with me and my stupid friend here?”

She just lay there, decomposing, wearing veils of flies that buzzed so loudly you could barely hear yourself think. The very fact that Oates and Neiderhauser could stand there like that, with that repulsive, hot stink and the feasting corpse-flies, was a good indication that their minds had now slid somewhere south of the valley of shadow of death and they were fearing no evil.

“Hey, Sarge,” Neiderhauser said. “Lookit, will ya? She’s fucking naked, man! Fucking naked! There’s flies crawling out of her cootch! Ha, ha, you see that! Fucking flies, man!”

Oates thought that was pretty amusing, too. “Hey, Mrs. Brown,” he sang, “you’ve got a fucking ugly daughter.”

They both broke up over that one. Oates was wracking his brain, trying to remember who sang that song. Was that Herman’s Hermits or Paul Revere and the Raiders? Jesus, Oates just couldn’t remember. But he knew he had owned the 45 back in the days of his carefree youth. Back before he’d become a soldier and then a National Guard den mother.

“Neiderhauser, I’m thinking our girl here is having one of those not-so fresh days, you copy on that?”

“I copy. I’ve smelled some gnarly pussy in my time, Sarge, but this bitch needs to Fabreeze her gee-gee or soak it in Palmolive or something.”

Oates laughed, realizing that was exactly the sort of thing he might say. So he liked it. He liked this “new” Neiderhauser. This boy was a man now. He’d popped his cherry and dipped his wick and he was going to be okay.

Oates kicked the mattress and the dead woman jiggled like about a hundred-and-fifty pounds of green Jello that just hadn’t set right. A mist of flies rose from her. “Ooo-la-la,” he said, “wake up, Little Susie…”

Which wasn’t the sort of thing you really wanted to be saying to dead people in Witcham these days. You were just asking for trouble. And Oates learned that quick enough when a wave of motion passed through the dead woman and she opened her bleary, yellow eyes.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said with a voice that was watery and thick like oatmeal dumped into a bowl. “Lookee, lookee, lookee! Well, it’s your lucky day, boys, because Long Tall Sally is open for business and I do mean open!”

Neiderhauser wasn’t a tough guy soldier any more. No, he was a little boy in a dark bed cowering from the shadow of a tree limb the moon had thrown against his wall. He took two stumbling steps back and fell on his ass, a choking sound coming from his throat.

Oates for once found himself without a comment.

The dead woman sat up with a tearing, moist sound like moldering, wet laundry peeled from a basement floor. Most of the skin of her back remained stuck to the mattress, ropes of tissue connecting her to it as she sat up. She grinned at Oates and Neiderhauser and it was a hideous sight. Not a smile so much, but more like her face had suddenly sheared open. Something dropped off her left cheek and a yellow mucus oozed from her eyes. She belched out a cloud of flies.

“What’s a matter, fellas? You afraid of a real woman? Oh, take those cocks out for me so I can suck ‘em. Mmmm. You’re seeing a girl what likes a good piece of meat. One I can suck and chew and bite off at the root…”

She stood up with a slushy sound, those ropes of tissue snapping like elastic cords. She licked the puckered hole of her mouth with a black tongue and spat out a couple of teeth, shaking herself like a wet dog, rank fluids running from her vagina and ass. The flies lifted from her and then settled back down, nearly covering her in a droning, crawling mass.

“C’mon, boys,” she said, swiveling those swollen, spongy thighs that were a disgusting purple-black from blood lividity. “Don’t you boys want a blowjob? I’ll suck your cocks so hard yer fucking toes won’t straighten out for a week! I’ll suck your balls right out the ends! See if I don’t? See if I don’t! C’mere, soldier-boy, suckee-fuckee you little faggots! Me so horny! Me so horny!”

Oates almost fell over Neiderhauser getting out of that room as that horror shambled in their direction, shaking her rancid tits at them. She squeezed one bulbous, discolored breast at Neiderhauser and a stream of yellow goo squirted past his face and struck the wall with a stench like the drainage from an infected wound.

Oates shoved him. “Move! Move! Move!” he shouted.

He could hear that thing slopping along behind them with a juicy sound and a rising noise of buzzing flies. Oates heard something snap inside his head. It seemed like everything got really tight behind his eyes, his brain encased in crushing bands, then something just gave up there and part of him, maybe, suddenly ceased to exist.

“Hey, boys, here come the toys!”

Oates shoved Neiderhauser forward, spun around and dropped to one knee. He opened up on that putrescent old whore on full auto. His first volley of shots blew two or three fingers off her left hand as it again squeezed that bulging sack of tit and the breast itself imploded and deflated, a gush of black fluid and meat running from it. The second volley stitched her from crotch to throat, each individual hole freeing a storm of trapped flies and a pissing green bile.

The zombie whore screeched at that. “Look what you did to my beauty, you rotten fuck! Look what you did to Long Tall Sally’s lovely, lovely tit! Now I won’t be able to squirt my milk into your mouth when I catch you!” She cackled at the idea of that, rotting teeth clattering together, and threw her head back. “Go run off, I’ll catch you in the end! Then I’ll take your meat down my throat and give you a sweet taste of what I’ve got brewing down below! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A sweet taste of my naughty parts? I’ll ram ‘em in your mouth and make you suck the blood out of ‘em! Go run and hide, Henry T. Oates, because when I catch you, you’ll get the fucking of your life?”

Oates grabbed Neiderhauser by the scruff of the neck and pushed him along, hoping beyond hope that there was a stairway leading up or down because they had to get out of there. There was a hot sharpness at his bowels like he badly needed to fill his pants, but he wasn’t giving in. He wasn’t going to drop and sob and suck his thumb, no sir! Not Henry T. goddamn Oates. For he was the baddest motherfucker God had ever seen fit to set loose in any war zone, walking dead or no walking dead. He was one bad-ass, life-taking, ball-busting, throat-slitting death machine and he did not give up or give in!

“Stairs,” he said, sighting them just ahead. “Neiderhumper, move your poo-nanny ass up while I cover your behind! Get going, you leg-humping sonofabitch! You don’t move and that cream-queen is going piss her ovaries right down your throat!”

Neiderhauser mumbled something and started up the stairs. He climbed them on all fours like some sort of half-ass monkey until Oates told him to stand up and act like a goddamn man…if such a thing were possible. Had he the time, he would have kicked him in the ass and kept kicking him until his rectum was under his tongue, but there was no time for that.

Long Tall Sally was coming and she was in the need of male companionship.

Oates followed Neiderhauser up the stairs, listening to Neiderhauser whining out some prayer he’d learned in Sunday school. Behind them, the dead whore was saying something about little boys tasting like snails and puppy dog tails. They made it up to the top and Neiderhauser was the first one into that dim hallway.

And that was a lucky thing for Oates.

For Neiderhauser waltzed right into a carefully prepared booby trap.

When Oates was with the 101^st, he’d attended a little seminar on booby traps, learned all about the amazing variety of anti-personnel devices the enemy can fashion from just about anything?unexploded ammunitions to household items. Everything from grenades and bullets to wooden stakes and tin cans. Ingenuity being the mother of invention and all. And people got real inventive when it came to killing other people. But the people that engineered the apparatus that took out Neiderhauser had not been schooled by any army this side of the grave and their idea of raw materials was a little more than shocking.

Oates saw Neiderhauser get it.

About ten feet into the corridor, he tripped some kind of wire and something huge and dark that had been tied off to the ceiling came swinging down on a cord and hit him, impaling him instantly.

Oates went down to his knees at the sight of it.

Somebody?and he could pretty much guess who or what?had taken the time to build a graveyard version of a man trap. What it was, was a carefully erected cage of human bones tied together with sinew and what might have been ligament. For weight, two corpses were tied to the back of the thing so it would swing down with devastating impact. So there you had it: a sort of Malayan Gate but not made of jungle vines and bent-back saplings, but the raw materials of the grave. The two stiffs tied to the back of the bone cage gave it weight, the bones?leg bones and arm bones and the slats of ribcages?gave it a framework and then in the very front, a dozen human femurs were wedged in there, the ends snapped off so that they were sharp, jagged, and lethal.

Amazing.

Lurid and unthinkable, but effective.

It hit Neiderhauser with a wet thudding sound, impaling him easily, and then, with him in tow, it continued to swing back and forth on the cord that tied it off overhead. Oates just sat there on his knees, prostrate and gibbering madly, watching it swing to and fro like a pendulum, Neiderhauser’s blood spraying evenly over the floor and walls.

He died very quickly.

Oates finally found his feet, realized he had pissed himself, but did not care. He just stared at Neiderhauser. “What the fuck you go and do, boy? What kind of horseshitty business you get yourself into?”

But Neiderhauser just swung back and forth like Tarzan.

Long Tall Sally was coming up the stairs with a slopping, juicy sound, humming some profane melody under her breath…if she indeed had any. Oates made a funny sound in his throat and moved up the hallway at a crouch. The fear and shock had drained away now and Henry T. Oates was back, talking to himself and singing songs by the Turtles and The Righteous Brothers…or what he could remember of them.

Again, he saw the humor in it all.

“Hey, you zombies!” he shouted into the stillness. “It’s yer lucky day ‘cause here comes Henry T. Oates! And I’m coming for you, sure as shit! So drop ‘em and grin, pucker up yer A-holes and make ready, ‘cause here comes the loving!”

The hallway veered to the left and Oates was glad to leave Neiderhauser back there, dripping and swinging. Long Tall Sally had gotten up the stairs and she was cooing over Neiderhauser’s corpse, saying how glad she was his penis was intact. Last thing Oates heard back there was the sound of chewing and slurping.

At the end of the hallway, something came padding out of the darkness.

A dog.

Oates caught it in the beam of his flashlight and that stopped it.

Except this dog was in a bad way, its back leg broken, its side smashed in, and its head crushed, a slop of brains hanging out and solidifying there. It had been a collie once before a car knocked it into the gutter and before resurrection, but now it was just a mess. Its coat was black and muddy, things crawling in it. One eye was gone, the other just red and oily. Its viscera dragged along the floor after it from its exploded belly.

“And Bing-O was his name-O,” Oates heard himself say.

It growled at him, showing its teeth which were remarkably white and long and untouched by the trauma that had killed it.

“What’s the matter with you, old boy?” Oates asked it. “What’s yer name? Old Red? Sure, that’s your name. What’s that, Old Red? You trying to tell me something? You want me to follow you? Right down into hell?”

Oates giggled and sprayed it down with his M-16. About all he did was make a bigger mess of the poor animal, dropping it to the floor where it growled and panted, snapping at lengths of its own intestine.

Oates moved on.

He came to a door marked PRIVATE and that was the one he wanted. He blew the lock off and found himself in a wide maintenance shaft. A ladder climbed right up to the roof overhead.

A few minutes later, Oates was up there, free at last.

He howled his triumph into the black, wet night, dancing around and jumping up and down, shaking his weapon. But after a time, he just sat down and told himself how goddamn funny it all was. He told Neiderhauser, too, forgetting sometimes that he was dead.

But what did that mean anyway?

Death in Witcham wasn’t like death other places.

So with that in mind, Henry T. Oates put the barrel of his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

18

Maybe Chrissy was fifteen, but she was hardly naive.

When Jacky Kripp and Harry Teal took her and Lisa for a ride, she knew what they had in mind. At least, Jacky. He was an animal and you could read him just fine. But Harry? She didn’t know what to make of him, yet she got the idea he wasn’t liking any of this.

So maybe there was a chance.

They drove in circles for awhile and the whole time, Jack Kripp explained to them what it was all about. How he and Harry were from the prison and for years they’d been dreaming of fucking some sweet stuff and just guess who that sweet stuff was going to be? He kept grabbing both Lisa’s and Chrissy’s breasts roughly. Chrissy fought, but the man was strong. Lisa did not fight. It was all too much for her and she had shut down now. Lisa was not strong on the best of days and this night had just been too much for her.

“We gonna find us a place to go,” Kripp told them. “Then we’ll get to it, know what I mean?”

Oh, Chrissy knew, all right.

And it wouldn’t be a simple grab of tit through a shirt, it would be much more intimate and much more offensive. And when it was done? He would kill them both. Chrissy had no doubt of this. Kripp was a monster, an animal that belonged in a cage, and now he was out, showing his teeth. The future was bleak indeed.

Despite popular belief at school that Chrissy was wild and experienced, it was not true. She had never had sex, though there had been times with Deke Ericksen that it had come pretty close. But it hadn’t happened. Sitting there, feeling hopeless, she decided it would not happen this time either. Her first experience would not be being mounted by this slimy, dirty pig sonofabitch. She had already decided that. She would slit her wrists first.

But it would not happen.

Harry kept driving and then apparently Jacky Kripp saw what he was looking for. He told Harry to pull through the gates of the University. He did and parked out front of the looming, four-story Natural Sciences building. The parking lot was deserted and Jacky got out with Harry, then Chrissy and Lisa followed. Chrissy could have run. Harry was leading her by the arm and despite being very strong and well-muscled, his grip was limp. Jacky had Lisa, though, had a knife to her back and if Chrissy ran, Lisa’s death would be very unpleasant indeed.

The front doors were locked, but Jacky took care of that with a tire iron.

Using lanterns they had scavenged somewhere, the convicts led them down a winding corridor, past the administration offices and to a wing of classrooms at the back of the building. Then through a door to where the ugliness would happen.

It was some kind of biology lab.

There were long tables with chairs pulled up to them, sinks and laboratory apparatus along one wall and glass cases along the other. Harry walked over there with his lantern, checking out the selection. Inside, were stuffed birds and mammals, huge snakeskins and petrified eggs, bones of every description. But most of the cases were filled with jars and glass vessels containing preserved specimens. Everything from snakes to rats to squids, as well as a lot of human organs and tissue samples.

“Jesus,” Harry said, “there’s babies in here…babies in jars. This one’s got two heads it looks like.”

“We ain’t here for that.”

Jacky made Chrissy sit on the floor and hopped Lisa up on one of the tables. Barely concealing his lust, he ran his fingers up and down Lisa’s body. She was completely unaware of it.

“Which one you want?” Jacky said. “I’m taking the brunette first. I’ll show you how to make her squeal. You wanna start with this blonde?”

Harry just shook his head. “I don’t want either.”

“Fuck you mean? You going gay on me?”

“I ain’t banging no kids and these girls are kids,” Harry said.

Chrissy saw a ghost of a chance now. Harry might help them or he might just stand aside and watch it happen. There was no way to know. He was hard-looking, looked like he might be capable of being very violent, but he did not have that look about him that Jacky Kripp had: that predator look.

Jacky lit a cigarette. “Fuck’s wrong with you?”

Harry said, “They put me in Slayhoke because I stole cars. They didn’t put me there for rape and when they put me back, ain’t gonna be no rape on my record. You hear?”

“You’re starting to piss me off, Harry.”

“Tough shit.”

“I’ll fucking deal with you later.” He looked down at Chrissy. “I’m gonna take you, you hot little bitch, you know that, don’t you? But I want you to give it to me. I don’t want to have to beat it out of you.”

Chrissy’s lips trembled. “You’ll have to.”

“You see that, Harry? She’s feisty. Brunettes are always feisty. And when they’re feisty that means they like to fuck. You like to fuck, sweetheart?”

Chrissy wouldn’t look at him.

“Sure she does, Harry. Just look at her. Born to want cock. Nothing wrong with that.” Jacky kissed Lisa, drew his tongue over her lips. “Nothing wrong with this blonde here, Harry. Nice big tits. You like big tits, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Harry said.

Jacky looked back at Chrissy. “I’m thinking you either give it up for free, honey, or I’m going to rape your friend here right in front of you. What do you say to that? You wanna watch me hurt her? You wanna watch her scream? Is that what you want me to do with your friend?”

“Fuck off,” Chrissy said.

She wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but she wasn’t exactly afraid. After what she saw out in that rain, she knew there were far worse things than cheap hoods like Jacky Kripp.

He laughed, spit out his cigarette, and tore Lisa’s blouse open. With his knife, he cut away her bra. He studied her round, perky breasts, liking what he saw. But Lisa was oblivious. Jacky didn’t like that. He gripped her breasts roughly, squeezing and fingering them, pinching her nipples. Lisa trembled, but that was about it. Jacky put his mouth to her breasts and began to lick and suck them.

Harry said, “All right, goddammit, that’s enough.”

“Who the hell you think you’re talking to?”

Here it comes, Chrissy knew.

Either Harry found some decency and stood up to Kripp or he cowered away and they both got raped and murdered. What was it going to be? Already, Chrissy was eyeing up that chemical glassware. You shattered one of those beakers or flasks and you could get a nice piece of glass to fight with…or to slit your wrists with.

Jacky went right over to Harry, but Harry stood his ground.

“You wanna fucking repeat that?” Jacky said.

“I didn’t bust out to rape kids,” Harry said. “I ain’t doing it and neither are you.”

“And you’re gonna stop me?”

“Yeah…I guess I am.”

Jacky brought up the knife, looked like he was ready to swing into action, but sounds out in the hallway stopped him. There were people out there and quite a few by the sounds of it. Both Jacky and Harry froze, looking at each other and those dragging sounds coming down the corridor. A revolting stink of bad meat came wafting through the partially-opened door. You could see by the looks on their faces that they were not liking this.

Chrissy stood up and pulled Lisa down from the table, she brought her around the front of the classroom, forced her to hide behind a long, low counter with her. Then she peeked around the corner, waiting for it, whatever this was going to be. She had seen those things out in the rain, out in the water, but never close up.

And now that was about to change.

Jacky and Harry ran over to the counter and ducked behind it, too, dousing one of the lanterns. The other still burned brightly over near the specimen cases. The door slammed open and the dead came in. The first two were bad enough. One was a dark-haired girl that could have been Chrissy after a couple days in the ground. She was thin and wraithlike, dressed in a dirty Aeropostle sweatshirt, her eyes black and shining, standing out in great contrast to the pale gray skin of her face. There was an older guy with her, middle-aged when he died, his face the color of fresh cream and blotched with open sores. The third one was barely human. He was naked and bloated, his face so distended with gas that you could barely see his eyes.

And the stink of them…nauseating.

They paid no mind to the light. They went up to those glass cases as if they’d sniffed out what was in there and yanked the doors right off their hinges, shattering them on the floor. You could hear the glass crunching under their feet. Quietly, they began examining what was in all those jars, tossing most aside violently, crashing them against the walls. The stink of pickled flesh and formaldehyde was horrible. It filled the room as more jars were broken open.

But then they found the human specimens.

Lids were unscrewed carefully and white, puckered things removed. The zombies began eating them, chewing on rubbery organs and appendages like they were pickled eggs. The naked man shattered the vessel with the two-headed baby in it, that white and grotesque thing. He picked it up and gnawed on it. The girl had a bleached human heart she was working on and the other guy had what might have been a liver. The room was filled with tearing and slurping and chewing sounds.

“Holy Christ in hell,” Harry said under his breath.

Chrissy was biting down on her lip so she wouldn’t cry out or vomit, maybe both. Even hardassed old Jacky Kripp was as white as what was in those jars. He had the knife in his hand and he was shaking. And then, at the worst possible moment, Lisa shook and blinked her eyes. She was coming out of her fugue and a look of utter disgust spread over her features. Harry clamped a hand over her mouth and she stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.

But maybe there was something in his look, because she settled down right away.

There was nothing the four of them could do.

Nothing but sit there and listen to that grisly feeding as the things went through the cases, chomping and sucking embalmed meat from old bone.

Chrissy was terrified and sickened, of course, but right then something else came over her, displacing all else. She felt something cold building around them, something primal and diseased and absolutely malefic.

Then a little red rubber ball bounced around the end of the counter, right past Jacky’s shoes.

You could almost hear him think: What in the fuck?

But he didn’t have to wonder for long as a blurry shape darted around the edge of the counter and of all things it was a clown. A clown. A clown in an orange-and-yellow checked suit that was stained with filth and dried blood, moss-green pom-poms down the front, an electric blue jester hat on its head replete with tinkling bells. Its face was white and bloated, eyes the color of mucus glistening from black diamonds.

“Hey, kids!” it said. “Grimshanks here! Want to see a trick? A real funny trick?”

Jacky made a sort of screaming sound and then the clown launched itself at him, its yellow teeth sinking into his face and scraping against the skull below, peeling his face right off with a meaty rending sound. Jacky Kripp was a hardass around the prison block, a real terror, but he didn’t stand a chance against that thing that took him. It peeled his face off and then took hold of his bloody head and smashed it against the counter until what was in his skull slopped over the floor.

That was it.

Jacky Kripp died that quick.

“Wasn’t that a silly, silly lark, kids?” the clown said, those huge yellow teeth of his stained red, clots of meat dropping from his mouth as he spoke. “But don’t worry! There’s more, there’s always more!”

Lisa shrieked when Grimshanks took Jacky and she hadn’t stopped since, just gasping and screaming and sobbing and finally just becoming completely incoherent at the unreasoning fear of it all. If she’d been in shock before, now she was simply insane.

The clown took a bite of Jacky’s throat, grinned, and spit the bloody meat right in Lisa’s face, which shut her up for maybe two or three seconds. But then her mouth fell open and a sort of “Guh-guh-guh” sound came out.

Harry pulled Lisa away from Grimshanks and Chrissy took hold of her and they tried to make it around the side of the counter. And while they did that, Harry just snapped, went livid with rage at it all. Just like he was out in the yard again, he went into attack mode. He picked up the knife Jacky had dropped and went right at the clown with it. He slashed him across the eyes, the nose, then slit open his cheek right down to the throat. Then he sank the knife right in that monster’s throat.

Grimshanks roared like some caged animal, part pain and part surprise and all fury. He roared right in Harry’s face with a blast of hot, almost searing, decay that came out in a steaming mist. Harry fell over backward.

“Well, that wasn’t very fucking nice!” the clown moaned. “Look what you did to my makeup! Oh, I’ll take special pains with you, Harry Teal.”

Harry tried to get up, but whatever that horror had exhaled into his face had almost the same effect as some narcotic gas. It was primarily methane and other gases of ripe putrefaction and getting a hot blast of it in the face had made him giddy and breathless, sluggish and slow.

The clown crawled right over Jacky’s body, its orange-and-yellow suit picking up a few new bloodstains at the knee. It towered over Harry, smelling of morgues and embalming fluid, fresh blood and fresher meat. He’d gotten it good with his knife. Those yellow, viscid eyes that looked like nothing if not oozing balls of fish spawn, had been slit right open, a dull greenish slime like the blood of grasshoppers had run from them and stained the clown’s cheeks. Its nose was laid open to red gristle and part of its cheek hung open in a flap. A black sap spilled from Grimshank’s contorted grin, hanging from his chin in glistening streamers.

Harry just laid there, dizzy, hoping the girls had gotten away because there was no way in hell he was going to. He raised his head up an inch or two, swooning, fell back down again.

Grimshanks crawled over him until he was straddling him, his legs scissored over Harry’s hips. Harry could feel something stiff and swollen rising against the clown’s thigh and he realized that it had to be the thing’s cock. It was getting excited. It was actually turned on by all this. Sure, this was all bad, but the idea of that was maybe just a little bit worse.

The clown grinned down at him, those sharp yellow teeth sliding out like rapiers, bits of meat stuck in-between them. A black tongue that was bifurcated like that of a snake came out and licked the teeth. And those eyes that had been slit clean open were whole again. That green jelly on its cheeks had dried to a film. “Pretty neat trick, eh, Harry? And you thought little old me couldn’t see! Ha! Shows you what a cheap fucking jailbird you are!” Grimshanks said, sucking up that black sap hanging from his mouth like a kid sucking up snot. Its nose was still flayed open as was its cheek and you could plainly see the maggots at work in there. “Now, Harry, let’s play a game! Remember when you were doing time? Remember when you’d hear some guy screaming in the night because he was getting raped? Remember that? Huh? Huh? Do ya? Do ya? Well, you know what? That’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to play prison rape! You wouldn’t mind if I rammed my dick up yer bunghole while I tore out yer throat, would ya? Would ya? Would ya, huh?”

Harry felt his mind clear.

Felt an absolute, almost elemental repulsion settle into him at the idea of it all. And he externalized it the way he generally did out in the prison bullpen: he balled his fist and hit that clown with everything he had which was considerable. Grimshanks’ head flopped to the side enough where you could see that livid, knotted scar from the rope he’d hanged himself with. He lost balance and Harry tossed him aside.

The clown screamed.

Harry scrambled over the top of the counter and the first thing he saw was Lisa and Chrissy. They were just standing there. Chrissy had a shard of glass in her hand. They had not run away, probably were too shocked to do so or maybe it was those zombies up front by the door, sitting around in all that broken glass and eating what was in the jars.

Harry pushed the girls towards the door and then Grimshanks darted up from behind the counter. “No fair! No fair!” he said. “And don’t think you’re leaving until my show is over!”

They almost made the door.

But Grimshanks had other ideas. He detached one of his oversized pulpy hands at the wrist, yanking on it until it separated from the wrist, each gray filament and rubbery cord stretching and finally snapping with popping bubbles of grayish goo. Then he tossed it at them. It struck the door and fell dead at their feet, but it had the desired effect: they stopped.

Harry held the girls behind him, not knowing whether to protect them from the carrion-eaters to one side or that pustulent, fleshy hand that was even now beginning to flop and wiggle its fingers.

“You don’t mind if I let my fingers do the walking, do you, Harry?” Grimshanks said, laying on top of the counter now, legs crossed, studying his stump with amusement. “I think I’ll finger your girlfriends a bit…you girls ever had clown fingers up yer cunt and a fat clown thumb up yer ass?”

The hand was fat and fungous, sores and boils set over its back. It jumped up and righted itself like a beetle that was trapped on its back and then it crawled across the floor like some immense white spider going right at Harry and the girls. Then it jumped up in the air, Harry ducking out of its path, and latched right onto Lisa. It ran right up her blouse as she screamed herself numb, pausing only to tweak her breasts.

What it did next, nobody expected.

It went right up to her throat and that made her scream even wilder. She danced around, trying to throw it and that hand skittered right up her chin and wedged itself in her mouth, all four fingers and thumb and those alone were of an incredible girth. Lisa fell to her knees, eyes bulging, chest rapidly rising and falling, trying to suck in some air. And that mucid, carious hand began to corkscrew itself deeper into her mouth, leaving white strings of flesh behind it that flapped around like confetti.

Harry and Chrissy went to her, but there was absolutely nothing they could do. The hand, which didn’t seem to be much smaller than a baseball glove, twisted itself completely into her mouth and you could hear the cracking as her jaw dislocated itself. As it squeezed its way in, black bile and gray jelly squirted from the stump.

Lisa fell over, grasping her throat and convulsing, her face going blue then purple, the eyes glazing over.

“Stop it!” Harry shouted. “Stop this! Stop it right fucking now!”

But Grimshanks just laid there, kicking his crossed leg and licking the stump at his wrists. “I won’t and you can’t make me, jailbird! But go ahead and try!”

“Don’t!” Chrissy told him.

Lisa continued to convulse and you could see her throat enlarge, spread out to incredible dimensions as that hand forced itself down her throat, things bursting and tearing in there and blackening the skin with broken capillaries and blood vessels. More of that bile vomited from her mouth and she was dead, suffocated, but still she moved as that hand forced itself deeper into her. It got into her belly and you could see those fingers unfolding, the skin at her abdomen set with five mounds pushing from the inside as the hand stretched its fingers.

Harry ran right at the clown and Grimshanks leaped up into the air, something almost comical considering its bloated girth. It leaped up and hung suspended there as if by wires, then it zoomed right down on Harry, knocking him flat, and winging through the classroom like a bat.

Harry saw it grab Chrissy and fly right out the door.

“You won’t catch us and you won’t find us,” Grimshanks’ sing-song voice echoed out of nothingness. “We go where the bad boys and bad girls go! The ones no one wants, no one ever wants!”

And he went after them, but it was too late. There was an explosion of glass and the clown flew right out a plate glass window with Chrissy and dissolved into the shadows of the night.

And then Harry was alone, except for the carrion-eaters.

19

That night there were sounds.

There was madness in Witcham, a raw and devastating insanity in the city now. Every nerve and fiber bunched with delirium and morbid psychosis. Like the ruined gutter landscape of a lunatic’s mind, things existed and breathed and walked those flooded streets that could not possibly do so in a sane and ordered world. The graveyards and cellars and shadowy hollows had given up their dead, things were breeding and flowering out there in the wet darkness.

Tonight was bad.

But tomorrow night it would be worse, Wanda Sepperly knew.

For tonight what had poisoned Witcham was just learning to crawl, but tomorrow night it would be walking high and in full bloom. And she was of the mind now that there really wasn’t anything that could stop it. A power, an influence, had been unleashed by people who had no true conception of what they’d been toying with. And like a fire with a good wind behind it, it was now going to burn out of control. And Wanda did not need egg yolks or chicken guts to tell her this. There were certain absolutes that you could feel, smell, and taste.

And the shadow that had taken Witcham was one of those.

She had been dozing off and on the past hour, feeling her age, feeling her brittle bones that would barely support her now and the frailty of the flesh that housed them. She had known for some time now that her days on earth were growing nigh and today and tonight she had burned up a great deal of what life she had left in her. She would not survive this, but maybe, just maybe, she could help a few others to.

It was getting on four a.m. when she heard a knocking at the front door.

She came awake from a shallow sleep in which her mother’s voice warned her of things she could not remember when her eyes flickered open.

The knocking came again. It was frantic.

Wanda tried to wet her lips, but they were as dry as the rest of her anatomy. Nothing in her now but sticks and twigs and desert sand. The knocking came again. There had been fear at first, but not now. She didn’t think those out in the streets could stand at her door with what she burned in her incense pots. The stink was heady and maybe a trifle unpleasant and they could not bear it.

She got to her feet, her old bones creaking, and went to the door with the aid of her cane. Funny how she had not needed it all day long. How the knowledge that her mind and her craft and her special talents being needed had revitalized her, made her feel as hot-blooded and flush as a woman of thirty or forty. But now that had drained away. She hobbled to the door, trying to feel in her mind what might be out there, what had come to call.

And though she was weak and worn, her mind was still an intuitive thing and it could sense no sinister intent out on the porch, nothing that walked that should not.

Sighing, she undid the deadbolt and lock, pulled the door open.

A teenage boy stood there, dripping wet, an overfed tomcat in his arms. “My mom and dad are gone,” he said, falling through the door. “And I can’t find Chrissy.”

Then he hit the floor, going out cold.

The Zirblanski twins came running, looking frightened.

“Help him onto the sofa, girls,” Wanda said, taking the cat from him.

“That’s…that’s Deke Ericksen. He used to be our paper boy,” Rita told her.

Rhonda and Rita wrestled Deke onto the sofa, while he mumbled on about things they could not understand. He was drenched and so was his kitty. Wanda toweled the cat off and it began to purr almost immediately.

“Friendly old mouser, ain’t you?” she said, setting him down.

Over at the door, she stared out into the night. Yes, they were out there and she could feel them. Feel the ancient evil they emanated. For maybe some thought they were just the reanimated dead, but she knew better. She could see the true nature of the malignance that filled them.

Yes, they were out there.

And now she saw them.

The boy, this Deke Ericksen, had brought some with him that had no doubt been following him. One of them was a young girl standing next to an oak in the front yard. She was just a gray, withered form, but Wanda could see her face, pale as marble and the depthless eyes staring out of it.

And out in the streets, another rose from the water, a woman who might have been the girl’s mother. She rose up, water running off of her, seeming to be at once flesh and blood and then something that melted into shadow. Her eyes were huge and black and intense.

Wanda slammed the door shut before one of those shadows drifted in.

20

What Chuck Bittner remembered most was running.

After he’d escaped the witch’s gingerbread cottage?a.k.a. Mrs. Crowley’s apartment of crawling goodies?he took to the streets in a daze. He didn’t remember much of it save splashing through the water, the falling rain, hiding from shadows that stalked the night…but little else. Some demonic clown had chased them all and then that kid, Nigel, had brought them to see the witch. Yes, that’s exactly what had happened, he knew, just as he knew he’d never, ever get anybody to believe him. Regardless, you couldn’t come out of something like that without being a bit confused, a bit rattled, and maybe more than a little crazy.

Chuck figured that’s why he didn’t remember much of his journey across the city to his own neighborhood in Elmwood Hills. When he arrived there, stunned and fatigued and he didn’t know all what, he was surprised. Surprised because he could not recall setting out in any particular direction with any set plan in mind. But some how, some way, he had arrived home. Something had guided him.

And after what he found when he got home, he just had to wonder.

The first thing he saw was that there were lights on in his house. Sure, the big Cape Cod on the corner with the high, hand-crafted iron fence around it. His old man’s Lincoln Navigator in the driveway. Not electric lights, of course, because those were history now. Wavering, yellow-orange lights like the kind thrown by candles. He should have felt welcomed by this, by the idea that someone was home waiting up for him.

But he did not feel welcomed.

In fact, he felt almost threatened.

His old man worked long hours and Chuck just couldn’t imagine him waiting up. Even with the fact that his son was missing in a school bus somewhere. Not that dad was selfish or insensitive really, but as he always said himself, he worked long hours.

So who had lit the candles?

Chuck stepped through the gate, the rain just coursing down now, running down his face and down the back of his shirt in rivers. He caught a glimpse of someone watching him from the oval window on the stairs. But as soon as he looked, they darted away.

It wasn’t his old man.

Dad was short and round. Dad wore so much gold jewelry around his neck it would have flashed in the candlelight. So it wasn’t dad. Then who? The figure had been tall and thin, almost like mom…but it couldn’t have been mom. Mom had divorced dad years ago. Besides, last month, last month…

Last month she died. She died and that’s that. You never saw her anymore, you didn’t even know what she was doing these days. Was she with one man after another like dad said? Or had it been worse? When she slit her wrists had it been because of her drinking and drugging or something more?

Something like loneliness?

Chuck wasn’t going there. There was pain there and bad feelings and he could not face them. After she’d died, he’d spent a lot of nights going over it all. It was true that he had not really seen her in three years. But she always sent cards and sometimes she called. But Chuck had not acknowledged those cards or returned those calls. He knew why, of course. It was because his old man had encouraged him to blot out the memory of his mother. And he had done so. His mother had left. He lived with his father. That made him feel bitter at her and made him want to do just about anything to please dad.

Well, he never left, did he? He didn’t abandon me. He took care of me.

As dad always said, “It’s just you and me, kid. Your mother wasn’t much to begin with and now she’s gone. It’s just us. You know you can count on me, right? That you can always count on me?”

And Chuck did.

Even though dad had little time for him, he knew he could count on him. At least, he thought he could.

And mom?

She was dead and that was that.

God, where was all this coming from? This sudden concern for others? He’d never cared about anybody before.

Sucking in a damp wind, Chuck opened the front door.

Right away. He could smell something cooking. Something like bacon frying. It had that same unmistakable odor…almost. But not a good smell like bacon in the morning, but something else. Something that smelled like salted meat on top and something almost rancid beneath.

He walked slowly towards the kitchen, certain now what he was going to see. But driven. Pushed in that direction. Needing to see the very worst thing that this night could offer up to him. Something much more personal than that clown or the old witch. Something he could not walk away from unchanged.

The cooking smell was stronger.

It was gagging even.

At the archway leading into the kitchen, he stopped. Stopped, took a breath, found his voice and pulled it up where it might be heard. “Mom?” he said.

There was a wet, smacking sound like an old lady moistening her lips. Then a voice, very dry and cracked: “Come in, dear.”

It was Chuck’s legs that almost mechanically brought him through the archway. Because the rest of him was tensed and crawling and needing badly to run. But his legs brought him in there and he got to see. See what, somehow, through wind and storm and driving rain, he’d been drawn back home to see.

There were perhaps a dozen candles glowing, throwing wavering shadows against the wall like something from a spookshow. And that was appropriate because mom was standing before the stove. The gas stove. The electric ignition was out, but mom was resourceful: she’d used a kitchen match. Mom had always been resourceful that way. Even after six weeks in the grave.

“Are you hungry, baby?” she asked.

Chuck wanted to fall to the tile floor. He wanted to fly apart or drag himself under the table like a sick dog. Mom just stood there, smiling at him as she cooked things in a frying pan. She was entirely naked, a moldering thing with deflated breasts hung with green moss. Her left eye was missing and her right was huge and glistening black, a grayish mucus running from it. The flesh had been eaten away from her ribs as if by animals and her skin was white and lumpy with strange sucker-like growths that looked oddly like barnacles.

“How’s my baby boy?” she said. “Did my baby boy miss his mommy?”

Chuck was repelled, certainly, but more than that he was wounded on a much deeper level. Something inside him, something he imagined to be like boiling red blood, was bubbling to the surface. Coming from a room inside him he’d kept locked and bolted for years. It was the place he’d kept the memories of his mother. The way she’d been before she left and his hopeless childhood fantasies of what things would be like when she came home again. But she never did come home, so Chuck had thrown everything into that room: all the emotional flotsam and jetsam that had collected in his soul over the years, all the love and hate, joy and heartbreak, remembrance and disillusion and pain, dear God all that biting, cutting awful pain, and here it comes, here it all comes?

Chuck began to whimper as all those repressed emotions broke through the levy and flooded him, running wet from his eyes and filling his belly with heat and making something in his chest constrict.

“Tears, Chuck? Are those tears and sobs for your poor neglected mother?” she said. “No, no, no, we can’t have that. Mommy can’t have her big boy crying like a little girl. You let mommy make it better. You let mommy make you something yummy to eat.”

And as Chuck stood there, floored with too many conflicting emotions, mom flipped dark, burning things in the pan with her spatula. A sickening odor wafted from them, almost overpowering her own stink which was that of mildewed, rotting things. As she worked that spatula, he could see where the pathologist had sutured her wrists back up in the morgue. The flesh of her fingers hung in loops like cobwebs. Her knuckles had burst through the skin and he could see red gristle beneath. She hummed some melancholy dirge under her breath and Chuck was certain that she’d hummed him to sleep with it when he was a baby.

He took one step backward.

“Where are you going, baby? Don’t you like mommy’s cooking?”

As she said this, a flap of something fell from her cheek and landed in the pan, sizzling away in the hot oil. And that was what she was cooking up. That’s what she was offering to her son: herself. Didn’t mothers always give their children their own flesh and blood? She had brought him to being within her own body and now she was giving him another helping of that. She wanted to fill him with herself and that’s why the flesh from her ribcage was missing: she’d filleted herself for her only child.

She stood there, humming and flipping the meat, an absolute horror. He could recognize that figure as his mother…but just barely. Most of the hair was gone from her scalp, save a few locks at the back of her skull. And these were not the lustrous red he remembered, but a dry tangle of pale orange hairs like dried reeds or straw. Her lips had shriveled away from her blackened gums and her teeth seemed narrow, rodent-like, just gray with filth caked between them as if she’d chewed her way up out of the grave. The entire left side of her face was enormously swollen, just a great sac of pus and quivering larva.

“Why don’t you talk to mommy, Chuck?” she said, a couple of graveworms dropping from her mouth and frying up in the pan.

“Your dead,” he said and was surprised at how calm his voice was. “You…you shouldn’t be here. You’re dead.”

Mom fixed him with that single black, juicy eye. “That’s what your father said, Chuck. That’s exactly what he said. Right before his heart gave out and he hit the floor. Don’t worry, baby, I didn’t let your father die alone and unloved. I laid on top of him. He didn’t like it much. Especially when I told him how all his partners are robbing him blind and how his mother tried to abort him and?”

“Stop it!” Chuck said, more emotions rioting in him, filling his head with explosions like fireworks. Grief and pain and guilt and anger and horror, oh yes, lots of that.

Mom laughed and it was an awful, screeching sound like grinding metal. “Hungry, Chuck? Hungry? She reached into the pan and her fingers sizzled in the oil, black smoke coming off them. She snatched a piece of meat and placed it between her teeth. She did not chew as a human chewed, but like an animal, a dog or even a shark maybe, snapping her teeth down on it and pulling it whole into her mouth and down her throat. “Yummy. Now, Chuck, it’s time we spoke the truth about your father.”

Chuck was breathing very hard, part of him certain that none of this was even happening, that perhaps he was still in Mrs. Crowley’s apartment. “Your dead,” he said. “Go…go back to your grave.”

“I don’t want to, Chuck. I’ve been resurrected and I like it.” She ate another piece of meat with that same chomping, gulping action. “Your father liked men, Chucky. He liked the feel of a cock in his mouth. He liked to put his own up men’s asses. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“Mom…”

“Oh, it’s true, Chuck. I should have known. All the while we were married, he was playing with other men. That explains why he always wanted to fuck me in the ass. I didn’t like it at first. But then later, yes, I liked it. When I was drunk I liked the feel of it. That was why I left, baby. Because your father was a queen and I like the feel of cocks in me. I liked to be fucked by men. Any men. I liked to be fucked by two or three men at the same time. I loved the feel of it.”

Chuck was crying now, tears running down his face.

Mom turned away from her fry pan. “Don’t be so weak, Chuck. Don’t be so fucking weak. You’re like him! You’re like your father! Soft and weak and gutless! I’d hoped there’d be more of me in you! I’d hoped you’d be strong! Strong like me!”

Chuck shook his head. “You weren’t strong! You…you killed yourself!”

Mom stopped, cocked her head to one side. She looked momentarily confused. That single black eye jittered in its socked, pulled in and pushed out, pulsing like a macabre slug. More mucus ran from it. The swollen bulge at her cheek trembled. It split open and a trickle of black blood ran from it. A plump, white worm emerged and dropped free, followed by another and another.

“Yes, Chuck, I did kill myself,” she said, examining the black surgical lacing that held her wrists closed. “Do you know what that was like? The loneliness and hopelessness and stark pain of it all? Alone, alone, alone! Lying on that floor, vomiting my guts out and thinking about my baby boy who did not love me anymore! Who would not even return my calls or send me cards on Mother’s Day! Do you know what that was like? To die alone, alone, alone?”

“Get out of this house!” Chuck shouted at her. “You’re not my mother!”

“Come here,” she said, holding her arms out to him.

“No!”

“Come here!”

“No!”

And he wouldn’t so she started coming to him, a green worm slinking from the ruined cavity of her nose. “You do as mother says or I’ll do something awful to you! I’ll call the clown, Chucky-fucky! I’ll call the clown here! Grimshanks will come and, oh, the terrible things he’ll do to you!”

Chuck just stood there, infinitely more disgusted by this thing that pretended to be his mother than he had been by Mrs. Crowley or even that clown. “You’re not my mother,” he said again. He did not say it in a whining, sobbing voice, but in a voice that was strong and sure. “You’re not my mother.”

Mom stopped for a moment. She did not seem to like what was happening here. This was not how it worked. Chuck was supposed to be terrified, on his knees, broken and sobbing. His willpower shattered by the horrors she so freely offered up.

Time for a new tactic. Time for something worse. Time for something that would strip his gears and lay him low.

Mom grinned, dripping and crumbling and raining worms. “Well, Chucky-fucky! Long time, no see! How did that old witch Mrs. Crowley treat you, eh? Tricks and treats and gobs and goodies?” The voice was that of the clown now. A sing-song voice of dementia from some slimy gutter in hell. “And you ran off, ran off, ran off, and left your friends! Tsk! Tsk! Do you know what she’ll do to them? Cut them and carve them and serve them up sweet! Boil their blood to broth and pickle their naughty underparts in dusty jars! Nibble, nibble, like a mouse! Who’s that nibbling at my house? Hee, hee, hee! Oh, they’ll suffer and they’ll whine and they’ll cry boo-hoo! And it’ll all be your fault! YOUR FUCKING FAULT!”

Chuck felt like he was going to fall right over. He felt dizzy and wobbly. No blood in his veins and no air in his lungs. Dear God, it was too much. It was like being back in that flooded street in Bethany with Tara and Brian and Jacob and the others. Once again, he could smell an eternity of circuses and carnivals and county fairs that had been stored up in some musty trunk. The cotton candy and hot dogs and popcorn. Yes, everything sweet and greasy and salty. The stink of elephant shit and hay and garbage. He could hear whistles and sirens and calliope music. It was coming from every direction, overloading his senses. And mom…Jesus, but the mom-thing was even starting to look like the clown. It could not be, but he was seeing it happen before his staring eyes. Green pom poms were erupting from her chest and a bright red ruffled collar thrust out from her throat. Her hands became oversized white gloves, the wrists still sutured.

It was happening.

It was really happening.

“Yes, they’ll suffer, all your friends will suffer,” the mom/clown-thing was telling him, her eyes lost in black diamonds, great red painted spheres of rouge appearing at her white, rounded cheeks. Except it wasn’t rouge, but the spilled blood of children. “But their suffering will be nothing in comparison to YOURS, you drooling, dick-licking, spineless little mama’s boy! Because I’m going to show you what old Grimshanks does with tasty little boys! I’ll show you all the vile, obscene things I make them do! I’ll show you what it’s like to beg for mommy and daddy! I’ll show you what I make them lick and suck and touch! Oh, you won’t be the same when I take your cherry, little boy! You’ll never be the same! You’ll beg me slit your throat just like all the others?”

Chuck knew he was defeated.

He could not fight against this thing. It would have him. It would take him and touch him and destroy him, make him beg for death, beg for it. You could not live after what this thing would do to you.

Beaten.

Violated.

Deflowered and soiled.

The clown advanced on him and a voice in his head said: Fight him. It’s all part of the game. The fear, the intimidation. That’s how it starts. And like a bully in the schoolyard, if you give into it, you’re done. When you weaken, it gets stronger. Fight! Fight! Fight! Do something! Anything!

Chuck stumbled into the kitchen, got the table between himself and that evil clown. How could he fight it? How could he honestly fight it? He did not know, but his hand reached out onto the counter by the sink. It found a glass jar filled with sugar and pelted it at the clown’s face. Chuck was a good athlete. Not just an exceptional soccer player, but a Little League pitcher that had, last summer, gotten his team into the state finals. He threw that heavy jar at the clown and it hit him dead center. The clown made a barking sound and fell backward. One of those white hands pressed against his face and blood ran between the fingers.

You hurt it! See? You hurt it!

Chuck did not really believe that he did. At least, not physically. His defiance was what hurt the clown.

The hand pulled away from the face and beneath there was just a black cavity filled with maggots. “Oh, Chucky-fucky, you ruined my good looks!”

But Chuck was not listening. He threw a can of coffee. A bag of flour. A rolling pin. And then he grabbed a canister of salt. He paused before throwing this. The others items the clown had merely batted from the air, but now he backed away and those clown features began to run like wax. Beneath them was mom. She was shaking her head, that single black eye looking concerned.

“Chuck,” she said. “Baby, put that down…don’t hurt mommy…”

What was happening here? Whatever this thing was, mom or monster or demon clown, it seemed suddenly afraid. Was it just the defiance? The fact that he’d fought back? Or was it what he was holding? The salt? He remembered in history class that when the Romans sacked a city, they would tear it down, salt the earth so nothing would grow…was there an analogy here?

Holding the salt, Chuck stepped forward.

The mom-thing stepped back quickly, bumping into the refrigerator door, pressing herself tight against it with outstretched hands like one of those people that got knives thrown at them.

“Baby,” she said, rasping her breath now, more worms and fluids dropping from her. “Baby…”

“You’re afraid of salt,” he said.

She shook her head, that eye darting about. “No, Chuck, no…”

“You’re afraid of it!”

He popped the lid and grabbed a handful. Yes, fighting back had been the trick. They did not like it when you fought back. They played their games and you were supposed to be paralyzed by fear. But when you fought back, it unsettled them. And especially when you discovered their aversion to salt.

“Put that down!” mom said, trying to inflate herself again, to gain the upper hand.

But Chuck didn’t.

He threw his handful of salt at her.

And she screamed. Screamed with rage and agony and bitterness. The salt spattered in her face and it was like throwing hot grease at her. It actually sizzled as it struck her, plumes of smoke and steam rising as her features literally dissolved. She thrashed back and forth, her hands going to her face and when she yanked them away like she’d placed them against a hot stove lid, strings of tissue came away with them. She was howling like a dying animal now, loud and raw and bestial-sounding. A roaring. Chuck threw more salt and she fell to her knees, twisting and writhing, the salt eating into her like acid. Her head struck the floor and burst open with a slop of something like black oatmeal. She screamed and hissed, but you could barely hear it above the sizzling, burning sound of her flesh. Steam blew from her mouth and smoke funneled from her body, filling the kitchen with a gagging, repulsive odor of seared meat. She thumped up and down on the floor, her flesh bubbling and popping and spattering, going brown, then black, and flaking away. The suturing at her wrists popped open. As she struggled, she sprayed black blood in every direction. Then her chest burst open and a nest of wriggling red worms pushed out, steaming and dying.

Chuck went over there and dumped the rest of the salt over her.

Everything curled and blackened and fell apart. Whatever the thing had been, it now looked like something you might have dragged from a fire pit: just cinders and carbonized flesh, the worms twisting like black superheated wires. Her jaw fell open and then there was nothing but the sizzling and steaming.

Chuck threw up.

The sight, the smell, the feel of it all was too much. He turned and vomited into the sink. And then he ran. Ran right out the front door and into the rain. Anything, to get away from that smell and that sight.

21

“Stop,” Mitch said, the words falling out of his mouth before he even thought of speaking. It was automatic. It was knee-jerk. He swallowed. “Pull over.”

Tommy pulled his truck to the curb. “What is it?” he said.

“If I told you, would you believe me?”

Tommy just looked at him in the dimness of the cab. “After what we’ve been through, I’m thinking I would.”

Mitch sighed, rubbed his tired eyes. “This sounds fucking nutty…but I got this feeling. This feeling I can’t shake.”

“I had a cousin like that,” Tommy said.

“I’m serious,” Mitch told him. “All day long…I can’t explain it…but I’ve been having funny feelings. Before I hooked up with you over to Sadler Brothers? I was cruising around, checking the flooding out, and I had this feeling inside, this sense like the shit was about to hit the fan. And that feeling was right. Ever since, I been getting some kind of intuition on things.”

“You and Mother Sepperly.”

“She’s got something and you know it.”

“Yeah I know it, only it scares the shit out of me, that stuff. Knowing things you can’t know. It just ain’t right.” Tommy stared off through the windshield. The rain looked like teardrops streaking down it. “Maybe that’s why she sent us out here. Maybe she knew that if you got out here, those feelings of yours would lead us where we needed to go.”

Mitch shrugged. “And maybe I need some sleep.”

“Which?”

“C’mon,” Mitch told him. “Let’s find out.”

They stepped out into the wet darkness, the water nearly up to their knees. Tommy’s Dodge Ram was set high, but it was only a matter of time now until it was of no use. Soon, only boats would be able to ply the streets of Witcham. And still the rain fell and fell unceasingly. They were about three blocks from the University now, right on the edge of Bethany and Pennacott Lane or Guttertown as it had been known many years before. It was a very desolate spot. What cars there were were abandoned at the curbs, some right out in the streets. The buildings around them were pitch black and empty, lots of old warehouses and freight depots.

“You picked a real nice spot here,” Tommy said, panning his flashlight around, his four-ten balanced atop the shoulders of his raincoat.

“I didn’t pick it,” Mitch explained. “It picked me. Let’s just look around. If the feeling fades, we’ll just go.”

They moved down the street, guns in hand, searching around with their lights. The rain fell and the sky boiled black overhead. A slight wind blew, rattling rusted sheet metal siding on some of the warehouses. They cut between two buildings for no other reason than because Mitch thought it felt right. There was an empty parking lot that had become a wading pool and beyond it, a huge gray structure, three-story, that looked ominous. It seemed even bigger in their minds, monolithic and almost frightening. Like it had been erected as a warning.

Mitch kept staring at it.

Tommy just shook his head. “Oh, come on, Mitch, not that fucking place.”

“I can’t help it.”

And he couldn’t. Maybe those feelings hadn’t been much more than hunches before, but now they were growing strong and resolute. He could no longer just shrug them off. Driving up the street, it had started in his guts, the sort of excited, exhilarated feeling like you got when you opened your income tax return or a really sexy woman flirted with you. It was like that. Adrenaline like a kid might feel looking at a pile of presents on his birthday. But with Mitch it was something else. Anxious, needling foreboding. It started in his belly and within seconds it had all of him and would not let go.

And that old building?

He felt like a needle on a compass being pointed to magnetic north. He could turn away, and he had, but it drew him right back. The certainty was overwhelming. Looking at it?some kind of factory, he was thinking?he knew that there was revelation in that place. Maybe Chrissy wasn’t there, but it was important that he go in there.

But Tommy did not like it. “You know what that place is?”

Mitch just shook his head.

“That’s Hoblich and Sons,” Tommy explained. “A mannequin factory.”

Mitch was going to say, so what? They make dummies for store windows. But then he started thinking what it might be like in such a place. All those human-sized dolls standing around. And with what haunted the streets of Witcham, it was probably only one step up from the county morgue.

“I’ll hold your hand,” Mitch promised him.

“Oh, you think you’re funny,” Tommy said. The idea of going into that place was really eating him. “I don’t like them goddamn mannequins. I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t help it. They freak me out. Have ever since I was a kid.”

“Christ, you worked in a mortuary once, remember?”

Tommy sighed. “Yeah, and do you remember where I worked in high school?”

“Montgomery Wards. So what?”

Tommy swallowed and swallowed again. “They had this warehouse over in Bethany. Jesus. They’d send me over to pick things up in a van. Well, sometimes I had to go down into the basement.”

“And?”

“And, shit, it was creepy down there…all dark and weird and cobwebbed. A big, shadowy kind of place, you know? Stank to high heaven and you’d find rat droppings in the corners and hear things scratching around down there. One light bulb down there hanging on a string from the ceiling. There were mannequins everywhere…men, women, little kids. Boxes of parts. That light would cast all these creeping mannequin shadows on the walls. If you bumped that light bulb with a box or something, and I did it plenty of times, all those crazy mannequin shadows would start moving and dancing all around you. I think…oh man, this sounds bad…but I think if that light would have gone, I would have lost my mind.”

Mitch looked at him, rain running down his face.

It took a lot for a guy like Tommy to admit such things. It was hard on him to confess that there were really things that disturbed him, things like mannequins. That he would do so, was a sign of trust.

“We won’t be in there long,” Mitch told him. “And don’t feel goofy about it. I was scared of puppets when I was a kid and maybe I still am. When Chrissy…when Chrissy was little, she had this clown puppet with a battery in it. You know, or maybe you don’t, how those batteries just wear down on battery-operated toys? Well, sometimes they get weird and start talking by themselves. I go into her room one night to check her and down in her toybox, down at the bottom, that stupid clown puppet starts talking in this draggy, deep voice: ‘I want you to play with me,’ it says. Well, maybe it sounds like nothing now, but that night? All alone? Christ, I almost came out of my fucking skin.”

Tommy laughed. “Yeah, I guess we all got bullshit like that inside of us.”

Mitch edged into the parking lot, casting ripples before him. As he neared the factory, there was a prickling in his belly. This wasn’t excitement or even apprehension, this was more along the lines of terror. Like sneaking up to a casket in the dead of night, so you could reach out and swing up the lid, see what was waiting inside for you.

There was a sudden splashing.

Mitch and Tommy froze up. They had their guns and they had salt in their pockets. They figured they were ready.

“What the hell?” Tommy said.

A lone figure came around the side of the warehouse, running full out…or as full out as you could in two feet of standing water. A man. He charged out, falling flat on his face, swearing and shaking himself off, looking behind him and then getting up again, making for the front of Holbich and Sons. Right away, Mitch knew this was an ordinary person, just like he knew something was hunting him.

And then it showed itself.

Mitch made a gasping sound because he did not know what he was seeing. The thing was just too far off for them to illuminate it much with their lights. They were seeing it only by the pale light of the moon that broke a few fingers through from time to time.

“C’mon,” he told Tommy.

They raced across the inundated parking lot just as the guy made the front door, began pulling on it wildly, trying to get it open. The thing started scrambling in his direction and scrambling was very apt. Because this thing did not walk or run or even hobble, it skittered along on all fours like a monkey or maybe a spider. The guy saw it coming, then he saw the flashlight beams and Mitch and Tommy coming to his aid.

“Watch out!” he said. “There’s a thing…it’s a…”

There he broke off like his imagination had failed him in describing what exactly was after him. Mitch and Tommy got between him and the thing, put their lights on it. The blinding light in its face stopped it cold.

“Jesus,” Tommy said.

And that pretty much was what Mitch was going to say.

The creature was manlike in that it had four limbs, but those limbs were far out of proportion to its body, long and sinewy like the legs of some insect. It was hairless and glistening with rain, just dead white and blotchy, its torso covered with a fine cobwebbed growth. It rose up on those two hind limbs and its arms were long and apish, the left at least a foot longer than the right and covered in fleshy knobs. The right side of its face was human or nearly, but the left was horribly distorted like the skin there had melted and ran, covering the eye and twisting the nose and drawing the edge of its mouth up in a crooked grin. That single eye appraised them with a flat hatred. It opened its mouth and it had fine, needle-like teeth.

“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.

“You tell me,” the guy said.

Mitch was staring at it, mildly repulsed, trying to figure out what it was or what nature had intended it to be. It was not just some walking corpse, though in many ways it resembled one, even the rancid stench wafting off it. But this was more than that, absolutely freakish and imperfect, something meant to be a man, but missing the mark by about a mile. It didn’t seem to have a neck. Its head seemed to grow right out of its upper chest.

It gnashed those teeth and made a low growling sound in its throat.

Mitch dropped his flashlight and put both hands on his Remington auto-loader. The thing made a grating, breathing sound, tensing for attack and Mitch felt his balls try to sneak up inside his belly. The leg muscles flexed and it moved. Mitch opened up on it, blowing a hole in its belly and knocking it flat into a tangle of spidery, twitching legs. It squirmed and howled and thrashed about, trying to right itself, the whole time great gouts of black blood gushed from its wound with a funny smell like spilled bleach.

“Give it another one,” the guy said.

Mitch did, punching a hole in its chest. It rose up and shook itself and then went down dead. The stink of that black stuff diffusing into the water around it was simply disgusting. Not so much bleach now, but mud and quarry slime.

Then they put their lights on it, trying to make sense of its obscene anatomy which was obviously neither this nor that. It seemed to be dissolving in the water, its skin coming off in globs that floated around it.

“Look at that, will ya?” the guy said.

Mitch was looking, all right. Just below its navel, below the hole he had put in it, there was a bulging mass like the mother of tumors. It was white like the creature itself, but blushed with pink. And there was no mistaking what it was…a face. This nightmare had a face and part of a bulbous head growing out of its belly like some kind of freak birth. That face was covered in a fine membrane of skin, plaited in those weblike growths, but you could see the suggestion of a mouth, a nose, the hollows of eyes, but unformed and embryonic. Right above that parasitic growth, the creature was laid open. Inside, it was just as pale as it was outside, but there was a suggestion of something pink in there.

“Christ, Mitch, it’s like a sideshow thing, you know?” Tommy said. “Something they keep in one of those jars. A bucket birth.”

The guy with them nodded, wiping rain from his face. “And…holy shit…look! It don’t have no, no…you know…no genitals.”

And it didn’t.

It was as smooth as a Ken doll down there, the flesh white and puckered, but not so much as a suggestion of anything you might consider a penis or a vagina. Nothing. Tommy was appalled, but fascinated at the same time. He crept forward and kicked it. His boot sank right into it with a mucky sound. He yanked his foot back with an awful suctioning sound and the thing moved a bit, enough so that the pink thing in its belly fell out…a human arm, spindly and wrinkled, the arm of a child, but an arm no less. It did not have fingernails and the fingers themselves were webbed together with skin.

Everyone turned away.

Tommy tried the door and it was locked. He blew it open with his four-ten. Then he turned to the guy with him, who was tall and well-built, hard-looking.

“Name’s Tommy Kastle,” he said. “And this is Mitch Barron.”

The guy nodded. “Nice to meet you both and thanks, man. That fucker would’ve had me you hadn’t shown up. Oh, by the way, I’m Harry Teal. And you boys ain’t gonna believe this and you probably won’t like it, but I just escaped from Slayhoke…”

22

And high above Witcham, overlooking Bethany from atop Crooked Hill, Bleeding Heart Orphanage stood tall and sepulchral like a pine box set on end. It held darkness in its belly and exhaled a stale breath of age and woodrot. Where once there had been the not-unpleasant odors of children and chalkdust, polished mahogany and the starched habits of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, now there was the stink of dust and plaster rot, crumbling brick and the creeping damp. The high rotting belfry was home to bats and pigeons, the walls tunneled by rats. The walks were overgrown and covered in yellow leaves, the high, narrow windows boarded and sightless. Within those bowing walls, only ghosts and shades walked, memories drifting down the uneven floors, forever silent.

But now, after two decades of stillness, there was movement.

With little warning, shapes and half-seen figures bled from the walls and slid from beneath stairwells. There was a slithering and a rustle of black crepe and gray cerements. Ivory faces peered from distorted pockets of darkness and pale hands whispered over banisters, vapid and obsidian eyes leered and did not blink, mouths grinned but not smile. Gaunt figures brushed past broken windows, trailing cobweb and plumes of dust. There were knockings and scratchings, the echo of scraping laughter and dead voices. Hollow winds blew down the chimneys and hallways, forever moaning and mourning. Shadows moved and wavered and hissed, cold fingers beckoned and clawed from cellar damps.

The dead were active.

And Witcham belonged to them.

23

Just inside the front entrance of Holbich and Sons, Harry Teal said, “Listen, guys, I ain’t saying I’ve been a good boy or anything. And I ain’t saying they were wrong in locking me way. But if you’re thinking I’m going to cause you trouble or jump you from behind, you got it all wrong. Yeah, I escaped from Slayhoke, but if you would’ve seen what I saw, well you would’ve escaped, too.”

Tommy looked at Mitch. “What did you see?”

Harry shrugged. “Well, I guess after that thing out there, you might just believe me.”

“Maybe,” Mitch said.

So Harry Teal, who was pulling a nickel in a maximum security prison for grand theft auto, started talking, spilling out the dirty details of his life. What he’d done in Milwaukee that had earned him a spot at Slayhoke and how he’d come to work in the mortuary and what had happened yesterday morning when they started moving the stiffs from the old prison graveyard.

By the time he was done, he was shaking and having trouble breathing.

Harry was a tall, muscular guy, who had survived the inner city streets and life in a state hellhole, but to see him there, telling his horror story, he looked like maybe he was finally broken. That finally something had come along that was nasty enough to kick his legs out from under him.

“I ain’t bullshitting you guys,” he kept saying. “They came right out of the fucking ground…dead people, some of ‘em not much more than bones and rags. Then, we got out, you know? Me and Jacky and Roland, those guys I told you about. Then…then there was the University and more of those zombies, Christ, eating out of those jars and then…then that goddamn clown…”

Mitch did a double take on that. “Clown?”

But Harry shook his head. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

“I’m guessing he wasn’t very funny,” Tommy said.

“No.”

“We believe you, Harry. We’ve seen those dead things. They’re all over the city, walking around, coming out of the water,” Mitch said. “But that thing out there…I don’t know what the hell that was supposed to be.”

“Some kind of mutant like in them movies,” Harry speculated. “Shit, I don’t know. But outside the University, well, I saw a man there, a dead guy walking around. I don’t think he had a head.”

“This just keeps on getting better and better.”

Tommy asked him what they were doing at the University, but Harry said he didn’t want to talk about it. Jacky wanted to do something bad, that’s all he would say about it. He’d been through the wringer and they weren’t going to press him.

“Where’s this Jacky at?”

“Dead,” Harry said. “That clown got him.”

“All right,” Mitch told him. “We’re going into this place, because I got a feeling we should. Less said about that, the better. You can take off or come with us. But don’t try anything, because we just aren’t in the mood to play games.”

“I stole cars, man. I never robbed or murdered anyone.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Tommy said.

Side by side, they moved through the offices of the factory and out onto the floor itself. It looked like any other factory. There was a warehouse, a shipping and receiving depot with piles of wooden pallets, a forklift, and boxes piled high on skids. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then they went out into the manufacturing area, a foot of water over the concrete floor. There was a machine shop that welded together the frameworks for the dummies and huge thermoforming machines that formed the dummies themselves out of plastic.

“You still got that feeling?” Tommy asked.

Mitch just nodded.

It was still strong. He could not exactly explain it or decipher it. It simply hung on and would not let go.

Harry grabbed a length of iron rebar from a table. “Just to defend myself with,” he promised them.

They moved on, flashlight beams winking off machinery and crates, presses and tables and yellow steel hazardous materials cabinets. Mitch had worked in a few factories in his time. They could be boring places or hectic and crowded places, so noisy you couldn’t hear yourself think. But he’d never, ever been in a factory like this where all you could hear was water dripping and all you could see were shadows and looming shapes. It was positively unnerving. The dead could have been hiding in countless places, waiting to spring or clamp waterlogged hands over your mouth.

“Here comes the good part,” Tommy said under his breath.

They came to a long, narrow room with racks to either side of the aisle. And standing in those racks were dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of mannequins. They leaned out against the bars of the rack like they wanted to climb free. Some were armless and all of them were faceless, this being the place where they were given their human features. Primed and painted, features stamped into the cold clay of those formless faces.

Mitch and Tommy moved their lights around, panning through all those crowded dummies, the sudden intrusion of illumination made them seem to move, to lean out and pull back, huddle together. They were unformed like things waiting to be born, nothing but plastic and wax and who knows what waiting for an imitation of life, waiting for a lacquer of pink to give them a semblance of flesh and blood.

Tommy was nervous.

Mitch was feeling it, too.

This place was dull and harmless by day, but at night with no lights to be had? Unsettling. Rows and rows of mannequins, like corpses whose features had been scraped off with razor blades.

“I think I’d rather work in the prison mortuary,” Harry said, his voice echoing out into that cavernous room. “These things are creepy, you know? They’re like dolls waiting to be born or something. They almost look like they could move.”

They were about half way down the aisle now, three grown men bunched together like kids moving up the corridor of a carnival spookhouse, just waiting for something to jump out at them. And the beams of their flashlights weren’t helping matters much, because the shadows kept crawling and shifting and they all could have swore those things were moving around them. Mitch tried not to spend too much time looking at those closely-pressed rows of figures. There was something about those dead faces that really got your imagination rolling. You began to wonder what it might be like to be pressed in there with them, feel their cold skins against your own as the lights went out. And what might happen when you were alone with them and they began to move against you, touching you and whispering into your face with a warm, plastic breath.

This was your idea, he reminded himself. You can get out any time. It’s up to you.

And maybe it was his imagination again, but he was thinking that maybe it was too late. A place like this should have felt lifeless and inanimate, but it did not feel that way at all. It felt tenanted, occupied, like maybe there were others there, others holding their breath and waiting until you got close enough and then, and then?

Part of what was bothering Mitch most was that he was smelling something that didn’t belong. Sure, you expected it to smell kind of dank in there with all the water pooling and leaking in, but there was another odor that he simply did not like. It was sharp and acidic like vinegar gone bad, that and a moist corruption that seemed to be building around them, thickening and misting.

Tommy stopped dead, shining his light around.

“What?” Mitch said, gooseflesh broken out on his arms and spine.

“Listen,” Tommy said and there was dread import beneath his words.

Mitch listened. He heard the water dripping into puddles, the rain on the outside walls, the creak of the roof in the wind. And then something more. Something that set his heart to pounding. For somewhere in the rank darkness around them, there was a barely audible sound like a breeze blowing through a pipe nearly clogged with dirt. The sound of low respiration. The sound of breathing. Air was drawn in and exhaled.

“Shit,” Harry said.

“There’s someone here,” Mitch said, glad for the Remington in his hand.

He swung his light down the rows and caught sight of an amorphous shadow pulling back into those neat rows. It wasn’t his imagination. For something down there behind them had moved. He could feel the others tensing around him, feel their backs pressing up against his own. If the dead had to come at them, then this was about the worst possible place for it.

“We better get out of here,” he heard himself say.

But even then he knew it would not be that easy. They had been drawn into a trap and that trap was about to be sprung. And whoever or whatever had set it, had gone to too much trouble to have their prey turn and walk out on it all.

There was more movement around them…behind them, in front of them, to either side. Always gone whenever they put their lights on it, but there, definitely there. The breathing was coming from all over now. You could hear wet cloth rustling, wet feet slapping, lips parting. Somewhere, there was a high, childish giggling.

Mitch swung around with his light and, Jesus, they weren’t hiding now, no more games. He saw them. Pressed in-between the dummies at irregular intervals, those pallid dead faces, wet hair hanging over black and soulless eyes, graying lips pulling away from teeth.

As they cast the lights around, they could see dozens of faces…men, women, children. The jumping shadows and flickering light and ever-present mannequin faces were disorienting. Sometimes there were three dead girls with black pools for eyes, then one, then none. A man and a woman, a couple teenagers, then just formless plastic faces and mulling shadows.

But there was no way you could mark it down to simple imagination.

They were there, the dead of Witcham, and you could feel them and smell their decaying, soft hides. See the lights glint off their rain-soaked heads and eyes of pitch and barred teeth. Mitch and the others began backing down the aisle, suppressing the desire to just run. They made it maybe ten or fifteen feet like that and then the first zombie moved. It was the cadaver of a little girl, maybe five or six but no more when she died. She moved under the bars of the rack with a fluid, flowing motion that was serpentine, almost liquid. Her body was a white blur capped by a head of tangled dark hair. She looked angular and warped like a reflection from a funhouse mirror, pouring forward.

And maybe that was a cue, for the others started moving, too, slipping under and over the bars with that same boneless, almost hallucinatory motion. Hands like withered orchids and limp white spiders reaching to clutch and tear and hold. Faces that were dripping and bubbly like melted tallow, milky-colored and fungous, set off by huge, glaring eyes that were sometimes silvery and sometimes a glistening black jelly. As they came forward, they joined together, compressed, became a single crowd of watery, inhuman things pressing forward, an army of the dead.

Harry shouted something.

Mitch and Tommy just started shooting, blowing holes in that advancing gray wall, spraying white tissue and gray gut in every which direction, gouts of that vile black blood splattering to the floor.

But still the dead pressed forward relentlessly, eyes fixed and teeth chattering, fingers hooked and reaching.

Harry cried out because behind them two men stepped from the shadows, eyeless and horribly sutured as if they had been in deadly industrial accidents. Their faces were tombstone gray and blotched with mold, black water running from their mouths and the hollows of their eyes. While Mitch pumped off a few more rounds at the converging crowd, Tommy turned and fired at the man on the left point-blank. He exploded into a spray of filthy and mud and flesh, collapsing into a shivering pile of bones and mucilage.

The other dead man vaulted forward.

He almost got Harry, but Harry swung his length of rebar with everything he had, splitting that soft head wide open. There was no solidity to it like a normal human head and Harry knew what that felt like because he’d piped a few guys out in the yard at Slayhoke. This was not like that. More like swinging a baseball bat into a rotting gourd?the guy’s head collapsed in a slushy spray of grainy black liquid and he went to his knees, not dead, but obviously wounded.

“Go! Go! Go!” Mitch yelled out and they ran past that crawling thing, moving through the factory and warehouse and wing of offices up front.

The three of them splashed through the parking lot, two or three of the dead standing in the falling rain and watching them. They made it down the street and into Tommy’s truck, throwing themselves inside and panting.

“Oh, shit,” Harry said.

There was a dead one standing outside Mitch’s door. A young guy with a white, oozing face. Even through the rain-washed window, you could see he wasn’t much in the looks department. He slammed his hands against the window and the flesh of them seemed to splash like the yolks of eggs, bits of meat running down the windows.

Then Tommy had the truck moving, knocking aside two or three others and they were racing down the street, casting a wave behind them.

“They’re everywhere,” Harry said. “Those fucking things, they’re everywhere. The city is full of the walking dead.”

24

In the darkness, they awoke.

And in the darkness, they were aware of death creeping amongst them. They could smell it and feel it and sense it along their spines, but they did not mention the fact. Sometimes when you don’t talk of a thing, the fear of it lessens. Tara, Brian, and Mark woke with dry throats and sick bellies, trying to see in the blackness that was suffocating and absolute. They were huddled together, pressed against one another. Brian tried to stand and hit his head. The ceiling was low. There were walls to either side.

“Where are we?” Tara said, when she summoned the strength.

“I don’t know,” Brian said.

“I think we’re in a box,” Mark said.

And that terrified everyone into silence. It made them think of being buried alive. Would Mrs. Crowley do such a thing? Oh, they no longer labored under the pretense that she was someone’s favorite nanny or loving grandmother. For after Chuck had run off, as they lay there stuffed with sweets, sleepy and sick and lethargic, old Mrs. Crowley had shown herself and, yes, there had been screaming. Much screaming. For she was every witch in every storybook and every horror comic that they had ever seen or heard about. So would she bury them alive? Oh yes, certainly. But only to asphyxiate them very slowly, to let them go soft and decayed, to season their meat so that it might be more tasty.

Tara, who had breathing very hard, suddenly panicked.

She jumped this way and that, slamming into the other two, hitting her head on the low ceiling and bouncing off the walls. Brian and Mark swore at her, shoved her around and she threw herself forward…right into the bars of the cage that hemmed her in. She grasped the rusting iron uprights, screaming and shouting and finally breaking down into sobs.

“I coulda told you that,” Mark said. “I coulda told you we were in a cage.”

But how he knew that, no one asked.

A cage then. The old witch had locked them in a cage just like Hansel and Grethel in that fairy tale and they did not need to be told that it was probably for the same reason. Here they would be kept, fattened like veal until they were plump and juicy for Mrs. Crowley’s table. No, they did not need to be told that, but the very idea sank into each of them, filling them with a darkness that was abyssal and deep and terrible.

“I…I just want to go home,” Tara said.

“Shut up,” Brian told her. “Just shut up.”

She began to sob again, only he couldn’t hear her because he was sobbing himself. They all were. Mark did it so silently that the others did not hear him, they could only feel the shuddering of his body as hot tears spilled down his cheeks.

“When she comes,” he finally said. “We have to rush her. We have to jump on her and beat her to death. We have to, we have to.”

“Can…can you smell that?” Brian said.

And maybe their eyes were no good in that stark night, but their noses were working. Yes, there was a stink of fetid meat and damp cloth and dark, noisome things, but there was another smell, too. The odor of things boiling on a stove pot. Maybe potatoes and carrots, cabbage and onions. Bubbling things, seasoned things. The smell of the witch’s kitchen.

“Oh Christ,” Brian said. “She’s going to cook us.”

Tara squealed: “No, no, no?”

“Oh yes, I will, my dumplings and sweetmeats,” came Mrs. Crowley’s dry and scraping voice. “Cook you I will and serve you up, I shall. Ha! Plucked and slit, cleaned and gutted, salted tripe and spiced lamb and fat belly-meat!”

There was a sudden intrusion of flickering light and they saw she squatted right outside the cage, a candle in her hand, hot wax spilled over the back of her fist. She did not seem to notice. Her face was hanging and flabby, yellowed with age and decomposition, lined and wrinkled and sunk with hollows. Her left eye was narrowed to a slit, a clear slime leaking from it. Her right eye was wide and bulging, pink and moist and lined with red veins. There was no pupil, not even the suggestion of one.

“Now, who will be first?” she asked, pressing a gnarled finger like a skeleton key to her scabrous and seamed lips. “Who will I filet and fry? Whose skull will I empty for my gruel? And whose fat will I raise my muffins with and whose sweet guts will I candy and press into jars?”

They all fought away from the front of the cage, shrieking and mad and just beyond themselves. None of them wanted to be first. None of them wanted to be brought into that sinister kitchen and put on the chopping block, hacked and quartered, slit and bled and stewed. They scrambled to get away from her, but the cage was only so big.

“Enough!” said the old witch, gnashing her blackened teeth. “You will choose now! Choose or you all go into the pot! All of you! I’ll peel your skin and lick out your eyes and chew on your tongues raw! Oh, what a fine time I’ll have…”

There was silence then. No one said a word. They sat there, shocked and stunned, bathed in that guttering candlelight. They did not seem capable of doing what she asked. It was unthinkable, abhorrent.

“Choose…”

Mark started breathing very fast. He took hold of Tara and she took hold of him and he felt the name rising up his throat to his lips, a blank scream echoing through his head. He opened his mouth, said, “Brian…take Brian…”

“Yes,” Tara said.

“No!” Brian shouted. “No! Not me! Not me! Take Tara! Take Mark! He’s fatter, he’ll taste better…oh please don’t take me, don’t take me…”

He was hugging himself, rolling back and forth on the balls of his feet. Just shuddering and crying and out of his mind at the horror of it all.

“You’ll do,” Mrs. Crowley said.

There was the scratch of a key and the cage swung open.

Nobody rushed her. Maybe the plan sounded good when Mark suggested it, but putting it into action was something else again. The witch reached in and grabbed Brian by one ankle, began dragging him out. He tried to fight, but she was too strong. He tried to grip his friends, but they turned away.

And slowly, Brian was pulled out of the cage.

The candle went out.

He screamed for maybe five minutes until there were wet, chopping sounds and then the noises that followed were grotesque and unspeakable.

25

An hour before dawn, the knocking came and went at Miriam Blake’s house on Kneale Street. Throughout the night which was long and shadowy and surreal, her guests?Lou Darin, Margaret Boyne and her son, Russel?had dozed off and on in their chairs, but never for more than twenty or thirty minutes, always waking with terror in their eyes.

And Miriam was there, shotgun on her lap, to say, “Go back to sleep. I’m watching, I’m always watching.”

Miriam had undergone a transformation that night. Somehow, some way, she was different. Maybe it had been Rita Zirblanski’s punch that had rattled something loose or maybe the idea of her oncoming death had given her a peace and a serenity she had not known since childhood. Her radical views had softened. Because ultimately, she knew, none of that mattered anymore. None of it.

So when the knocking came at the door an hour before dawn, she just nodded. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

The others stared at her, thinking she was out of her mind.

“I think we’re the last ones,” she told her guests. “Those effing things have been knocking on doors all night, I’d reckon. Being invited in and breaking in when they weren’t. Now we’re all that’s left.”

“The last people?” Russel said.

“Yes, I’m afraid so, son.”

“That’s…that’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said. “It can’t be. There are 80,000 people in this city. 80,000!”

“Were, I’m afraid. Were.”

The knocking sounded again. Not just the front door now, but the back door, too.

“Maybe…maybe it’s the National Guard,” Margaret said, though she did not seem to believe it.

“No, dear, no,” Miriam told her.

This knocking was slow and monotonous. It wasn’t at all the way someone would knock that needed help or wanted to give it. That would be more of an insistent, quick rapping. And if it were a mere social call?a laughable idea under the circumstances?then it would have carried some sort of rhythm. But this…no this knocking was all wrong. It was a mindless banging. The sort of cadence a machine would produce or something with a mind like one.

“Why don’t they just stop?” Lou said.

And then they did.

Silence.

For a moment, two and then three.

The doorknob was turned this way and that. It was rattled violently. The door shook against the plank Miriam had secured over it after she’d blown the lock off. Somebody wanted in and they intended on getting in.

Russel grabbed his mother’s arm in a death-grip. “Look,” he muttered. “Look…”

Behind the curtains they could make out the silhouettes of several people trying to peer through the window. They rubbed the rain-beaded panes with their hands and pressed their faces up against the glass.

“I guess they’ve found us,” Russel said, reaching for a rifle on the table, a Winchester. 30-30.

The door was struck by a flurry of pounding, shaking in its frame. The window took the same degree of force and shattered in its casement. With a sinking feeling, everyone in that room saw dozens of white hands tear through the curtains, lashing and clawing, dead faces peering in. And the hands?puffy and rotting?were thrashing around mindlessly, looking for something to grab. By the light of the candles, they all saw the zombies waiting out there, massing, preparing to come in. Many faces were distended with gas, others stripped nearly down to bone, and still others with strips of flesh hanging from their cheeks and chins.

Lou Darin screamed.

It was a high, broken, womanish sound. He was the Superintendent of Schools. He cracked the whip in Witcham’s educational circles. He was the terror of the PTO and the school board itself. He was a man of position and power and influence. But all that was gone in a single moment of hysteria. All of it. Now he was just a frightened child and the scream that came out was the only course of action left to him as his mind came apart.

“Come on, you effing sonsofbitches,” Miriam told them. “I’m here! I’ve been here all along! Come and get me!”

So they did.

As they pressed through the shattered window, Miriam kept pulling the trigger on her Remington 12-gauge until she was out of shells. She blew them into fragments and slime, but they kept coming. They were faceless and dripping things, white and bloated, streaked with sediment and river mud, their faces veiled with grave fungi.

Miriam found her feet and went right after the first one to violate her house. It stared at her with steely eyes set in a face of running corruption. It smiled at her and she swung the shotgun at it, splitting open the crown of its skull. Black water spilled down its face. Then it took hold of her and she fought with as much life as was left in that old body. Scraping at that hideous face with her nails, gouging out strips of mucid flesh and white pulp. But it had her, crushing her against it, squeezing the life out of her.

“Run!” she told the others. “For God’s sake, run!”

They needed no more prompting. Russel in the lead, they dashed back through the house, making for the back door. And when the front door came apart, they had already slipped out the back.

The thing holding Miriam tossed her aside and the others moved past her, making for the backdoor. She lay on the floor, breathless and aching, her left wrist numb. She waited for them to come back. Five minutes. Then ten. But they did not return.

Good God, was this a respite?

Had some power above granted her a stay of execution?

It seemed impossible under the circumstances. But she did not look a gift horse in the mouth. She pulled herself to her feet, sickened by the smells those things had dragged into her house. Quickly then, she found her Remington and loaded it. The window was broken, the front door hanging by one hinge. Whatever she was going to do, she knew she had to do it now.

Think, old woman! You need a plan like you’ve never needed one before!

The best course of action, she decided, would be to lock herself in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Take a few guns and a lot of ammo. Hold out until dawn like they always did in those westerns when the Indians were besieging the fort. That was the ticket.

Miriam.

At first she thought she’d heard it, then she realized she hadn’t heard it with her ears, but with her mind. Just that single word and so clear, so precise that there was no way that she could have merely thought it. No, this had been placed in her head.

She looked around the living room, the shotgun in her hands.

It came again, but this time it was spoken: “Miriam.”

The voice was soft and fluid and not at all unpleasant. A voice like that could weave your brain in a downy cocoon and tuck you off to dreamland. You could listen to it while you fell asleep.

“Miriam.”

Maybe she should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Whether demon or angel or just one of those soulless monstrosities from the grave, this one was special. This one wasn’t bothering with any horror show theatrics. No scratching at windows and battering through doors. No vile, dripping voices describing the tortures of the damned or exposing the dirty little secrets of your life. The brain that directed this voice was above the fun and games. It was experienced and aged, smooth and effortless and somehow enchanting.

“Miriam,” it said through the open doorway. “I’ve come for you.”

Yes, there was an enchantment to it, something that made you dream of castles in the sky and fairy kingdoms and gentle afternoons spent at your mother’s knee as she read to you of lands far, far away in her voice which was always sunshine and honey, a voice you wanted to drink from and sleep on.

This voice was like that…almost. A man’s voice. A voice that was cool, almost chilly, maybe not friendly exactly, but soothing and inviting. How could you not listen to a voice like that? Maybe those other things were all rape and violation, but this one was pure red velvet seduction and black satin romance.

“Come in,” Miriam said.

She said it and was instantly filled with horror and longing, more of one than the other. And a voice, a very tiny voice, in the back of her brain said, Are you goddamned crazy, old woman? Do you realize what you’re doing? What you’ve invited into your effing house? But she just ignored that. Her time had come and she wanted to look the Grim Reaper himself dead in the face and say, ha, thought I’d quiver in my boots, did you? That you’d scare the beejesus out of Miriam Blake? Well, wrong you are, boyo…

There was a swishing as of sheets and a form stepped through the doorway.

Miriam looked and looked again.

It was a man, very tall and very unpleasant to look upon. He wore some long, oily looking coat that might have been leather. A graying, dirty shift beneath it that might have been a shroud. His face was pale, blotched with gray, seamed and withered, barely containing the skull beneath. Red worms were feasting upon it. Beetles crawled over it, scurrying madly. But what caught her were those almost luminous yellow eyes set with just a tiny black pinprick of pupil. Those eyes did not just look at you, they owned you. They were filled with toxic mists and crawling, lunatic shadows, glimpses of places you would not want to go and things you would never want to see.

“So, you’re him, ain’t you?” Miriam said, her hands greasy on the Remington in her fists. “You’re Death…aren’t you?”

“Yes, Death and Life and all that lies before and beyond,” he said.

That voice was still liquid and enchanting, but what it came from was simply hideous.

“You don’t frighten me,” she said to him. “I knew you’d come one night. I’ve lived a long life and the grave doesn’t scare me.”

“Of course not.”

Miriam’s heart was palpitating, her palms sweating so badly that the Remington slid from her hands and thudded uselessly to the floor. Looking on him, she knew her death would be ugly. It would not be quick and it would not be clean. It would be an atrocity. He would squeeze every last drop of human suffering from her and drink of it, grow giddy and drunk at the taste. And when he was done, he would eat her flesh, gnaw her down to the bone.

But he’d get no satisfaction, she decided, because she was old and stringy and tough as a two-dollar steak. And she’d never beg and she’d never scream.

As he glided forward, perhaps expecting this old woman to piss her bloomers and make a run for it, she stepped towards him to meet him. “Got yourself a town, have you? A town all your own, eh, Mr. Death? Turned our Witcham into a great effing boneyard and now you’re here like a fat rat to lord over the refuse pile? Ha! Fool you are and fool you’ve always been! Go ahead, kill and maim and dismember and call your creeping shades from their graves! See what good it does you! Because low or high, rich or poor, they’ve all known the sunshine, they’ve all walked above the earth and known life! Not like a worming, skulking vermin like you! Feeding in coffins and squirming through the muddy earth…”

The dark man stepped forward and something under that gray, mildewed shift of his was moving, undulating. Something that wanted to get out. Something that needed desperately to reveal itself.

“On your knees,” he said.

“Ha! I’ll bow and scrape to no graveworm like you! I’ll not?”

But those eyes would not have this defiance. And the mind that lit them would have even less. Miriam felt something give inside her with a wet snapping and she went down to her knees before him. Her bones were rubber and her muscles flaccid and useless. Her nerves idled with flat indifference and her blood became a cooling tar. There was an eruption of blinding pain in her head and she felt her bladder let go, then her bowels. Her left side went numb. Her eyes exploded with broken blood vessels, purple and livid. A trickle of dark arterial blood ran from her nostrils.

“Now,” said the dark man. “No tortures of the damned, Miriam. I won’t dismember you and eat you. It is you who will feed.”

He held out one white, bloated wrist and slit it open with a hooked thumbnail. Black, foul-smelling blood ran like sap.

“Drink,” he said.

The opened wrist was pressed to her parted lips and that black fluid filled her mouth until she wanted to gag. But there was no gagging, only the choking sounds of her throat swallowing.

“Now bite,” he said.

Her teeth did, sinking into that maggoty flesh and tearing free a moist chunk.

“Swallow,” he said.

And she did, the feel of the rancid flesh sliding down her throat making her stomach roll and her heart seize up, darkness taking her finally, thankfully.

That was how Miriam Blake died.

There was mindless, rabid death like that which had burst into her house. And then there was the kind that Miriam suffered, a violation that was bleak and godless and infinitely foul.

26

Crowded, damp, and dark like being buried in a box.

But maybe worse, maybe like being trapped in a black womb, lodged there like something dead, held fast until worms and rot came. This was how it was for Chrissy. She opened her eyes and felt others around her, some alive and some near-dead and most just simply mad. She was bruised and banged-up, but alive and she planned on staying that way.

She pushed a leg off her lap and elbowed a body from her side. She heard moans and groans, felt a warm wetness as someone bled on her. Wherever she was, it was black as pitch and cramped, confined. The air was heavy and saturated with a clinging damp that was hard to breathe. The floor was dirt, but dry dirt. Wherever she was, it was above the water line. A high place, yet one with a floor of earth.

Now what sense did that make?

What possible sense?

She tried to remember. The University, of course. The bio lab. Lisa and Harry and that asshole Jacky. Oh, God. Lisa was dead and so was the pervert Jacky Kripp. The clown. She remembered the clown. It had taken her. Jesus, it seemed impossible, but the clown had flown away with her.

No, no. That wasn’t it exactly, she told herself. You didn’t fly. It wasn’t like a bird snatched you up, this was more of a drifting. The clown took her and drifted away into the night with her, floating up above the water, floating and floating and floating…

After that, she could not remember.

She must have blacked out.

Well, wherever this awful, smelling pit of bodies was, she had to get out. She hadn’t been dumped here by accident, that was for sure. She was tucked away here with the others for a reason. She knew that much. Maybe they were to be left for days until they starved to death, so they would reawaken like the dead things, be like them, be one with them.

“Where is this place?” she said under her breath.

And a voice said, “I don’t know, but we’re never getting out alive.”

Chrissy felt tears roll from her eyes. This was it then. A pit with no escape. They would languish here until…until maybe that clown or something worse came to get them. It was unthinkable. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She couldn’t accept a death like that. Maybe it was her youth or her ego or just her innate stubborn streak, but she could not accept any of it. Not without a fight.

She was left alive.

Unlike Lisa, she was still alive and if she was still alive, then there was a chance.

She crawled over bodies, not knowing if they were dead or alive. She found a wall of damp, cobwebbed stone. She crawled in the other direction and found a like wall.

“What’re you doing?” a voice asked her.

“Trying to find a way out.”

“There is no way out?”

“Have you tried?” Chrissy said. “Have you even tried?”

Nobody bothered answering her and she did not care. The world was insane or maybe it was just Witcham and what did it really matter? This was the reality of everyone in that stinking pit. Ugly, impossible, but this was it. You could roll up in a corner like a sick dog or you could go out fighting.

And Chrissy already knew what she was going to do.

Whatever had brought all this about had brought hell into the world and now it was time to repay the favor.

27

After their heroic…or not so heroic…breakout from Miriam Blake’s house that night, Russel Boyne, his mother Margaret, and Lou Darin, ran through the blowing wet blackness, planning on making it to the Russel House. But a horde of pale, dripping people waiting down the street changed their minds. They took the next available house which belonged to the Procton’s. God only knew where the Procton’s were and nobody really cared. Russel led the way and the other two followed. He stood by the door with the Winchester he’d taken from Miriam’s house while they filed in. Then he locked and bolted it.

“Now what?” Lou Darin said in the darkness. “What in the hell now?”

Russel didn’t bother answering that.

His mother in tow, he checked the house, making sure all windows and doors were secure. Upstairs, downstairs. Then he fell into a chair in the living room, Darin’s question echoing in his head. Now what? Yeah, that was a good one, all right. What did you do when you were locked in a house and dead people were outside and they wanted to kill you? Being unemployed mostly, Russel had seen a lot of horror flicks. Lots of ‘em had people trapped in houses with zombies outside. He was so dragged-out and worn thin that he couldn’t seem to remember what it was those people did about it.

Did they wait for dawn until the ghouls crawled back into their graves? Or was that strictly for vampires?

Darin had found a gas lantern on the mantel that the Procton’s had left behind. There was a can of fuel for it, too.

“You think it’s a good idea to light that, Mr. Darin?” Margaret said to him.

“Why not? I’m not about to live like a mole in the darkness.”

“Sure, but you might draw them things in.”

Darin just ignored that. He knew what was best and he didn’t care for people like Margaret Boyne to be telling him what to do. Miriam Blake had been bad enough. He scratched a stick match off the fireplace brick and lit the lantern. Both wicks caught, an even illumination filling the living room and chasing away the shadows.

“There,” he said. “That’s better. Don’t you think?”

Neither Margaret or her son commented on it.

“I can tell you right now,” Darin said, “that I don’t care for the idea of us being trapped in here. Shouldn’t we try to find a vehicle? My SUV is sitting in my driveway at this very moment. In ten minutes we can be over there and then out of this stinking city.”

Margaret chuckled in the dark. “Really, Lou. Have you forgotten what’s outside at this very moment?”

“Yes, yes, yes, the crazies. We have a gun.”

“They’re more than crazies,” Russel said. “They’re the walking dead. Just like those people said that gave me the Watchtower magazine. Foul abominations and stuff that crawled out of the cellar of hell.”

Darin sighed. “Please, let’s not get into that again.”

Russel shrugged. As with most things in life, it mattered not one whit one way or another with him.

“Are you still doubting?” Margaret said. “After what you saw come into Miriam’s house?”

“I saw people. Obviously mad, but still people.”

“Dead people.”

“Disfigured, certainly…but dead?” Darin shook his head. “I think not.”

“Zombies,” Russel said. “I saw that movie where zombies take over the world. You ever seen that, Mr. Darin? Night of the Living Dead? That was a good picture.”

Margaret nodded. “Yeah, it was. Did I ever tell you, Russel, that I saw that one out at the Hillview Drive-in with your father? Oh, God, that was years ago. Years ago. They showed it with that Japanese picture. The one about the monster with three heads.”

“Ghidrah. Now that was a good one. I think Ghidrah was my favorite after Godzilla. I always hated Mothra, though. I mean, how tough can a moth be anyway? You ever see any of those pictures, Mr. Darin? Any of those Jap movies? Those were something. Godzilla was the best. Some of ‘em were pretty bad, though. Like the flying turtle…what was his name? Gamera? Yeah, that was it. Gamera movies were stupid. But not as stupid as that one with that squid that walks around on the tips of its tentacles. Man, I mean, how could you believe something like that? Ghidrah’s one thing, but come on.”

“Not all the Godzilla ones were good, though,” Margaret pointed out. “Remember that one? Was it Son of Godzilla? The one where Godzilla’s little boy blows smoke rings?”

“Oh yeah, that bit the big one, all right.”

“I always like Rodan, the giant bird.”

“Yeah, Rodan kicked some ass. Remember when he flapped his wings? It made a wind that blew buildings down and stuff. That was awesome.”

Darin just stared at them, perhaps wondering what he’d gotten himself into. The city was besieged by crazies and these two were talking about bad movies. He had a mad desire to slap them both across the face. He tried to be tolerant. Maybe this was how they coped. Maybe that was it. But had these two been students he would have shouted in their faces.

Margaret was obviously enjoying herself. “Ah, I used to stay up all night with Russel, Mr. Darin, while he watched monster movies. I thought he might get scared watching them alone.”

“Was this recently?” Darin said.

They both looked at him, but simply did not comprehend his sarcasm.

“I wasn’t scared. Not of them Jap movies. Some of the others used to bother me, though. I never liked the mummy and the wolfman. I mean, Frankenstein could be mean, but he liked kids and he didn’t kill ‘em much. Dracula? Well, he was greedy and you could talk sense to him, you know? Tell him that if he didn’t kill you, you’d bring him some girls or something. But the mummy didn’t care what you said unless you had some of those Tanna leaves he liked. Mostly, he’d just strangle you. And the wolfman? He’d rip out your throat soon as look at you.”

“Those were good flicks,” Margaret said, nodding her approval. “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Now it’s all blood and guts, killers with masks and crap like that. Not like it used to be. Drive-ins are all gone now, too. Hillview’s been closed for years. Wicker Creek is gone, too. I think there’s a trailer court there now. The last one was the Brighton. It’s been closed fifteen years, I bet. Still there, but overgrown.”

Darin sighed. “Can we please stay on the subject?”

“Yeah, you’re right. What were we talking about? Oh, Night of the Living Dead. That was a good picture. You see, Mr. Darin, these people are trapped in this house and the zombies are attacking. They have to fight them off until dawn. Until the sheriff and his men come and kill them.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens all right,” Margaret said. “There’s a colored guy in that one, ain’t there?”

“Sure, but he’s okay for a black guy.”

“All right, that’s enough. You two don’t seem to realize the situation we’re in here,” Darin said, drops of spittle on his lips. “We don’t have time to take a trip down memory lane here. We need a plan.”

“He’s right,” Russel said. “In that movie, those people board up the windows and I think that’s what we need to do. We need to make some weapons, too. Maybe firebombs and stakes and stuff. Anything we can come up with.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what we should do,” Margaret said.

“You two are both crazy,” Darin said.

Then there was the shattering of glass somewhere in the house and there was very little time to debate the comparative sanity of the Boyne’s. Glass shattered and there were garbled voices…or something that sounded like voices.

“Must be the zombies,” Russel said, almost too calmly.

“Yes,” his mother agreed. “I figure they’d be coming. Must have sniffed us out.”

Darin was on his feet. “All right, dammit. The thing to do is to draw them into the house and escape like we did at the Blake house. It’s our only chance. We’ll make a run for my truck and?”

“No, sir,” Russel said. “We got to make a stand here and now just like in one of them cavalry pictures.”

“You’re completely out of your mind,” Darin told him.

“Oh, you think so?” Margaret told him when Russel merely shrugged. “I imagine my son knows a little bit more about killing zombies than you do.”

She took the lantern and followed her son down the hallway towards the back of the house where the sounds of breaking glass had come from. It was a bedroom and the dead were trying to get in. An easy dozen of those white, puckered hands were tearing at the curtains and sash and anything they could get their rotting fingers on. Russel knew instantly what to do. It was just like that movie. He went over there and started hammering those hands with his rifle butt and there were so many, it was like trying to squash dozens of wriggling albino spiders at the same time.

“Be careful!” Margaret told him. “Watch it now!”

Darin was scared. He’d have been the first to admit that, yet the absolute absurdity of the situation?and the Boyne’s in general?seemed to cancel a lot of that out. They weren’t in touch with reality. Not in the least. Granted, reality in Witcham these days left something to be desired…but these two were something else again. They just didn’t seem to realize the danger those things outside presented. They were like a couple players in some European existentialist film. Too offbeat and exaggerated to be really taken seriously. They had spent a better part of their life watching low-budget horror films and now the veneer between reality and fantasy had been torn wide open, between the real and the blatantly cinematic, and they happily adapted to this. Life was a cheap zombie movie, pass the popcorn, mom.

Good God.

Russel kept at it, smashing at those hands and doing little more than mashing a few of those pulpy fingers in the process. The…crazies weren’t getting in, but then they weren’t retreating from the window either. Had the house sat lower and they didn’t have to reach up like they were, they would have come right in and used Russel as a floormat to wipe their feet off.

Finally, Russel backed away. “Too damn many,” he said. “Just too damn many.”

But not to be discouraged, now that he had his moment on the silver screen, he brought his rifle around and started popping rounds at the hands. He blew holes through moldering palms and blasted some fingers away in sprays of black juice. But, again, this did little to stop those outside.

Margaret, getting her cue from some unseen director, handed Darin the lantern and snatched a crucifix off the wall.

“Here,” she said, wading in, “have a taste of this!”

She thrust the cross into the flurry of hands. One of them grabbed it with no ill effect and almost yanked her right out the window with it. As it was, she fell over and several hands took hold of her. One had her around the throat. Another tore her hair out by the roots. And another…what seemed to be that of a woman, with a couple finely lacquered Lee Press-On Nails still on her fingers…scratched welts across her face and cheeks that looked oddly like racing stripes.

“Russel!” Margaret screamed. “Help me! Help me! They’ve got me! The dead have got me!”

Darin did his bit to save her. He walked over there with the lantern, seeing if light would drive them off. It didn’t. It just illuminated that closely-pressed ring of faces outside the window and forever erased any doubts he’d had that they were just crazies. He saw those faces and let out a low scream or something like a scream. Dear God. All of them rotting and dripping and oozing with slime. Eyes missing and skulls thrusting through faces. No, there could be no doubt now.

Russel charged in, shooting and hammering at them. Fighting for his mother’s life and managing to free her, along with a hand that was clutching her throat. And this was the ultimate denouement to this little episode of madness. Margaret hit the floor and that severed hand would not let go. It had hold of her throat and it planned on squeezing the life out of her. She turned about three shades of blue, went purple, and then Russel was on his hands and knees, trying to yank that hand off.

“Are you gonna help me?” he shouted at Darin.

But Darin primly shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

Russel freed the fingers one at a time, snapping them free until the severed hand had nothing left to grip with. It fell to the hardwood floor, thumping around for maybe two or three minutes before going still. The fingers following suit.

The zombies were gone from the window.

Russel dragged his mom into the hallway and let her catch her breath. The whole time, he just shook his head as he stared at Darin. Darin thought Russel was going to yell at him for not assisting, but that didn’t happen.

Sweaty and breathless and amazed, he said, “Man…what a rush.”

PESTILENCE

1

Even with the rising of the sun, darkness still held an awful sway over Witcham. For it was in every flooded cellar and musty-smelling closet and shadowed attic. You could not only see it, you could feel it. The city was a great, murky, misting graveyard washed by that slimy sea of death and putrescence. A disinterred coffin yanked from moldering earth, its dirt-clotted lid thrown open in brazen violation. Yes, the sun came up and showed you things you did not want to see. And chiefly, what it did was made all the dire imperfections of the city all that much more apparent as bright stage lights might make you see every childhood scar and blemish on an actor’s face. The daylight came, probing and digging and revealing, a bright and shining scalpel that cut through layers of dark and cancerous flesh, exposing the dank malignancies and pulsing anatomy beneath.

It was a long night.

A night that buried the city, that filled its hide with worms and the rising sun was the autopsy that showed you the depth of disease and putrefaction.

2

At Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus, Hubb Sadler and Knucker and Hardy, along with Hot Tamale and Herb, formed a war cabinet. This was their city. This was the city they had grown and lived in and like a loved one, they were not ready just yet to throw dirt in its face. So all through that bitter, sleepless night, they planned on re-taking it, wrenching it from the grip of unhallowed things that sought to turn it into a great morgue.

Hubb was loving it.

He hadn’t done a lot of smiling since his brother Chum’s ticker had exploded in a soup of blood fifteen years before and he’d hit the floor behind the counter, deader than a halibut in a dry bucket (on his way down, Chum, true to form, had said, “What in the dick-fucking Christ is this?”). Hubb had weathered that storm as he weathered them all?with a vile temperament and a variety of profane adjectives on his tongue. But he was liking this. Loving it, in fact. Wasn’t much old Hubb loved these days besides the sound of a cash register ringing and its drawer filling up with folding green stuff, but boy oh boy, now this rising dead business. Now that was putting the wind back into his sails. He’d buried his brother fifteen years back and his wife ten years ago and since that time, truth be told, Hubb hadn’t been doing much but hanging on. Just existing. Life and its assorted bullshit pretty much having squeezed the guts from him like a stepped upon cricket…but now he was getting some of that back. Really getting it back. He’d been hanging on and hanging on, too damn pissed-off and ornery to die, like maybe he’d been waiting around for something that would show him he was really a man again. And this was it. Sure, maybe he was overweight with a bad back and fallen arches and his left knee had been shot up by the gooks during the Korean War. Maybe he had a prostate the size of a honeydew melon that dribbled piss like a leaky garden hose. Maybe the Docs said his rheumatism and lumbago weren’t going to get better this side of the grave and that his cholesterol and high blood pressure were bad enough to kill five men half his age. And maybe his dick hadn’t done any dancing in years?even that sweet young college girl, Mindy, with the flowing raven hair and tits like cruise missiles hadn’t put any sauce back in his sausage, and you were talking about a girl that made boiled lasagna noodles stand up hard?but here he was, feeling like a man again. Maybe physically he was on the wrong side of seventy, but psychologically he was feeling thirty again, ready to knock cocks with the best of ’em just like he’d done in the old days. And how was that for coming back from the grave, ma and pa? Jesus Mary-humping Christ…how was that?

Old Hubb felt renewed and revitalized, ready to slap ass and slide meat, praise God in the highest. So he rallied his troops like a general, gathered weapons and mapped strategies. Their time was coming and when it did, they would not shrink from duty. They’d meet those zombies, dicks in hands, and give ‘em the randiest fucking this side of hell.

3

Outside the city, at the Fort Providence Military Reservation, there was a silence of cryptyards and grave hollows. A vile-stinking mist blew through the high security installation. Rain fell. Things rotted and other things moved. But nothing truly living or natural breathed there. The corridors were empty. The rooms untenanted. The pestilence that took the city, it would soon be known, was born here and what had crawled from that toxic womb, was hell itself.

4

And Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle? They had slept. That was something. They had slept and that if nothing else kept them sane. Mitch could not remember ever having been so tired, so worn, so empty before. After the nightmare at the mannequin factory, they had gone back to Wanda Sepperly’s, Tommy and he and Harry, their new friend. Wanda let them in and Mitch had to wonder if she ever really slept at all. But then, he knew that the sleep of the old and the sleep of the young were entirely two different things. The Zirblanski twins were zonked out in one bedroom, so Mitch and the others took the one across the hall. He and Tommy both took a bed; Harry got the floor. Harry didn’t seem to mind. A sleeping bag on a carpeted floor beat the shit out of a state rack any day, he pointed out to them.

“Listen to me, Harry,” Tommy had told him. “You say you only stole cars. Okay and fine. Just don’t try any shit, okay? We got an old lady out there we’re real fond of and a couple girls sleeping across the hallway that Mitch and me cherish, so don’t do anything that’s gonna piss us off.”

You could see Harry didn’t like that much. Like any other group in society, criminals had their foodchain, they had their surface feeders and their bottom dwellers. Even an armed robber or a car thief could look down his nose at, say, a pedophile and feel good about himself. “See, that’s how it works when you’re inside. None of us think we’re fucking Boy Scouts,” he explained to them. “We know we’re bad boys and troublemakers. But there’s a pecking order, see? There’s rungs to the ladder. The more brains and balls it takes to pull your chosen crime, the more respect you get. A jewel thief or a bankrobber have guts and brains, so they get respect. They’re up on the top. But a rapist or a child molester are just gutless trash, so they take the abuse. Guys who torment helpless women and children don’t rank real high in our system. Inside, I have a bad day and I feel shitty about who and what I am, I go knock the teeth out of some baby-raper or serial killer and that makes me feel better about myself. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But life inside and life outside are two different things. I guess what I’m saying is, I’d slit my wrists before I’d stoop to hurting innocents.”

“Fair enough,” Tommy said. “Just remember, we’re letting you sleep here. We’re trusting you.”

“And you can. You saved my life.” He laughed then. “Even women don’t excite a guy like me the way a nice vehicle does. Like that truck of yours, Tommy. We were in Milwaukee? I’d jack that sonofabitch in about three minutes tops. Within an hour, she’s stripped.”

“You leave my truck alone.”

So, whether they wanted him or not, Harry was part of them. Mitch thought he seemed all right. He looked like he could be rough if you cornered him, but he seemed like a good guy, as good as a guy could be after living in a state cage for the past few years. Mitch had a funny feeling that Harry was now part of what they were, whatever that was. But he believed it. For some way, somehow he was going to be instrumental down the road. He needed them and they needed him.

Before they closed their eyes, Mitch pulled Tommy aside and laid it out for him: “Listen, buddy, we don’t find Chrissy by sundown, I want you to take Wanda, Deke, and the girls and get the hell out. Goddamn city is sinking. No, no, don’t give me any of that hero shit. I want you to get them out of here. You wanna come back, I’d appreciate your help. But they have to get out of here.”

And with that logic, even Tommy Kastle could not argue.

5

At Slayhoke Penitentiary, the dead outnumbered the living. The 1^st Air Cavalry, bolstered by National Guardsmen, spent the night throwing a serious volume of fire against anything that tried to leave the prison walls. During the process, many of them died and quite a few more had nervous breakdowns. By dawn, they huddled outside the wire in the mud, the rain falling and the mist rising, wide-eyed and trembling from the amphetamines that kept them going and the horrors they had seen and would never forget. They had surrounded the prison on all sides, established a No-Man’s-Land between themselves and the walls, gunning down anything that tried to cross it. Using grenades, anti-personnel mines, and flame throwers when bullets couldn’t do the job. And out there now, in that cratered, misty dead zone, there were the remains of dozens and dozens of bodies. Bullet-ridden, blown to fragments, incinerated…what was left, continued to move.

6

In the Procton House, Russel and Margaret Boyne and Lou Darin waited for the sun to come up. They did not sleep. They did not relax their vigil. They knew the dead were out there and they waited for them. They kept busy. Russel and his mother collected up knives and hammers and golf clubs, anything they thought could be used as a weapon. The entire time recounting the plots of dozens of low-budget horror films. Darin listened, but did not hear. They were mad. They were both mad. And he told them so quite often. Although Russel ignored him, Margaret argued their point continually.

“This is not about who’s crazy and who’s not, Mr. Darin. This is about the survival of the human race,” she told him. “This is a battle to save humanity.”

“And you’re going to wage it with kitchen knives and a couple nine irons?”

“We have to start somewhere.”

Towards dawn, Russel said, “I wonder what happens if one of us gets infected? Will we come back from the dead, too?”

7

All in all, it was a mad sort of night.

Which was to be expected now that Witcham had gone completely insane. Lots of things that had happened in the city were witnessed by many. Some people lost their minds at what they saw, screaming themselves into a happier, carefree world of lunacy. Others ran and still others just let themselves be taken by what knocked on their doors that long, listening night. Still others found neither of these paths acceptable. They refused to live in a world that had been turned upside down and shaken out. So they put guns in their mouths or drew knives across their wrists or swung from nooses before the sun rose. Better that than live in a world where all the dark things were given breath, where the dead could rise from their graves to torment the living.

Here are a few things of a more personal nature that were witnessed by no one but those who suffered through them:

Chuck Bittner, after his run-in with Mrs. Crowley and then the walking corpse of his own mother, spent the night in a dumpster of all things. Hearing things moving in the water around him, but simply afraid to look and see what they were. Selfish, arrogant, uppity little brat that he had been, Chuck was no more. He had aged a decade that night. And he did not doubt that he would never again be a kid. So he waited through the long night, curled up, wet and shaking, the rain falling and the rising water smelling of his mother and the wind sounding like her voice.

Dr. Charles Monroe, the county coroner, figured on a long night when he saw all the drowned bodies waiting in the morgue. Just after midnight, when they began to move, Monroe did nothing but sit and stare. He sat there while the cadaver of Jenny Compton, aged three, walked over to him, fixing him with black and soulless eyes. And it wasn’t until she sank her teeth into his throat that he managed a brittle, broken scream.

Douglas Perry of Perry Family Meats was woken rudely over in East Genessee when he heard movement in his shop below. He kept no money on the premises, but he did have some ten-thousand dollars worth of meat hanging in his refrigerator room and was hoping the power would come back on soon before he lost everything. When he went down there, flashlight in hand, he found the stainless steel door open. Inside, hanging from shanks of beef and carcasses of pork, were what he thought at first were babies. At least, at first glance they looked like babies…like fetuses really: bulbous-headed and round-eyed. But there the resemblance ended. For these babies?if babies they were?were malformed and grotesque, some with too many limbs and others joined together like Siamese twins. They paid him little mind, just continued to chew and suck at the hanging meat with the most obscene sounds. Perry left and promptly put a bullet through his left temple.

And Father Mackley of the Holy Covenant girl’s school not too far from Perry Family Meats, stepped out that night into the rain and wind, half out of his mind over the girls missing from his school. He looked up in the sky and the clouds parted. He saw the moon clearly enough. Except it looked like a bright orange skull grinning down at him. Mackley suffered a fatal heart attack on the spot.

And that was the night in Witcham.

When the sun finally rose, it revealed the devastation. Which was considerable. Nobody had to erect a gravestone to Witcham, the buildings and houses rising from the water were a cemetery all their own.

8

Dawn.

The sun came up, but little of it was seen or felt. It hid behind an angry film of gray and black clouds, hinting at its presence, but refusing to show itself completely, wearing its veils like a stripper and refusing to disrobe. That’s how morning came, with a seduction and a tease of daylight, but nothing more.

The city drooped under the rain that fell in buckets and then blew in fine mists, but never, ever stopped coming. It was a hard rain and a soft rain, a needle-fine rain and a downpour that drenched you to the skin. It stung your face and got in your eyes and soaked through your pants and boots and after awhile, it seemed that your soul was drowning, filling up like a bucket and everything inside your head and out was gray and wet and steaming. That was life in Witcham these days, an existence of abyssal depths and muddy ponds and pale green swamps. There was no chance to ever dry off, just the water dripping and dropping, that accursed dampness that made you want to scratch your skin off after a time.

So, the water continued to rise, the Black River continued to swell, and Witcham continued to sink and sink. A gray mist came off the slopping, eternal sea, obscuring everything and turning what daylight there was to a leaden gloom.

People came out of houses, wading through the black, oily water. In less-flooded areas, they used trucks. In submerged areas, they boated or clung to drifting refuse.

What you noticed first when you stepped out into the overcast, damp world of Witcham was the smell. No, smell didn’t cut it. This was definitely a stink. It was an ugly black odor, organic and meaty and warm. You could not only smell it, you could taste it on your tongue and feel it laying over your skin like a sour sweat. Maybe you could fool yourself for a time, as you tried to breathe that thick and rancid air, that what you were smelling was just that stagnant, polluted water backwashed with rotting garbage and dead animals and sewage, but you knew better. For this stench was simply too overpowering, too sweet and high and gagging. This stench was that of the unburied dead, of hundreds, if not thousands, of bloated, waterlogged corpses chewed by rats and veiled by flies and sweating maggots by the mitful. This was what maybe Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka smelled like after a good rain. Not exactly a country lane after a spring shower, but a sickening, steaming brew of decomposition, an odor so physical, so very palpable that you had all you could do not to drop to your knees and vomit at the first whiff.

And if Witcham had a perfume, a signature odor, this was it.

The streets were rivers of filth and garbage, excretia and carrion rushing towards some unseen and pestiferous dead sea. Things bobbed and things rolled. Some of those things were alive and some were dead and some were neither. Everywhere, there were corpses drifting about, in whole and in part. And that brought flies, storms and clouds and ravaging swarms of meatflies. And gulls and crows and buzzards and rats, thousands of rats.

Witcham was a bloated, sunwashed corpse breeding disease and vermin and horror. Over a third of the population had fled when the flooding began and of those remaining, nearly half were dead by dawn.

You could almost hear the clicking of a great death-watch beetle hanging over the town, the ticking of a clock, grains of sand sliding down the neck of an hourglass.

This wasn’t over yet.

Something was coming.

Something was about to happen.

And it wouldn’t be long in coming.

9

Mitch rolled out of bed at 12:30 the next afternoon. The sleep felt good, but he did not like the idea of all the daylight that had been wasted. Tommy and Harry came awake about the same time. Mitch sat up, working the sleep from his eyes with sleep-numb fingers. It was not like in a book or a movie where some character rolls out of bed and does not remember the awful plight he or she is in. No, there was no merciful moment of forgetfulness. Mitch came awake fully aware of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. It laid inside him in a cold, inorganic mass that made him physically ill.

“We better get going,” he said.

Harry was fully awake the moment he opened his eyes. You got like that when you did time. Just like a soldier in a war, you came out of sleep tense and ready to fight.

Tommy, however, took a few more moments. “Morning, sunshine,” he said to Harry.

Harry smiled.

Out in the kitchen, Wanda Sepperly was looking bright and perky and almost youthful. And why not? It had been years and years since she’d had so many fine young faces gathered around her table. The Zirblanksi twins were there, dark of eye and hair, but vibrant and taking to Wanda like seedlings to spring rain and sunshine. Deke Ericksen was there, too, his eyes little more than bloodshot holes. Those eyes had seen things, Mitch knew, things they would never forget. Despite the grayness pushing up against the windows, inside Wanda’s kitchen things were bright and homey.

Wanda was old school.

Unlike most, she had little use or faith in electric stoves or gas ranges. She hadn’t taken many things from her old farm in Bayfield County, but one of them, her most prized possession in fact, was her cast-iron wood-burning cookstove. Power or no power, you could count on it. Wanda was in her glory putting out the eats for the young gathered at her table: pancakes with maple syrup? “and it ain’t no Log Cabin nor Aunt Jemima, Mitch Barron, this is pure and sweet squeezed straight from my own trees”?and scrambled eggs and slab bacon. Rita and Rhonda, who lived mostly out of boxes and cans as was the curse of our modern age, were loving it like this was a trip to granny’s farm. Deke was mostly picking at his food. But Wanda kept scolding him and despite himself, despite what he’d seen and knew, his teenage belly was hungry. Hungry as only a teenage boy could be.

Wanda winked a sparkling blue eye at her recent arrivals. “Sit down and fill yourself. For this day will be no better than the last.”

Harry was pretty excited at the idea. After five years of state food, he was ready for some real eats. His eyes were wide and there was drool on his mouth.

“Not right now, Wanda,” Mitch said. “We’re gonna take a turn around the neighborhood, see what’s going on first.”

Harry looked disappointed, but he fell in step behind Tommy.

“Stay,” Mitch told him.

“No, I better go with you guys. You might need me.”

“Stay and eat for chrissake,” Tommy said. “Fill your tank. Look like you need it.”

He fell into a chair and Wanda set a plate of cakes and bacon and eggs down before him. Right away, he launched into it, oooing and ahhing and telling Wanda, between mouthfuls, that she was surely the finest cook in the world.

“Are you going to check at our house?” Rhonda asked.

“Yeah, we’ll take a look,” Mitch told her. “Maybe your mom and dad are home, girls.”

They both nodded. They’d been through hell like everyone else, but they were handling it much better. Mitch decided it was because they were young. The young were much tougher than anyone ever gave them credit for. They could switch gears and burn rubber in the blink of an eye before your average adult even got the keys in the ignition. That was youth. The girls were like dandelions that you mowed down one day and the next, they grew right back, flowering bright and yellow. You could not keep them down.

Mitch went over to Deke and tapped him on the shoulder. “I need to talk with you, buddy.”

They went in the living room and Mitch sat by him on the couch. “What brought you here?” he said, knowing it would not be something good.

Deke shrugged. “I was looking for Chrissy most all night.”

“And?”

He sighed. “And…and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, because I can’t believe it myself.”

He looked somewhere on the borderline of tears or rage. It was hard to tell which. But there was no doubting that something inside of him had been yanked out and stomped on. And it would be no easy matter putting those things back in and getting them to work properly again.

“I’d believe you. You saw dead things walking? You saw mutations maybe? Ghosts? Spooks? Zombies? Whatever in the Christ you wanna call them. You don’t think I’d believe that, try me. Because I’ve seen things in the past twenty-four hours that’ll turn your hair fucking white.”

Deke looked him, his eyes moist. “Lily,” he said. “Mrs. Barron, I mean.”

Mitch bit down on his lip. “Gone, son. She’s just gone.”

“And Chrissy?”

“She’s out there. She’s alive out there. We just have to find her.”

Deke nodded. “She is alive, Mr. Barron. I know she’s alive.”

“Me, too.”

They both knew it and they both believed it and that was a connection they shared. Maybe it was this more than anything that made Deke start talking. He told Mitch about his visits to the house yesterday and the way Lily had been, talking about dead people below in the sewers and secret worlds beneath and her sister being down there. It hurt to hear it. And mainly because Mitch was floored by guilt. While he was out nosing around town for Chrissy, Lily had been here, needing him. Not in a good state of mind. Confused. Scared. But he had to live with that.

“Then I went home and my mom and dad were gone,” Deke said.

“Nobody was there?”

“Oh, yes, somebody was there. My brother.”

Mitch paled. Nicky Ericksen had drowned a couple years back, he thought.

“We buried him at Hillside Cemtery,” Deke said in a wounded voice. “He must have been washed out with the others. He was home last night. Laying in his bed. Laying there, waiting for me to come home.”

Mitch put a hand on his shoulder, but it was precious little consolation. “Then you came here?”

“No. First I took care of him. I had to take care of him. I had to…to put him back down, you know?” He sank his face in his hands. “It wasn’t Nicky. I don’t know what it was. He was saying things…bad things. Nicky was a sweet kid. He would never have said things like that.”

“I know. Whatever gets into them, it’s spirits or something. Demons. Shit, I don’t know.”

“Are you going to look for Chrissy?”

“In a little while. Not just yet.”

“And when we find her?”

“When we find her, we’ll get her out of this mess. Then I’m coming back. I’m coming back to sort this mess out.”

“I want to help.”

“Okay.”

No point in telling the kid no, Mitch figured. He was hurting and only vengeance would seal that wound and stop the blood from running.

When they got back to the kitchen, Harry was still eating and Tommy was feeding a massive tiger-striped tomcat strips of bacon. It was probably the biggest, ugliest cat Mitch had ever seen. Half its left ear was gone as was half its tail. Goddamn monster. Looked like a dwarf sabertooth tiger with those yellow fangs hanging from its mouth. Tommy had the damn thing sitting up on its hind quarters, begging for bacon.

“Me and this damn cat are getting acquainted,” Tommy said.

“His name’s Mr. Cheese,” Deke said.

“Looks like he got beaten with an ugly stick.”

“Well, that was another name we thought about. Mr. Ugly.”

“Let’s go, Tommy,” Mitch said. “We’ve got things to do.”

10

They didn’t find much more in the neighborhood than they’d found the evening before. Most houses were locked and nobody answered the doors. Those that were open, were empty. They didn’t search every open house, but you could tell upon walking in that nobody was about.

Emptiness.

Desertion.

The day was gray and misting. The water had risen two or three more inches now. You could no longer see the streets. Even the yards and walks were inundated now. Everything was a stagnant sea of dirty standing water, lots of dead leaves floating. Lots of flies buzzed around. They found a few dead animals, a couple of corpses. Tommy poured some salt on them, but nothing happened. That was a good thing, they figured. And what a state of affairs it was when floating corpses meant nothing to you.

Outside the Blake house, the very house that Mitch and Tommy were in no hurry to check, they saw destruction. The front door was pretty much torn off its hinges. Just hanging there. A lot of windows broken.

“Looks like the old bitch had trouble last night,” Tommy said.

Carefully, Mitch went up onto the porch with his Remington autoloader and stuck his head through the doorway. Instantly, he could smell the sickly-sweet tang of death. “Miriam?” he called out. “Miriam? You around?”

His voice echoed out and died.

Inside, there was wreckage: shattered furniture and pictures hanging askew on the walls, lots of mud in the carpet. Yeah, Miriam had had visitors last night and it sure as hell wasn’t the fucking Welcome Wagon. He knew if they searched that house room by room, they were going to find things. Maybe some of the dead ones. Maybe Miriam’s corpse and those of Russel and Margaret Boyne. Maybe even Lou Darin. But Mitch wasn’t up to it. He’d seen enough death, he didn’t need to go hunting for it.

Down the block they went, knocking on doors and looking for life and finding nothing. They didn’t even see anyone out walking or hear a dog barking. The world was just graveyard silent. Flooded and stinking and dead. If it hadn’t have been for the far-off drone of a plane, it would have been easy to imagine the entire world was like this. A colossal cemetery.

Then at the Procton house, life.

Lou Darin was on the porch, looking agitated like usual. “Is there anyone else left?”

“Not that we can find,” Mitch told him.

“Have you looked?”

“Yes, we looked, Lou. We’ve been knocking on doors for the past half-hour. Nobody’s around. Either they’re dead or they just got out of town.”

He grunted. “Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“How’d you end up over here? Where’s Miriam and the others?”

“Miriam’s dead as far as I know. And good riddance. Russel and Margaret are inside. And I’m getting out. This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Those things burst into Miriam’s house last night and we ran. We hid inside the Procton’s. I don’t know where they are.”

“You taking Russel and Margaret with you?”

He shook his head. “No way. They’re both crazy. I don’t care what they do. They think they’re living in a zombie movie. They’re preparing for the final battle of mankind. If you can believe that.”

He made to move past and Mitch grabbed him by the arm. “Miriam didn’t make it?”

“I don’t know. They attacked and we ran. The Boyne’s and I.”

“And you left that old woman there?” Tommy said.

“We didn’t have a choice.”

Lou gave them a more detailed version of events. Apparently, the dead got in the house and Miriam told the others to run. That’s all that Darin knew. Miriam was most likely dead.

Tommy laughed. “Well, you are one brave sonofabitch, ain’t you?”

“Oh, shut the hell up, you idiot.”

Darin stormed away, making for his own house and his SUV in the driveway if he was to be believed.

Inside, Russel and his mother were nailing boards over the windows, lording over an improvised collection of weapons: sharpened baseball bats and broomsticks with steak knives attached to the ends. Mitch had to wonder what good any of it was going to do.

“You both need to get out of here,” Mitch told them.

“There’s nowhere to run to, Mitch. This is the end battle. Just like in the Bible. Hell has delivered up the dead and this is the last stand of mankind. The whole world is like Witcham now.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, yes I do. Hell on earth.”

“Russel, you can’t believe this.”

Russel drove a nail through a board. “It’s true. Just like in that picture where the dead take over the world. You can stay here with us, Mitch. Help us get ready. Because tonight they’ll be out in force.”

“I don’t think they have to wait for dark,” Tommy said.

“Sure they do,” Russel told him. “That’s how this works.”

Outside, both Mitch and Tommy just shrugged. There was no point in arguing with a dementia that was so well-developed. They wanted to stay and die, there wasn’t much you could do.

Mitch sighed, wiping a sheen of wet mist from his face. “Let’s go over to my house. I want to get some more shells for the Remington.”

They trudged through moist yards to his own, wet leaves blown up against the house, water dripping from the roof. It was impossible not to look at that house without getting assailed by a hundred memories. There were the raingutters he’d put up five, six years back. He could remember being up on the ladder and Chrissy was standing at the bottom, nine or ten years old and cute with pigtails and freckles on her cheeks. There were the Andersen windows that Lily and he had put in one sunny September day three years ago, the air brisk and sharp as apples, the sort of day you were glad to be alive. To either side of the porch there were Lily’s flower boxes filled with wilted brown stems. There were those pain-in-the-ass hedges that she made him round off every summer with the clippers. God, it was everywhere. All the damn memories. He could see Chrissy running up the walk from grade school, her dark hair bouncing and her Little Mermaid lunch box bumping against her leg. He could see Halloween pumpkins on the porch, Chrissy taping up cardboard skeletons and green-faced witches in the windows. He could see the trees that Lily hung with lights every Christmas, the evergreen boughs she decorated the porch railings with. He could see himself out there come Easter, scattering the carrots Chrissy had left for the Easter bunny in a trail, taking a bite out of each one first.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ in heaven…it had been a life. A real life. It had been his life and he had been content with it all. In love with it. In love with his wife and his stepdaughter. All the holidays and special times, raking leaves in the fall and cutting grass in the summer and shoveling snow in the winter while Chrissy pegged snowballs at him. Chrissy’s slumber parties and Lily’s quilting guild. Tommy and he building the garage out back. Summer cookouts with steaks on the grill and cold beers in hand, Chrissy and her friends splashing in an inflatable pool and?

“Mitch?” Tommy said. “You okay, man?”

Mitch swallowed it all down before it took him away. He wiped his eyes with the back of his fist. “I’m all right.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t go in there, you know? I can get the shells.”

“No, I’m going in.”

Mitch led the way up the porch, shutting it all down inside of him until he was numb and could not feel a thing. Just some wind-up machine out doing a job. The door was unlocked and he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it or not. No matter. He led the way in with Tommy behind him and he wondered vaguely in the back of his mind how many times they’d come in like this together, carrying groceries or six-packs or bowling trophies. Maybe even Christmas presents to be surreptitiously placed under the tree for Chrissy. A new sled and skates, Barbie’s Dream House and an Easy Bake Oven. God, those were the days. Tommy…crazy fucking Tommy…climbing up onto the icy, snowy roof on Christmas Eve night, stomping around up there like Santa Claus so Chrissy would go to bed already.

Stop it! he told himself. You don’t feel any of it! You don’t feel anything! Nothing at all! You’re empty!

Mitch got the box of shells from the locked metal box up in the hall closet. As he was taking them out, something gave him pause. At first he thought it was those damn memories again, sneaking up to torment him. Because he was smelling lilacs. Lilacs of all things. He stepped farther into the hall, over near the staircase leading to the second floor.

The odor was stronger.

Lilacs.

“You smelling it?” he said to Tommy.

Tommy nodded. “Yeah. Flowers or some shit.”

“Lilacs.”

That meant nothing to Tommy, of course. Not really. But to Mitch it meant everything. He knew that smell. Knew it very well and it made something in his belly pull down low. Lily’s body lotion. She put it on after she had a bath. Its smell was distinctive and he could feel her skin beneath his lips, that lilac odor sweet in his face.

Mitch stood there looking up the stairs.

“What’s the matter?” Tommy asked.

He told him.

“Shit,” Tommy said.

They went up the stairs side by side and when they got there, they went right to the master bedroom. Right away, that telltale scent of lilacs became almost overpowering. Beneath it, there was something else, a dankness Mitch was glad he could not smell. What he saw in there?in his bedroom?was much like what they’d seen in that other bedroom yesterday at the Bell house. Someone had been here. Someone had been at Lily’s vanity. They had scattered cosmetics and perfumes and what have you everywhere. Drawers were yanked open, emptied. Silky underthings hanging out like guts. And there was the tube of lilac body lotion. Most of it had been squirted all over the vanity top and then tossed to the floor and stepped on, the remainder seeping into the carpet. Somebody had been using it, though. It had been on their hands when they pressed them against the vanity mirror, leaving creamy prints there.

Mitch felt like he was going to swoon. He steadied himself against the chest of drawers. “She was here. Last night or early this morning.”

Tommy swallowed. “Who?”

“Lily.”

“Mitch, you don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

And he did.

They come back that quickly. They die and rise that quickly.

Tommy was looking at the bed. There was a gray stain on the quilt. Somebody had been laying there, somebody that was wet and dirty.

Sure, Mitch, he thought. She came back here looking for you. She went to her mirror and smashed things around looking for the lotion. When she found it, she smeared it all over her cold white flesh. Perhaps grinning like a skull the whole time. Then she laid in the bed and waited for you. As she had waited for you other nights…

“She was here,” Mitch said. “She might still be. You got that salt on you?”

Tommy pulled the waterproof bag out from under his raincoat.

“All right. If she’s here, let’s find her.”

Tommy didn’t argue.

They went from room to room, looked in closets and behind furniture and under beds. They could not find her. Finally, they opened the cellar door and looked down there into the black rising water. It was at least four feet deep and rising, coming right up to the seventh or eighth step. Cardboard boxes and plastic bottles of detergent bobbed on the surface.

“She’s down there,” Mitch said. “I know she is.”

“In the water?”

“Where else. She’s sleeping on the bottom, waiting for dark to come again.”

“You’re…you’re not going down there, Mitch.”

“No.”

He shut the door and locked it from the outside. If she planned on walking around tonight, he wasn’t going to make it easy on her. Is that what they were all doing, though? he wondered. Laying down beneath the water, sleeping, dormant? And when night came, they’d all rise back up. Five times as many as there were last night.

Christ.

Outside, in the falling rain, Mitch just stood there, making himself breathe in that moist, tainted air. Purging the smell of lilacs from his head. The worse smells coming from the cellar.

“I think we should take a drive out to the Army base like Wanda said,” Tommy suggested.

“All right. But first there’s something we have to do.”

“Which is?”

Mitch looked down the street to where Miriam’s house rose from the pale mist. “There’s someone in that house and I want to know who it is.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because when we left, I left the front door open. Now it’s closed.”

11

Mitch took hold of the door at the Blake house and gave it a pull and it nearly fell on top of him. Only one hinge stopped it from doing so. He set his rifle aside and leaned it up against the frame like it had been when they’d first looked for Miriam and the others. Once he did that, he gathered up his rifle and stood there, thinking. While Tommy and he had been checking out the other houses, somebody had set the door back in place.

“I wonder why,” he said out loud.

“Why what?” Tommy said.

“Why somebody put the door back up.”

Tommy pulled off his baseball cap and shook rain from it. “Why else? They put it up so the light wouldn’t get in. Maybe whoever’s in there, don’t care much for the light.”

Mitch had been thinking the same thing, more or less. When they’d came here before, he’d done little more than stick his head in the door and call out for Miriam. But he had smelled something in there. Death. Not an unusual smell in Witcham these days, but inside a house it was much stronger than out in the flooded streets. It was contained and heightened, purified.

“What you say we go get some pancakes?” Tommy said.

Mitch ignored him and walked through the doorway. It was just a mess in there. Not just the broken furniture he’d seen before and the askew pictures, but things much worse. The carpeting was covered with muddy prints and gray water squished out of it when you walked on it. Miriam’s guncases had been overturned, the doors torn off and weapons scattered about. A mirror was shattered. Everything had been swept off the mantel and crushed underfoot with the remains of the broken window.

“Looks like a really pissed off Avon lady called last night,” Tommy said.

Mitch saw muddy handprints on the walls leading to the kitchen. Most of them were badly smudged, as if especially grimy hands were slapped against the walls and dragged along. Some were very distinct, though. Adults, even children lower down. A few had bits of tissue stuck to them.

Mitch smelled the stink of death and looked at the wreckage, thinking, this would have been us last night. If Wanda hadn’t been burning that shit to keep the dead away, they would have stormed her house and killed us all.

They looked around in the rooms downstairs, saw nothing of much interest. The dead had rampaged through here, but apparently they’d come and gone quickly, left little evidence of their passing.

Mitch walked over to the stairs.

“More stairs,” Tommy said. “This is over, I never climb stairs again in my life.”

Mitch was feeling it the same way he was. Stairs. Stairs always led somewhere bad these days. Whatever was in the house was up there and he could smell it, something just beginning to decay with a sharp green smell. It was up there and he could feel it. It had a heavy, almost ominous physical presence that dried the spit up in his mouth. He tried to tell himself it was just the stairs, the memory of other things they had led to, but he knew better. Something was up there and whatever it was, it had raised the fine hairs at the back of his neck.

He cleared his throat. “Miriam? You up there?”

“She’s dead, Mitch. She ain’t about to answer you even if she’s here.”

Mitch waited a moment. Two, three. He felt a bead of perspiration slide down his spine to his beltline. He was holding onto the Remington so tightly, he thought his fingers would leave grooves in the stock.

“Miriam,” he called out, his voice echoing through the emptiness up there. “We’re here. We’re here to see you.”

Tommy looked at him like he was mad. Looked like he was about to say something smart and cutting. But he didn’t. Because a voice came from up there and the sound of it made them both want to run.

“Who’s down there?” it said, bubbling and mucky-sounding. “Who’s that? Who has come into my house uninvited?”

“Shit,” Tommy said.

It was Miriam’s voice, all right. The way she would have sounded if her lungs were full of gray water and sediment and rot.

“Is that you, Mitch Barron? You get out of my house or I’ll come down and you won’t like that, Mr. Union Man, you won’t like that at all.”

“Come down,” Mitch told her, his voice full of steel.

There was a slurping sound that he knew was her drawing in a breath. “Here I come.”

There was a squishing sound of her walking down the hallway accompanied by that clotted breathing and then she was coming. They thought she would amble down the stairs like one of the dead, but she did not amble. She drifted. Wearing an old ratty dressing gown, she floated slowly down the stairs like some ghoulish hot air balloon. She was white and swollen and mottled, lots of bumps and humps on her face where none had been before. She floated on down with arms out to either side like she was crucified, her head slumped to one shoulder like her neck was broken. There was black goo all over her mouth. A great oily quantity of it was washed down the front of her gown, globby and sticky looking like she’d thrown it all up.

Tommy and Mitch had their rifles on her, but she didn’t seem to care. She floated near the top, just hovering there like some great predatory insect, making a low hissing sound in her throat.

“Don’t you move,” Tommy told her, ready to pull the trigger.

She grinned at him with yellow teeth, making a snarling noise. Her eyes were black and greasy, like fat skimmed over a pot of brine. They shone darkly. So very black and deep they were like windows looking into some fathomless, haunted dead-end of space.

“Come into my house, have you? Trespassing like hobos and bums and hippies crawling with disease! Come to visit old Miriam Blake, eh, Mitch Barron? Well, well, well. Are you happy with what you’ve found?” she said, her voice now high-pitched and wavering like it was coming from a great distance over a weak radio signal. You could almost hear the static crackling under her words. “You’ve brought your friend with you. Tommy Kastle. He would be the one that has deceived you, Mitch. All the while you thought he was your good friend, he was fucking your wife. What a fine state of affairs! Do what’s right, Mitch, turn that gun on him and kill him! Kill him for what he’s done to you! Do you hear me? Kill him!”

Tommy was taken off guard just as he was. He kept shaking his head side to side. “Mitch…Jesus Christ, no, I wouldn’t do that…I’d never do that…”

Mitch felt her getting into his head, spreading filth through his thoughts, gumming up everything in there and he just wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure of anything.

Miriam floated up there, malevolent and dripping with evil. As she spoke more of that black juice ran from her mouth. Her robe was open now showing not just the gray marble of her flesh and her drooping, blue-veined breasts, but something much worse. Worms. Hundreds of red worms were coming out of her belly and chest, wiggling in the air from their holes, making her look like some kind of repulsive sea anemone bursting with red tentacles.

“Kill him, Mitch! Do you hear me, you little gutless shit! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! KILL THE MOTHERFUCKER! KILL HIM THAT HAS BEEN

FUCKING YOUR WIFE! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER!”

And for one insane moment there, Mitch almost did. God help him, but he almost put the gun on his best friend and murdered him. A man he would never have raised a hand against in a sane moment. But he knew better. For light broke through the darkness that webbed his thoughts. Broke through with a stunning clarity and he saw Miriam for what she was…a thing, a wraith, a corruption that lived on filth and lies and hatred.

“Fuck…you,” he said and pulled the trigger of the Remington.

Twenty-gauge buckshot hit her and a split second later, Tommy fired. Then they were both shooting, buckshot biting into Miriam, knocking her back and forth, smashing her into the walls as she tried to launch herself down at them. She rose and descended like a diving bell, spraying fluid and tissue, screaming in a dozen waterlogged voices. And then, as if the helium had been bled from her, she came down. And came down hard, thudding into the steps. Then she was tumbling down and they could hear her fragile bones snapping and snapping. She landed at their feet in a fleshy, broken heap, bones thrusting out from her, worms coming out her throat and scalp like the snakes of Medusa.

They jumped back.

“Dead,” Tommy said, like he didn’t believe it.

She lay there a moment, bleeding that black goo and slithering with worms. Then her head craned up at them and she was grinning, more worms in her mouth. Black juice ran from her lips, looking like dirty transmission fluid. “Think you’ve won a great battle, do you? Think you effing sonsofbitches have put old Miriam Blake down and there’ll she’ll stay! Wrong! You’ve not won nor stilled me! You can stop me, but you won’t stop the other! The other that has come through to eat the guts out of this fucking city bite by bite!”

They kept backing away and Miriam started coming after them.

It was revolting to see. She was broken-up, shattered, infested by those looping red worms, but she was coming. Maybe her spine had broken because she could not stand. Instead, she wriggled, she crept. Like a slug she came forward with a lurching motion, raising up her ass like an angleworm and lowering it, pushing herself forward, making moist popping sounds. Her jaws opened and closed like they wanted to bite something. She left a slimy, bloody trail in her wake.

They both opened up on her again until what was left was ripped and torn and perforated, her neck broken and head twisted off to the side.

“Salt her,” Mitch said.

Tommy took out the bag and threw handful after handful at her.

It worked right away. Miriam thumped on the floor, screaming and screaming. Steam and moisture boiled out of her. She vomited a gout of that black blood onto the stairs. Her flesh yellowed, threaded out with fingers of dry rot, went brown and flaking. Her eyes filmed over and sank into her skull. She hissed and steamed and shuddered and then went still. All those worms twisting and writhing, trying to get free, then blackening and sinking into the desiccated, smoking mass that looked like a winter-dead tree.

That was it.

Mitch took Tommy by the arm and they staggered out of the door together into the rain. They both went down on their knees in the wet grass, water puddling around them.

After a time, Tommy found his voice. “They ain’t just zombies, Mitch. I been thinking on this awhile. They got power or something. They get in your head and hypnotize you or something. Like they know what scares you.”

“You saying she wasn’t floating down the stairs in there?”

Tommy shook his head. “She was. Oh, shit yes, she sure was.” He swallowed. “But in general, I mean. They can play head games with you, you know? Get in your mind and make you feel things and think things that aren’t true.”

Mitch looked at him. “I didn’t believe it, Tommy. I knew she was just lying the way those things do. I knew you and Lily would never…well, you know. Get together.”

“No way.” Tommy breathed in and out real slow. “She was in your head, though, wasn’t she? Miriam? For a minute there you almost believed her. I saw it in your eyes. They were just mad, crazy.”

“Yeah. She got in my head. But she wasn’t strong enough to make me believe crap like that. I know…knew my wife. And I know you, pal. You’re a complete asshole, but you’re loyal and trustworthy.”

“Hey, thanks, Mitch. That was real nice. It touches me, you know?”

Mitch smiled thinly. “Let’s go out to that base and see what the hell this is all about.”

12

As they approached Fort Providence, Mitch watched the rain falling, the roads flooding, and he couldn’t seem to remember what it was like to be dry or warm. How long had this been going on and how much longer could it possibly last? This was life in the Asian monsoon season and it would drive people mad. He was sure of it. You couldn’t sit there day after day and watch the water rising and feel it against your face and down your back without your mind coming unhinged.

Something had to give.

It just had to. Mitch was not honestly sure how he was feeling now. Too many emotions, too much guilt and horror and frustration over all this. Lily was gone and he knew it beyond a doubt. Something else was out there, maybe, living in her skin. But the Lily he’d known was dead. The pain he was feeling over that was immense, but he’d forced himself to lock it away. He would grieve later.

And Chrissy?

Mitch did not know.

Wanda could only tell him that she was alive. She was too worn out and beaten now to do any more of her “conjuring”, as she called it. She had told Tommy and he that, yes, Chrissy was alive and that, no, Harry Teal was no danger to anyone except maybe himself. Mitch badly wanted to push her about Chrissy, but she was just done in. She had come to life and made a fine farm breakfast for all concerned, but she was old and tired now. Very much feeling her age. About all she could say was that “there are others who don’t like me nosing into their business, others whose minds are very strong and very terrible.”

Which didn’t tell him much.

He’d had the feeling that going into that mannequin factory was important. But, looking back, he couldn’t see the importance of any of it. For what had come of it? They’d found Harry Teal and that had been about it. Was that what he’d been feeling? The need to find Harry that might somehow bring him to Chrissy? Christ, it seemed absurd…

Deke Ericksen was also at Wanda’s now, had come there during the night. He’d been looking high and low for Chrissy. And like Mitch himself, nothing would dissuade him that she was alive and that they would find her.

Tommy kept driving.

They were well out of Witcham now, staying off the main highway and taking the back roads towards the Army base. He seemed refreshed after his sleep. They’d all closed their eyes at dawn and had not woken until nearly 12:30 in the afternoon. Not good, in Mitch’s eyes. They’d needed the sleep, but he’d hated to waste the daylight…or what there was of it.

Tommy knew the Black River Valley about as well as a man could. Having hunted and fished the valley all his life, he knew just about every county bypass and gravel road there was. He took them on a very circuitous route, trying to stay to the high roads because all the low-lying areas were simple impassable. Mitch was glad he was driving, because it all seemed like a monotonous run of trees and fields and farmhouses to him. Not roads running through them, but rivers and creeks and streams interconnecting and forming great mires and pools. Water, water, everywhere.

Harry was smoking a cigarette, watching the windshield wipers arc back and forth. “So you boys think you’ll find answers at that base.”

“Yes,” Mitch told him. “In fact, we’re sure of it.”

Harry nodded, looked thoughtful as he pulled off his coffin nail. “Place is high security, least that’s what they said at Slayhoke.”

“It is,” Mitch said.

“And you think you can just walk right in there?”

“We’re gonna try.”

Harry just sat there, smoking. His hair was dark and bristly, a mustache of the same color reaching down to his jawline. But neither of which were as dark as his eyes at that moment. “We been hearing stories about the base. Funny sorts of stories.”

Mitch looked at him.

“Sure, crazy shit. But after you told me that business about the yellow rains and all that, figure you might want to hear this…even though it’s probably bullshit.”

“Tell us,” Tommy said, the truck splashing through a dip. “We’re like toadstools: we thrive on bullshit.”

Harry shook his head. “The cons and some of the guards, they been saying how the Army is shipping back corpses from Iraq. Doing things with ‘em. Nobody knows what exactly. Just experiments or something. Crazy, eh?”

“Yeah,” Mitch said, his throat very dry suddenly. “Crazy.”

13

The road leading to Fort Providence Military Reservation, as it was known, was long and winding and set with lots of signs that did their best to warn you away from what it was. Things like: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and NO UNATHORIZED VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT. There were no less than three checkpoints with barriers to keep you out. But, interestingly enough, all those barriers were wide open and all those checkpoints unmanned. There was a good two feet of water, if not more, flooding the road, but Mitch was thinking that it would have taken a lot more than deep water to get those guards out of their shacks. Something had happened here. Something bad. Something possibly catastrophic and ugly. Maybe he did not know that to be fact, but he felt it in his guts and that was enough.

This is insane, he thought, us driving right into a high security joint like this. A week ago, two weeks ago, they’d have forced us off the road and put us in irons. But today we’re driving right in.

After they passed the third checkpoint, the road veered sharply to the left and the heavily wooded countryside suddenly opened up. There were red STOP signs and more guard shacks. Mitch was just betting there were tire traps on the road, metal spikes that would spring up with the touch of a button to snare an unwanted vehicle. Of course, you couldn’t tell under all the water. Tommy kept the truck moving very slowly, expecting just about anything.

“I don’t want to burst your bubble,” Harry said, “but this is a felony, you know. I knew a guy who broke into a Navy supply depot in Chicago. He didn’t even get a chance to steal anything. And now he’s doing fifteen years in Leavenworth. Just thought I’d mention that.”

“You know lots of good people,” Tommy said. “I suppose we could turn around, call it quits right now. What do you think, Mitch?”

“Drive.”

Tommy did.

Mitch knew he was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? Maybe Mitch himself was prone to some funny feelings from time to time, but you didn’t need to be psychic to feel the vibes rolling off this place. The atmosphere was blighted and grim and forbidding. Back in Witcham it was bad, of course. Like an open grave or casket filled with seething, spoiled meat. That sense lessened the farther you got away from the city limits. But here, it was different. There was not just a feeling of death and degeneration, but something worse. Something violated and spiritually depraved scratching around inside your skull. You could almost smell the misery and horror and utter madness of this place.

Mitch put a cigarette between his lips and his fingers were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it.

A sign came into view. It was white with black lettering. FORT PROVIDENCE MILITARY RESERVATION, it said, and beneath that, UNITED STATES ARMY MEDICAL COMMAND. And, beneath that, ABSOLUTELY NO

ADMITTANCE! USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED!

“Shit,” Tommy said.

Shit, was right.

Mitch had the feeling had this been any ordinary day they would have been gunned down, bagged, and shipped out. And there was something very unpleasant about broaching a place where your government hid all its dirty secrets. Yeah, maybe your tax dollars funded places like this, but that didn’t mean Uncle Sam wouldn’t slice your nose off for sticking it where it did not belong.

One last sign warned them: THIS IS A HIGH SECURITY FEDERAL INSTALLATION. Beneath that it said, HAVE ID BADGE READY. YOU ARE UNDER

VIDEO SURVELLAINCE. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE.

Fort Providence was right ahead of them now. The road topped a hill and in the distance, through the curtain of rain, you could see the base itself?some old brick buildings surrounded by metal Quonset huts and garages, everything connected by enclosed walkways. Lots of high antennas and radar dishes. A power station. Parking lots, a few far-flung hangars and runways, an air traffic control tower. And then atop a low series of hills that looked artificial, a sparkling white compound with wings fanning out from it. This is what caught the eye. Because the far left quadrant was utterly destroyed. It looked like God had gotten bored and picked it up, slammed it back down in a tumble of matchsticks and then set it afire. Just blackened ruins now.

“Must have been one hell of a fuel tank,” Tommy said.

“That’s what they were saying, eh?” Harry said to them. “That a fuel tank went up or something?”

“That’s what they said.”

“A lot of damage. Maybe…maybe it was blown on purpose.”

They came to the main gates and they were wide open. The base was surrounded by not one, but three high chainlink fences which were electrified, if the signs could be believed and Mitch figured they could. They were topped by barbwire, cameras and motion detectors set out everywhere. You would have had a hell of a time sneaking in here unannounced.

“Nobody around,” Harry said.

And that was true. Lots of cars with U.S. government plates, trucks and half-tons, a few Hummers…but no people. The place was like a cemetery, a ghost town. Whatever had taken this place, it had left nothing living behind. Unless there were people hiding in those buildings…but Mitch doubted it. Maybe the chain of command had broken down, but the sort of guys who guarded a place like this would have been extremely vigilant, extremely well-trained, and extremely ambitious when it came to dealing with intruders. No, there was no one left.

“You smell that?” Tommy said.

There was a sharp, acrid odor blowing in through his cracked window. A chemical smell.

“That yellow rain smelled like that,” Mitch said.

“Let’s just speculate here a minute,” Tommy said. “They’re working on some crazy shit here. Something goes wrong and there’s an explosion. That explosion throws God knows what up into the air and it comes down in the rain. Something that makes the dead wake up and something else that comes down as that yellow rain. You following me here?”

“Yeah,” Mitch said.

“Okay, we just got hit by a few patches of that yellow rain in Witcham…but what about here at ground zero?”

“It might have been real bad,” Harry said.

The rain started really pouring down again in gray sheets and they couldn’t see much. Mitch thought he saw a few figures moving off into the gloom, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of a lot of things. Maybe that rain was a good thing, maybe it helped to cover up things you just didn’t want to be looking at. Maybe. It kept coming down and the windshield wipers just couldn’t keep up with it. Tommy slowed the truck, visibility down to maybe fifteen or twenty feet at best.

They started seeing bodies floating in the water.

Mostly soldiers, but some civilians as well. They were all bloated up and reduced to a mush like they’d been full of oatmeal. It was like that…their bodies had been reduced to a slushy, semi-liquid slop. Globs and streamers of the stuff floated around in the water, the driving rain breaking them apart into a slimy goo. They passed a Hummer and a soldier was hanging out the door. He looked almost melted, his flesh hanging off the skeleton beneath like plastic that had superheated, then cooled. They saw another vehicle with two men in it melted together. Another soldier was stuck to the side of a truck…adhered to it by his flesh which had gone gummy and gluey.

“They got caught in the rain,” Tommy said.

He pulled the truck to a stop suddenly, everyone jerking forward in their seats. Something ran right out in front of the truck and quick. It looked like a naked woman swollen to obscene proportions and bleached white. One that had been carrying another in her arms. Except that hadn’t been the case at all…that other woman had been growing from her chest.

“Another freak,” Harry said. “Like at that mannequin place.”

Tommy got the truck rolling again and there was one terrifying moment in which the tires just spun. But they caught and onward went the truck. They were making for the white building on the hill. That was where they needed to go and nobody had to tell Tommy that.

They started climbing the hill and another mutant dragged itself across the road. It was half-crawling and half-swimming. It was either a dog that looked like a rat or a rat as big as a dog with something like trailing, fleshy ropes behind it.

“Boy, my nerves are going to hell,” Tommy admitted. “This is worse than the dummy factory, this is just plain?”

Something hit the roof of the truck.

Something big.

Tommy let out a little gasp and Mitch and Harry just tensed right up. Whatever was up there, it was heavy, the roof popping with metallic sounds as it moved around like it was trying to get comfortable. Tommy had slowed, but now he sped up a bit, not really knowing what else he could do. It was too dangerous with all the vehicles and what not around to try any fancy TV sort of maneuvering.

“Just keep us moving,” Mitch said, his voice dry and cracked like he’d been chewing on salted peanuts and needed something to wet his whistle. He brought up his Remington auto-loader, but mainly to have a weapon in his hands. He wasn’t about to play hero and shoot through the roof; he could just about imagine all those pellets bouncing off the roof and tearing into them.

More popping sounds and then something else that rose above the constant murmur of the falling rain: a squealing, almost mewling sort of sound that made everyone tense, brought out the gooseflesh at the backs of their necks. It was quiet up there after that and they had no true way of knowing whether their guest was still present or had gone elsewhere. Which put them in an awkward position, for sooner or later they would have to get out and the idea of that was frightening to say the least. Mitch just hoped it was gone, because although it sounded like something from a bad movie, he was firmly of the school that there were certain things sane eyes should not see.

And especially at this place.

About that time, Tommy realized his window was open a crack. He closed it real quick, his Adam’s Apple bobbing up and down as he tried to swallow something down. All three men were sweating now. It was growing moist and warm in the truck cab. Tommy thumbed the AC button and it cooled off right away, but that hardly solved their problem.

They were starting up the hill to Doc Frankenstein’s place, as Mitch began to think of it. Problem with the old doc was that he had gotten senile and forgotten to latch the cages of his pets. Now they were wandering everywhere.

Their guest was still present.

A thudding sound from overhead proved that much. It came again and again and the roof dented in slightly.

“Holy shit,” Harry said.

And then it showed itself…or part of itself. Something long and serpentine came sliding down the driver’s side window. It looked almost like a tentacle, but there were no suckers or anything on it. It was perfectly smooth and mottled gray and pink like it was shedding its skin. Tommy pulled away from the window. It coiled at the glass, about as big around as an arm, smearing the rain and leaving bits of itself stuck to the glass. Then it retreated and several more limbs spilled over the outside of the window. Some of them were jointed like the legs of a cricket and at least one of them looked something like a human arm but with no hand at the end.

There was another thudding and their guest took off.

Mitch caught a quick glimpse of it…something huge and bulbous with a hundred trailing appendages. It veered off into the rain, but he could not say it flew off, just maybe drifted away like it was filled with helium.

“I’m for getting the hell out of here,” Tommy said.

Harry nodded. “I second that. Take me back to Slayhoke. It’s too scary out here.”

Mitch found himself laughing at that. It had to be the most absurd thing he’d ever heard anyone say and being Tommy Kastle’s friend all these years, he’d heard some pretty damn absurd things.

Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine with the third nipple?”

Mitch laughed nervously.

“It’s true,” he said. “My cousin Kathy. Kathy Dolin. When I was ten I spent the summer with my cousins in Streator, Illinois. Goddamn hot, I remember that. One night, my cousin Joe said, you wanna see something and I said, sure. Kathy was taking a bath. There was a coat closet on the other side of the tub and you could see through a crack in the caulking, see somebody in the tub. I saw that nipple, swear to God. Kathy had some pretty big pillows on her, but right in-between them, there was another nipple, looked like maybe it hadn’t really took.”

Harry was giggling.

Mitch said, “And what’s the point of that story, Tommy?”

“Pretty obvious, ain’t it?” he said. “There are certain things man was not meant to look upon. Like what’s inside that building ahead.”

He drove them up to the fence, but the gate was locked.

“I guess we walk from here,” he said.

They got out into the water, that building looming up above them. They took their guns, a couple flashlights, and two Coleman lanterns they had taken from Mitch’s garage. The main gate was locked, but they slipped in through a smaller gate that wasn’t. They huffed it up the drive and to the main entrance. There was a little guard shack out front. A soldier with an MP armband was sitting in there, slouched in his chair. His flesh had oozed off him like hot cheese, was stuck to the floor and walls in a webby mess.

At the door, they paused.

“Go ahead, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is your party.”

14

Of course, the front door was locked.

They’d gotten through too many entrances already, so there was bound to be one that wouldn’t let them in. This was it. All of Fort Providence was high security, but this place, this building, was especially so. Just a steel-faced door with a small slit of thick one-way glass at the top. There was a slot where you could insert your ID card if you happened to have one, but other than that, you weren’t getting in. And there was not a single window that they could see.

“What now?” Tommy said.

“We just go around the side,” Harry explained. “Where the fire was. Should be open there.”

It was a plan.

At least they were out of the water now, that was something. Though it wasn’t like they were going to dry out any time soon with the rain pelting them. Mitch leading, they moved through the wet grass, the rain running down their faces. Patches of groundfog blew around them. But other than the rain, there was no sound to be heard. Just that same dead silence that was eerie and unearthly. They could tell themselves that they were alone, but they knew better than that. Maybe there weren’t any people around as such, but there were other things. Awful things that they just did not want to meet up with.

The building was cut from brick, whitewashed and windowless, boxy in shape. There were cameras set out, listening devices, motion detectors…not that any of them were much good any longer being that there was no one to monitor them. Generally, there was a smell of dankness and rot, but now and again they smelled that acrid odor of the yellow rain. Something that was very frightening, because if it came down suddenly, they were done for. There was no cover to be had anywhere.

“Pick it up,” Mitch told them.

But it was not easy. Their clothes were so heavy and wet they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. They trudged along behind Mitch until the scene of that burned wreckage came into view. Whatever had exploded, it had destroyed not only that jutting wing, but a good section of the main building. What they were seeing were crisscrossed blackened beams, rubble, and twisted metal scattered in some great heap. They found a few bodies in there cremated right down to the skeletons. Lots of mangled conduits and pipes, the shattered remains of what might have been machinery.

“Look at that,” Harry said.

Above, on the roof, there were a dozen crows sitting up there, stretching their wings and clacking their beaks. In the rain, you couldn’t see much of them. They were just perched up there like they were looking for something to descend upon.

“Something alive, anyway,” Tommy said.

But Mitch didn’t think so. “Look over there.”

Another body just around the side of some metal drum, boiled to slop like the others. There were three of those crows on it, pulling out strands of pulpy meat with their beaks. That was bad enough, but as they looked closer they could see that those birds were not right. Their hides were threadbare and you could see the bones through them. One of them had very little flesh on its head and you could plainly see the skull beneath, one eye socket with a black eyeball, the other empty. They flapped their wings and kept pecking and picking.

“Lead on,” Tommy said. “I’ve had enough.”

Mitch ducked under a burnt arch of wood, climbed over a pile of bricks and slid down the other side, leapfrogging iron beams and a spiderwebbing of pipes and melted hoses. And as he did so he was thinking that whatever had gone up here, whatever had exploded, it had let loose an incredible amount of energy and an incredible amount of heat. He was seeing that wrecked machinery and a lot of the metal was actually fused, lots of glass melted in to unrecognizable shapes. There were times as they picked through those ruins that he thought the whole thing would come down on top of them. But finally they made it, climbing over a collapsed wall and sliding beneath jagged sheets of cracked plasterboard.

And then they were in.

Great sheets of plastic were hung from ceiling to floor to keep the wind and rain out of the rest of the complex. There were a couple more bodies here, soldiers apparently, reduced to a sort of mush that had absolutely nothing to do with the fire. Their skeletons looked like they were trying to climb out of the doughy paste their flesh had been reduced to. Carpets of moss were growing out of their mouths.

“What the hell did this?” Harry asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell which was not so much organic decay but something hot and moist like plaster rot, the stink of old houses threaded with wood blight. “That rain? It turned their skins to goddamn gruel? Looks like fucking Malt-O-Meal.”

“Ground zero,” was all Mitch could say about it, a blanket explanation that explained absolutely nothing.

“Here’s another one,” Tommy said.

This one might have been a woman judging from the long brown hair hanging from its scalp. And although her hair was only mildly singed, her flesh had gone liquid and mushy like the others. She was like some morbid wax effigy that had been lit up and then put out just as it began to melt, her flesh sinking into the skeleton below, her fleshless jaws locked in a scream. One hand was reaching out to them, a laminated plastic ID card in it that looked like a credit card.

“C’mon,” Mitch said.

They pushed aside the plastic sheeting and found themselves in a long corridor studded with offices, the walls black from the heat and smoke damage. The base had its own power supply and it was still running. A few lights were on overhead, but most were not. It was gloomy in there, their footsteps echoing out. At the end, they passed through a door and came into some sort of lobby. There were a bank of elevators, but you needed an ID card to operate them. But there was a directory on the wall. And although the complex was only single story, there had to be four or five levels below ground. The lowest, no doubt, being the most secure and contained.

Tommy read from the directory. “Let’s see…do we want biochemistry or embryology? That’s downstairs. Then we got developmental biology and cell biology, bioengineering and nanoscience…what are we looking for?”

“Nanoscience?” Harry said. “I saw that shit on the Discovery Channel. They let little mechanical bugs loose in you to repair things, repair your cells.”

“I’m betting what these eggheads have been doing here won’t make the Discovery Channel…except maybe on Halloween night,” Tommy said.

They found the stairs leading below, but the doors were locked and again you needed an ID card to get down there. The doors were three-inch steel and there was no way in hell a four-ten or twenty-gauge shotgun would do more than scratch them.

“What now?” Tommy said.

Harry had that one covered, though. “That woman out there…she had an ID card in her hand.”

“You wanna get it?” Mitch asked him. “I don’t think I want to touch her.”

“Shit, I worked the prison mortuary, that stuff don’t shake me.”

“Use a rag or something to grab it, Harry,” Mitch warned him. “She might be contaminated with something.”

“Got ya.”

Harry raced off. Despite his soaking wet clothes, he moved off very fast. But unlike Tommy and Mitch, here was a guy who worked the weights every day and did a hundred-and-fifty pushups before breakfast. He was in peak condition. Fighting condition, as you had to be to survive in his world.

Tommy and Mitch lit cigarettes, avoiding looking at each other.

“If I was Harry,” Tommy said, “I’d run and keep running. Steal the truck and get the hell out of here. That’s what I’d do.”

“He won’t.”

“No…I don’t think he will.” Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “What about Chrissy, Mitch? I mean, yeah, I want some answers, but what about the kid? This isn’t helping us find the kid.”

Mitch didn’t say anything to that.

What was there to say? Should he try and make Tommy realize that this was important in ways he couldn’t adequately put into words? That like Wanda Sepperly had told him this was very necessary, them coming here? She had said it was all circular. That all roads would connect in the end. That to get to Chrissy he would have to follow roads that seemed to lead nowhere, but they would link him to her in the end. There was no point trying to explain things he didn’t even understand himself. He trusted in what Wanda said. He had to; he simply didn’t have any other choice.

None of it made sense and yet, in his guts, it all did. Somehow.

Just as Harry Teal was part of it, so was this.

“We’ll find my girl, Tommy. I know we will.”

Tommy exhaled smoke. “You know this is going to be bad, don’t you? What we see below?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You can feel it like I can?”

“Yes.”

And he could. It was thick in his mouth, that taste of fear, like sucking on copper pennies…metallic and sharp and unpleasant. There was a smell here that had little to do with putrescence or death, this was bigger than that, older than that. The smell of blackness and pain, insanity and spiritual evil.

Harry came back with the card which looked shiny and new. “I wiped it off with a rag,” he said. There was a barcode on the back. He inserted it into the slot and the door clicked. “There we go.”

Mitch led the way through and down the iron steps to the next lower level. Again, Harry had to insert his card. The door opened and they passed into a corridor that was completely dark. They lit the lanterns right away, hoping they’d see some light switches ahead. The air was decidedly foul and corrupt, moist and hard to breathe. Something had gotten out of control here and this was its smell.

Holding the lanterns, they moved down the corridor. There were no doors on either wall, just a set of heavy steel doors at the end. Again, the ID card opened them and out came a nauseating, hot wave of decomposition that made them turn away, swallow their guts back down.

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “That stink.”

They moved in there, each wondering what sort of awful vapors they might be breathing, but none of them wanted to turn back. There was discovery ahead, the sort of things no man…or precious few…had ever been allowed to see. The room they were in was large with white walls, three doors set into it. They used the card again and went off through the one on the right that said PATHOLOGY over the doorway. The room was circular and tiled in green, set out with trays of surgical instruments, stainless steel slabs with drains set into them, cabinets of chemicals. Scales and specimen jars.

“Looks like an autopsy room,” Tommy said.

There were no bodies or anything in there, but lots of tell-tale stains on the floor and on those slabs. The air smelled of alcohol and preservatives. You could just image the sort of nasty things that went on there, but there was nothing much to see. They went through a set of double doors at the back like the kind that lead into restaurant kitchens. This room was even bigger. Set along one wall were the mouths of brick ovens and along the other were huge circular iron doors set into steel faces that gleamed. The smell in there was old, but unsettling. The stink of burned things and ashes.

“This is a crematorium,” Tommy said. “I don’t know about those brick ovens, but those steel hatches are for sliding bodies into…to cremate them.”

Nobody doubted what he said.

They moved around with their lanterns held aloft, shadows jumping around them. There was a coating of fine gray ash on the floor. They didn’t open the circular iron doors, but inside those brick ovens there were great heaps of cinders and blackened remains. You got the feeling that somebody had been burning a lot of something and very quickly, hadn’t cared much about the mess they were making. Which made Mitch think of those concentration camps in Europe, how the Nazis has been incinerating bodies as fast as they could before the Allies moved in. The air was dusty and gritty, left a dry film on your tongue.

“Can we get out of here?” Tommy said.

Mitch led them through another door and this room was narrow with shelving running from floor to ceiling along both walls. There were leaden, rubberized coffins heaped all over the place. But the shelves themselves were crowded with zippered body bags. Harry went right over to a few of them, took hold of the straps.

“There’s remains in these,” he announced.

Many were full and many were not. But nobody had to tell them that these were the remains of soldiers shipped back from Iraq and other terrible places where American sons and daughters were dropping like flies. This is what the government was doing with them. Not all of them, of course. Many were shipped to their families, but many were not. They ended up here to be used as raw materials for whatever line of research the Army Medical Command was pursuing. The nature of which must have been shocking beyond belief.

“This is sick,” Tommy said. “I mean, this is really fucking sick. You die for your country and this is the respect they show you in the end.”

“Are you surprised?” Harry said. “Are you really surprised?”

But he wasn’t, none of them were. You tried to be a good American, you tried even to be patriotic at times. You hung your flag out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. You tried not to be too hard on your leaders even though you knew, down deep, that they were dirty and manipulative, spinmasters and bureaucrats and out-and-out liars. But you tried to trust them, you tried to believe in them, you tried to tell yourself that there were not dirty backroom politics going on. You did your best to support wars that were unnecessary and bloody and costly, had no true purpose that you could see. And this is what it got you. This is how the puppetmasters pulled your strings and wasted your sons and daughters, pissed on the flag and the constitution they were supposed to uphold. And when the mask was stripped away at midnight, regardless of party affiliations, what you saw was ugly and brutal and squirming. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they said.

Mitch led them out of there.

Yes, they were still frightened and disturbed, but it was more than that now. Those emotions had been displaced by anger and slow simmering rage. They went back out the pathology door and chose another. This led to another steel door which announced:

EXTREME DANGER?CONTAINMENT AREA.

“Well, let’s see what those sweethearts were up to in here,” Mitch said.

Harry used the card and the door popped open. They passed through a series of doors, each warning them off and they found themselves in a wide corridor. To one side there were glass doors running from floor to ceiling. A very dark, smoky glass you could not see through. They put the lanterns right up to them, but the light would not penetrate very far. But there were things in there, forms, figures, something that they just could not see and that was probably a good thing. They turned to the other wall which was set with black iron doors with observation windows set into them.

“Look like solitary confinement cells,” Harry said.

“They are,” Mitch said. “This is…this some kind of fucking zoo.”

Holding the lanterns up to one of the observation windows, they saw a naked man in there. A dead man with that same pulpy, corpse-white flesh that the dead of Witcham possessed. Like them, he was wormy and rotting, bloated-up. He seemed not to notice them, was too busy chewing the meat off his own forearm. In the next cell they weren’t sure what they were looking at…something like a mass of gray-white slime that was trying to pretend it was a man, ropes of it webbing it to the walls and ceiling. It was the same in nearly all the cells…inhuman things, unformed things, unfinished things, things that maybe had started as carrion and kept growing, maybe not entire bodies, but parts thereof that were growing and multiplying like tissue in Petri dishes, an organic miasma of limbs and heads and staring eyes. They saw something like a jellyfish with a hundred coiling limbs, except the upper half of it was clearly a woman with a face that was fetal and indistinct. In another cell, it looked like there were two women sitting side by side, only they were not separate, but grown together like Siamese twins, rows of pendulous teats growing from chest to crotch. They found a cell with three or four corpse-like things in there, white and blubbery and slimy, that seemed to be dividing from a single mass.

These were the things they saw.

Nameless experiments gone terribly wrong.

Most cells had nothing even recognizably human in them…just scraps and cast-offs that were assimilating one another, mutating into things you could not even guess at. Evolution had started in the grave in this place and where it would lead, you just didn’t want to know.

“Enough,” Mitch finally said.

They got out of there, found another door in that maze of rooms that said MOLECULAR GENETICS/BIOENGINEERING above it. They all tensed at what that might be about. But they knew it was going to be bad, that if there was a nursery where these horrors were born, it would be in here.

They stepped through the door and found that there were a few lights on. Even so, the place was huge and shadowy. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high and the room itself was as big as the display floor of a car dealership, hundreds of feet square. Everywhere, there was machinery and tables crowded with laboratory equipment and microscopes and glass jars of specimens. But not only that but urns of human remains, casks of dried insects, stuffed animals, mummified limbs. The dusty remains of what looked to be very ancient cadavers crumbling on slabs. Huge glass vessels held pale limbs and eyes and internal organs floating in cloudy baths of serum…and many of them were moving, alive even though they couldn’t possibly be. There were entire corpses in huge glass tubes filled with fluids that reacted when Mitch and the others got near them, scratching at their prisons, their mouths opening and closing like they were trying to speak. Harry found the living head of a woman in a cask of pink liquid and Tommy found a vat of gray tissue that was undulating.

“What the fuck is this place?” Mitch finally said, stumbling madly down aisles of living specimens and chemical glassware.

There was no way he could know, no way any of them could know. Not really. They could not know nor guess that what they were seeing was an unthinkable combination of a witch’s workshop and a molecular bio lab, an alchemist’s laboratory and cellular biology research station. It was all these things. The intersection of cutting edge medical science and Medieval sorcery. This was a dissection room and a tissue lab, a cell physiology laboratory and a cabbalist’s shed. The meeting of the very old and the very new.

Here were dried snakes hanging from overhead and sectioned rats, presses and Athenors, cauldrons of decomposing animal matter and alchemist’s Pelicans with spidery tubes used for spirit production. Chemical furnaces and ovens, flasks and crucibles, alembics and retorts. All the workings of a Medieval alchemy lab?three-legged cauldrons and distillation apparatuses, bowls and clay jars, Liebig Condensers and receiver flasks, exotic glassware such as ampullas, crane’s bills, cucurbitas. Cementation boxes and fermentation chambers, scorifiers and aludels, bone-ash cupels and digestion vessels. Just a crowded esoteric menagerie of long-stemmed flasks and coiling spouts, ceramic pots and copper bowls, dried animals and bones and crematory ash and great charts of indecipherable figures. All of this crowded amongst tables of modern laboratory equipment, electron microscopes and centrifuges, dissection tables and chromatographs. Jars of petrified spiders were sandwiched in-between laptops and protein purification work stations. Embalmed human hands were flanked by pH meters, thermo baths, PCR machines, incubators and digital microscopes. Medieval sublimation alembics were attached to retorts and specimen jars, while to all sides were bones and feathers and staring human skulls. In the same room you could call up the spirits of the dead, you could do tissue culturing, DNA extraction, gene transfers, and protein purification.

“This is a goddamn madhouse,” Tommy said, bumping into a set of capillary DNA sequencers as he tried to avoid tripping over the snaking maze of a 13^th century distillation apparatus with condensers and tubing, flasks and cast iron pots, digesters for putrefaction studies. “A fucking madhouse.”

“You’re right,” a voice said out of the shadows. “That’s exactly what this is.”

Guns went up and a tall, thin man with silvery hair stepped out. He wasn’t the mad scientist they were expecting with a dirty lab coat and frizzy gray hair, but a neat and trim man in an expensive suit who looked more like a stockbroker than anything else.

“Now,” he said. “Are you here to seek vengeance for what has happened or do you want answers?”

The way they were feeling, vengeance sounded pretty good. But they weren’t after that and this guy looked positively harmless, sad really. He looked just worn and empty like maybe you could beat him to death with a hammer and he wouldn’t have even attempted to defend himself. He was offering them a look in his dark chest of secrets and they could not refuse.

“It doesn’t matter to me who you are,” he said to them. “I’m going to tell you what happened here. How this came about. Because today or tomorrow the Army will come in here and sterilize this entire place. No one and nothing will be left. The wheels are already turning.”

“And who are you?” Tommy put to him.

“I was, until five years ago, a professor of cellular biology at Stanford. My name is Robert Osborne, if that interests you. I came here five years ago after being contacted by the Army Medical Research Command on authorization of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. They wanted to include me in an ongoing research program known as the ReGenesis Project.”

“And what was that about?” Tommy said. “Making zombies?”

If such a man as Osbourne could smile, could show some human warmth, he did it then. But it passed quickly enough. “Hardly. The aim of the project was an investigation into limb and tissue regeneration.”

Osbourne said that the U.S. military had been interested in this for years, the possible application of biological regeneration technology to battlefield injuries. Hence, soldiers with disfiguring injuries and the loss of limbs could be potentially made whole again.

“And how did you go about this…this project?” Mitch asked him.

“By studying Medieval alchemy and certain remains of a Seventeenth-century warlock named Alardus Weerden…”

15

The research, Osbourne explained, was initially begun back in the 1970’s from studies in the acceleration of the healing of battlefield wounds and burns. And from that, it was extrapolated that possibly entire limbs could be regrown. Flatworms, fish, and certain amphibians can regenerate internal organs, tissues, and limbs to a certain extent, but humans can only regrow selective tissues and organs…the liver, the blood, the outermost layer of skin.

“It’s really genetics,” Osbourne went on, “when you come down to it. All the information to regenerate any tissues or limbs is encoded in the genes if we could only activate it.”

He said the initial research was done on salamanders, which can regenerate limbs. The key was to unlock how they did it and apply this to higher vertebrates, namely, man. The theory was that these salamanders, when they experienced significant tissue loss or damage or the amputation of a limb, had a sort of signal response. In that, when the tissues were damaged, cells at the site released signals which activated regeneration on a cellular level. This response was much like that in a human embryo when genetic encoding allows it to grow an arm or a leg for the first time. The trick was to reestablish this marvelous mechanism.

They were all sitting in Osbourne’s office by this time, out of that blasphemous workshop of creation that made everyone a little uneasy.

“Project ReGenesis was aimed at understanding the molecular basis for regeneration,” he told them. “The first breakthrough was learning that when an amphibian regenerates a limb, there was not only healing at the sight to prevent blood loss, but no scarring. Humans always develop scar tissue at the wound sight. Amphibians heal, but they do not scar. You see, at the site of the missing limb, various specialized cells like skin and bone and nerve tissue immediately lose their identity and become generalized. Like stem cells or T-cells, they no longer know what kind of cells they are. This is called de-differentiation. The result is a mass of unspecialized cells called a blastema which proliferates at an amazing rate to form a limb bud. These cells take on specialized roles as the limb develops.”

That was basically the first breakthrough they had.

The stumbling block was that vertebrates were unable to create a blastema. They simply repair a wound and stop. The process goes no farther. In blood and liver tissue, for example, small numbers of unspecialized cells set aside during embryogenesis are activated. These stem cells can proliferate indefinitely, endlessly, but only for general repairs, not out and out replacement. They lack the proper triggers to activate them, to create a blastema. In the marine worm planaria, for example, if you cut one of these creatures into, say, two-hundred pieces, in days you have two-hundred separate worms. How it does this is with regeneration genes. These genes only exist in blastemas. One of these genes encodes an enzyme that degrades the cellular matrix, a mesh of proteins and other molecules that surrounds cells. This enzyme then triggers regeneration by releasing growth factors to the surrounding cells.

Mitch and Tommy and Harry just sat there, smoking, not sure what any of it was really about. Mitch knew a little about stem cells. Only that they could possibly become any sort of tissue they were exposed to…nerve tissue, heart tissue, whatever. In stem cell research, he understood, there was maybe the cure for diabetes, heart problems, brain damage, spinal cord injuries. The blind might see and the lame might walk and vegetables might live productive lives once again. Just as God had intended. Of course, there were a bunch of religious whackos and right-to-life zealots that were against it because fetal tissue had to be harvested. But as far as Mitch was concerned, using aborted tissue was at least a way in making something bad into something good. It was life giving life.

Vertebrate regeneration, Osbourne said, is accomplished by the formation, growth, patterning, and differentiation of a blastema at the limb stump. Mature tissues adjacent to the wound site lose their extracellular matrix and cells reenter the cell cycle in preparation for stump repair and limb regeneration. At the cellular level, the blastema mimics the original embryonic limb bud that gives rise to the mature limb.

“And we were there, gentlemen!” he said, growing heated now. “We were there! Right at the threshold of a new technology that would have saved millions!”

Tommy, with his usual subtlety, said, “So what’s that got to do with zombies?”

“Don’t be such an idiot,” Osbourne told him. “Regeneration is the most complete repair mechanism there is. It could completely revolutionize medicine as we know it. Coupled with nanotechnology, things like invasive surgery, cutting and probing and agony, would be things of the past. Medieval bullshit.”

“Like what you boys were doing out there?”

“I wasn’t doing that. I was against it. I didn’t have any interest in that nonsense, but I was overridden by the powers that be,” Osbourne said. “All of what you saw out there and all of what you see in Witcham is because of a cellular physiologist from the University of Michigan named Brighten that the Army brought into the project. He caused all this…”

Brighten was a genius, Osbourne admitted, but a dark genius.

He was one of those guys that would have made a great Nazi scientist like Mengele. Ethics meant little to him. He was concerned with pure science and anything that stood between him and enlightenment, the ultimate fruition of his studies, was simply a means to end. Osbourne said he wasn’t exactly a people person and had no compunction about using human guinea pigs…had the law allowed such a thing. Now Brighten was not only brilliant, but damned unconventional. One of his hobbies when he wasn’t dissecting things was alchemy, that great forerunner to modern chemistry out of the Middle Ages. Which Osbourne called a “frightening marriage between physical science and sorcery.” One of alchemy’s chief aims, other than turning base metals to gold, was the artificial creation of life, particularly, human life. And this latter endeavor fascinated Brighten, him being a physiologist.

“Brighten was obsessed with not only true scientific advancement, but with these realms of pseudo-science…or what we thought were pseudo-science.” Osbourne rubbed his eyes. They were puffy and red and it had probably been days and days since he’d closed them for any length of time. “He was well-versed in the works of the great alchemists?Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, Jacob Boehme, Nicholas Flammel, the Comte Saint-Germain?and had read dozens of Medieval alchemical texts in their original Latin. Things known to be coded and practically indecipherable like The Secret Book of Artephius, A Chymicall Treatise of Arnoldus de Nova Villa, the Coelum Philosophorum of Paracelus, The Ripley Scroll, Bacon’s The Mirror of Alchemy. Good God, he knew them all and could quote openly from them, claimed to have discovered the ancient key which unlocked their codes. He would lecture us on Paracelus and his alkahest, the prime element of organic creation. Talk us to death on Edward Kelly and John Dee, Borellus and his essential salts.

“But what brought him into Project ReGenesis was his discovery of the life and works of Alardus Weerden, a Seventeeth Century warlock or witch or what have you that was executed in 1627 in Wurzburg, Germany, during the notorious witch persecutions of Von Ehrenberg.”

“That’s the guy you mentioned,” Mitch said. “You said something about his remains…you telling me you guys stole his body?”

Osbourne shook his head. “No, just a fragment for study. The Army arranged for it to be snatched from a secret grave it had been interred into by some of Weerden’s disciples shortly after his beheading and burning…”

It was insane, but Brighten, by studying contemporary witchcraft texts of the 17^th century, was able to learn where Weerden’s body was buried and to convince the Army brass that the old wizard’s bones held the secrets of regeneration. For Weerden had claimed that he could regenerate himself endlessly if but a scrap of flesh or knob of bone from his corpse was extant. Brighten was in possession of evidence, Osbourne claimed, that proved conclusively, at least to his superiors, that Alardus Weerden had lived a dozen lives, dying violently or by accident each time, and then biologically regenerating himself.

“So you got his bones?” Tommy said.

“Just one. A single metacarpal from his right hand.”

“And what did you find?”

“We found that there was still cellular activity in it and this nearly four-hundred years after his death,” Osbourne explained. “According to Brighten, Weerden had learned the science of regeneration from ancient texts. Though one contemporary source claimed that he had commerce with demons or entities from other worlds or dimensions. Unfortunately, we were not able to discover the process itself. Weerden had been exposed to something or had exposed himself to something, we believed, although there was always the possibility that it was some freak genetic talent. There was no way to know. But the point here is that Weerden’s remains had activity in them. Molecular activity. At least, that finger bone did.”

“Did you…did you regenerate him from it?” Harry asked, because somebody had to.

Osbourne ignored that. “We studied his cells and from them we were able to isolate FRX-3, the radical gene trigger mechanism of his regeneration. We found that if a bit of bone tissue were placed in a nutrient bath much similar to embryonic fluid, the cellular activity went from a near-dormant state to a frenzied binary division and FRX-3 was released and the tissue began to metabolize. That vat of living tissue you saw out there…that was grown from but a section of Weerden’s digit, a sliver really.”

“Didn’t look like it was turning into a man,” Harry pointed out.

“And it won’t,” Osbourne assured him. “That tissue has been selectively cultivated and destroyed and re-cultivated a hundred times. It is, essentially, a massive blastema that gives us a near endless supply of the FRX-3 gene. This gene, by the way, exists naturally at wound sites, but is not active. Anyway, we no longer need it in that we have successfully synthesized this amazing protein artificially. That flesh should die soon in that it is no longer being fed.”

“It looked pretty lively,” Harry said with a disgusted look on his face.

“Yes, and that is more than a little disturbing.” He waved that aside with his hand, as if he preferred not to discuss it. “At any rate, we had isolated FRX-3, and it worked. We tested it for nearly a year on lab animals and then on humans. Volunteers, all. Men that had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, were missing limbs. Anything from fingers to legs. It worked perfectly. It triggered regeneration at the stump sight and replicated an entire arm within ten days.”

“Ten days?” Mitch said.

“Yes, ten days. FRX-3 sent the cells at the stump site into a sort of regenerative hyperdrive. You could nearly see the growth before your eyes. It was science, yes, but to see the results…well, it was little less than magic.”

In the case of a complete arm amputation wound, Osbourne said, the stump was treated with FRX-3 in the form of a topical ointment. The FRX-3 genes immediately began replicating themselves and activating their latent forms which exist naturally. The trigger had begun. Within an hour, an epidermal sheet migrated to cover the wound. Genes common to both wound healing and regeneration were expressed via FRX-3. Cells in the stump tissue immediately lost their specialization, becoming migratory. They developed a blastema and proliferated. At this point, the re-expressed genes showed spatial and temporal patterns that differed from ordinary development. A limb bud developed, then a chimeric limb itself. The genes showed similar expression and function as they did in embryonic tissue. Four days later, the limb was completely regenerated.

Jesus, Mitch thought, it was amazing. This was the most important thing ever discovered…but he knew something was going to be wrong with it all. The fact that dead people were walking around in Witcham proved that.

“So what’s this have to do with zombies?” Tommy asked.

Osbourne flinched at that word again. “The limbs and tissues regenerated perfectly. At least at first…but within days, the tissue became morbid and spongy. You could cut sections away and they would immediately regrow. But the flesh was cold, unbearably cold to its owner. The regenerated tissues immediately began producing toxins which sickened its owner. But worse than that, the new mutated tissue began assimilating the rest of the body. Somewhere during the process, the patients died from infection. But they didn’t stay dead. The mutant tissue assimilated the entire body and the body woke up.

“Sometimes they were simply insane,” Osbourne said. “Sometimes quite lucid. But one thing became quite clear?who they were when they died and who they became after death, were not the same thing. Maybe Weerden’s consciousness never faded. Maybe he controlled the regeneration mentally and that was how he regenerated perfectly and not as some white, rotting thing. And maybe, being conscious, his mind was not filled with something else that should never have lived.”

Osbourne wouldn’t go into detail about that.

Even though he was obviously a very unsuperstitious man, he believed that there were minds out there, evil and malignant minds that had never been born or never were meant to be born, entities occupying some unknown sphere between the physical and the purely spiritual maybe. That they were always looking for bodies, for vessels to inhabit, and they found them in these regenerated/resurrected corpses. He had trouble admitting all this and he never once mentioned that great scientific imponderable, the human soul, but he was essentially saying it without saying it.

None of that surprised Mitch in the least. He had heard what Wanda told Tommy and he the day before when Tommy had asked if they were zombies. She thought the idea was ridiculous.

“…them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they returned as is something else indeed,” Wanda told them. “The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, those things have been waiting a long time to be born.”

“We began to experiment,” Osbourne said, definitely wanting to change the subject. “We found that you could endlessly bisect one of these reanimated bodies and that, given time, it would regenerate into a whole. But often that whole took on monstrous characteristics not contained in the original. Hence, the things you saw in the cages, gentlemen. How Weerden successfully regenerated himself is unknown. He made himself whole again and again and we, yes, we created monsters. We found that if a bit of tissue or even a limb were treated with FRX-3, it began to regenerate. Sometimes, it became a duplicate of the original…with certain unpleasant divergences or mutations. And sometimes it grew into something inhuman and plastic, something degenerate.”

“That explains that thing at the mannequin factory,” Tommy said.

“These imperfect regenerations are horrible to see,” Osbourne admitted. “White and fungous and morbid. But what makes them even more horrible, is that they seemed to be controlled by diabolic minds, anti-human minds.”

Osbourne said they experimented for months and months. Some of the staff collected up the paraphernalia of alchemy, trying to recreate some of Weerden’s original studies, but to no effect…no effect that was not ghastly and unspeakable to the extreme. Hence, the madhouse the molecular bio lab had become. The rest of the staff continued to cultivate Weerden’s tissue and apply FRX-3 to various animal and human tissues. Organs, limbs, anything to an entire individual could be redeveloped…but the end result was always an absorption of healthy tissues by the mutated variety. It was found that FRX-3 would also reactivate dead tissue and even entire cadavers.

“Then we had our explosion,” he told them.

In a high pressure vat, they were “cooking” certain proteins that FRX-3 created during the regeneration cycle, hoping for a modified, biochemical approach to their problem. Osbourne did not know what happened, but the vat exploded and shot these hybrid proteins straight up into the atmosphere where they rained down over half the countryside.

“And the dead started rising,” Mitch said.

“Yes, apparently. The dead regenerated and things were regenerated from scraps of tissue as well.”

Osbourne finished by telling them that in addition to the protein stew shot into the air, there were also quantities of other hazardous, experimental chemicals sent airborne. One of them was a spray called VVK. VVK was a yellow mist that when sprayed on the regenerated tissues actually halted the process and destroyed the regenerative processes in the cells.

“Yellow rain,” Tommy said.

“Yes, it fell over the compound here first, killing nearly everyone. The others simply lost their minds. Some killed themselves when they realized what had been unleashed and I don’t know about the others. They probably ran off.”

“So this VVK can kill those things?” Mitch asked.

“Oh yes. Unfortunately, it kills any living thing it comes into contact with. It’s deadly.” Osbourne grimaced and slammed his fist on the desk. “We’ve let loose a Pandora’s Box of horrors here, I’m afraid. And I’m as guilty as the others. But today or tomorrow, a containment team will sterilize this place. And me with it. The yellow rain, as you call it, may come down once or twice more before it dissipates. So be careful. But as to the FRX-3 proteins and the genes themselves…I’m not sure how to stop that or if it can be stopped from turning this goddamn country into a graveyard.”

Mitch hated the man.

Despised him…yet he almost felt sorry for him. Felt sorry for him because Osbourne had watched a wonderful research project that could have benefited millions perverted and turned into something unholy, for lack of a better word. The regeneration program, the original ReGenesis Project, could have been the single most important medical breakthrough in history. And maybe it still would be in the hands of the right men and women. For as Osbourne himself had said, they were damn close to perfecting it. Then came that crazy bastard Brighten and his witchcraft and alchemy. Something wonderful and unique had become a nightmare of gargantuan proportions. Yes, he hated Osbourne for being part of it, just as he hated the rest of those scientists for letting loose something like this. Something that had killed God knew how many people and Mitch’s own wife in the process. But as much as he hated, he understood. Scientists were really kids at heart, curious kids with incredible minds that always asked, why, why, why. And if you gave these kids in question a toybox with the secrets of the universe in it, of course they were going to open that box and play with what they found inside.

“Where is this fucking asshole Brighten?” Tommy wanted to know.

“Dead,” Osbourne said. “He exposed himself to FRX-3 and it…digested him cell by cell. He went into the incinerator.”

Harry seemed to still have more questions and he asked one of them right now. “That tissue out there you’re growing…Weerden’s tissue. You’re not feeding it, you said, yet it’s alive. What will happen to it?”

“It’ll go into the incinerator,” Osbourbe told him.

“And if it doesn’t?”

“It will…it might just keep growing. We don’t know.”

“But it’ll never become Weerden?”

Osbourne shook his head. “No. We don’t know what Weerden’s exact process was. But that tissue is basically a fibroblast, a blastema…unspecialized cells waiting for genetic information to tell them what to do and what they should be. Technically, in their DNA, they have that information but are unable to access it. If that mass of tissue could get nutrients, it would theoretically grow and grow.”

“The chicken heart that ate the world,” Harry said.

“Precisely…in theory.”

“And if got some human tissue…it would become a person?”

Osbourne said, “Yes, I suppose. I suppose…”

The three of them just sat around looking at each other and at Osbourne. Well, it had been a really wild and heady trip coming out to the Ft. Providence base. But what were they coming away with? How did any of this help them or Witcham for that matter? They had not learned anything really hopeful.

“That VVK kills ‘em,” Tommy said. “You know what else works? Salt.”

“Salt?” Osbourne grunted at the idea. “I suppose it would. The resurrected have an extremely high fluid content. The salt would leech water from the cells and destroy their membranes.”

“We figured that out,” Tommy said. “And none of us are smart like you.”

“Smart? No, not smart. Intelligent, I always thought, and perceptive, but hardly smart. You men should leave now. The Army will be coming. If they find you here, they’ll kill you.”

“Okay,” Mitch said. “One last thing, though. Weerden. You didn’t answer my question. Did you guys regenerate that fucking old warlock or not?”

Osbourne looked pained. “I…I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know.”

“Brighten and the others were involved in things I wasn’t given access to. After I made my feelings on the project known, I was kept out of certain experiments.”

Osbourne told them that down below, there were additional high containment levels that had originally been designed for the manipulation of genetically-enhanced disease germs, part of the Cold War biological warfare effort. Brighten was running experiments down there. Those levels were sealed off. Even Osbourne himself could not access them.

“So he could have regenerated this witch?” Tommy said.

“I…I just don’t know. We created blastemas, but I don’t know if they could have regenerated an entire individual.”

“But that’s what Weerden said, wasn’t it?” Harry put in. “That he could regenerate himself endlessly from just a scrap?”

“Yes,” Osbourne said. “Yes. Regardless, you men must leave now. It’s dangerous here. More dangerous than you can know.”

When they didn’t move, he smiled grimly. “You wondered what that blastema tissue would do if fed and left to its own means? Well, come on. I’ll show you. And after you see it, you’ll be glad to leave. Yes, you will.”

Mitch just stared at him.

Maybe this guy was intelligent and had all kinds of letters after his name, but he was about to crack up. You could see it around the edges, he was starting to lose it and he must have been pretty damn strong not to have gone over the edge already. Now he wanted to show them something, something perfectly awful, no doubt. Mitch wanted to tell Harry and Tommy no, but he could see that they wanted to look at whatever it was. Wanted to see the thing that would send them running. He didn’t figure there was any way to talk them out of it. And Osbourne? Sure, he wanted them to see it. Like some kid that knows where a dead cat full of worms is.

Osbourne led them back through the maze of the laboratory and to a steel door at the rear. He opened it with his card. He had that fucked-up grin on his face that was about three feet from full-blown dementia. He brought them to an elevator and opened it, again, with his card. They rode down for a couple minutes and the doors opened on a huge room that was circular like the morgue above itself.

“Come on,” he said to them. “You’ll want to see this.”

It was dark, the electric lights not working down there apparently. They brought the lanterns and Osbourne led them off into the murk. There was a fusty, rank smell of things rotting in bogs. A very organic, profuse sort of smell.

Mitch heard a slopping, almost liquid sound ahead that echoed and echoed around them. It was followed by a weird, shrill chittering and then a godawful roaring as of some beast rising from a primordial lake. Whatever was just ahead, it was the end result of them toying with Weerden’s biology. Something no mind could look upon and remain unchanged.

Tommy stopped and looked at Mitch, his face bloodless, but then he started moving again.

There was a large rectangular pit ahead and it was probably big enough to hold a pickup truck or maybe a couple of them.

Osbourne got there first and Harry was right behind him. He looked in there and his face just went yellow, his eyes widening, his lips trembling. He stepped away, shaking, going down on one knee.

Then it was Tommy’s turn. And Mitch’s.

Mitch saw. Saw something so hideous and utterly grotesque he thought it might burn his thinking mind to cinders. His first reaction was shock, then nausea, and then a curious vertigo that threatened to tumble him into the pit. His heart hammered like it would explode and his mind became a wind tunnel of buzzing white noise.

The thing in the pit roared when he put his light on it. Roared with a booming sound that sent a blast of hot, rancid air right into his face. It stank of vomit and bile and fungal decay. Down there in that pit, the thing was huge and quivering and creeping, a fleshy miasma of gray pustulating jelly set with twitching, fibrous growths. There were dozens of limbs growing from the thing…white tentacular whips and snapping cords, human arms and legs that were white and gelid-skinned, perforated with running sores. And heads. Snaring what genetic material it could, this mutant blastema had replicated a dozen bulbous human heads that were screaming and thrashing and calling out to the men above. Caricatures of what must have been Weerden’s head, fleshed in running wax. It was completely noxious and revolting. And what was maybe worse were those dozens of pink, slimy eyes the size of softballs.

Eyes that were staring right at him.

Harry grabbed Osbourne by the collar of his coat and lifted him right off the ground. “I should throw you into that motherfucker!” he shouted. “I should feed you to it! How would you like that, you crazy sonofabitch?”

Tommy and Mitch pulled him away.

They made towards the elevator.

“Here me good, you prick,” Mitch told him. “My wife is gone because of your fucking pets and my daughter is missing. If she doesn’t turn up, I’m coming back for you. I swear to God I’m coming back for you and I’m going to toss your ass down there. You hear me?”

Osbourne heard him, all right.

16

Imagine: the city haunted.

Haunted by vermin.

For Witcham was nothing but a flooded graveyard, a slaughterhouse, an inundated mortuary. A slopping, stinking gray cesspool of filth and decay and boiling miasma where thousands of ripe corpses had been washed from graves and thousands more were exhumed by the rising polluted waters every morning, creating a virulent black sea of dank rot and sewage and pestilence.

And this brought the vermin in hordes.

Immense buzzing clouds of meatflies and corpseflies that took to the air in droning, verminous clouds, darkening the sky as they settled over the streets, drawn and made hungry by the carrion that bobbed and drifted through the gutted carcass of the city. The flies feasted on the cadavers that clogged the streets in a gruesome logjam of bloated white flesh. They fed and mated and laid their eggs in the bellies of corpses, in the soft and spongy tissues of eyes and mouths and genitalia, seeding a fertile and noxious garden of putrescence. And within what seemed hours, those eggs gave flower: millions of writhing maggots and corpse-larva that themselves began to spread their wings, feeding and mating and laying millions of more eggs. The flies became storms that whirred through the city, feeding and fucking and breeding, spreading disease and filth.

The rot and waterlogged dead brought not just flies, but slinking red graveworms and beetles and crawling things. Thousands of ravenous rats were forced up from the sewers and cellars and drainage ditches by the rising water. Armies of them…fat and greasy and gray that filled buildings and overran houses. At night, they glutted themselves on corpse-flesh and made warm, putrid nests in the bellies of the moist, unburied dead.

By day, there were the birds.

Gulls and ravens, crows and buzzards. You would see them lighting off a floating cadaver, perching there happily on islands of drifting carrion, stretching their wings and cawing, picking out strips of raw red flesh and pecking flyblown faces down to the bone beneath. They feasted on maggots and insects and fought over the juiciest, greenest cuts of meat.

That was Witcham.

A putrid sea of decomposition haunted by vermin, a misting and rain-washed organic soup of decay that was charged with a hybrid flux of regeneration proteins vomited out of the secret catacombs of Fort Providence. And as such, it was not just a sea of death, but a great amniotic bath of degenerate and mutant life, resurrection, and unspeakable re-genesis.

17

On their way back through the city, they could plainly see the inexorable, almost ghastly change that had taken place in the past twenty-four hours. There was more water in the streets, of course, and it was still coming down. In buckets. There were more stranded cars and certain intersections were getting to the point where they were nearly impassable to anything that did not have a high profile like Tommy’s Dodge Ram. Many of these were blocked off and the public works had arranged detours. The National Guard was out in force, of course, as were the police and emergency services. Lots of people were on their way out of town.

But all that was to be expected.

What Mitch noticed was that much of Witcham seemed deserted now. And not just the heavily-flooded areas, but almost the whole town. Upper and Lower Main Street were nearly empty, most everything closed. Even the college looked empty. Yesterday, there had still been people in the streets shopping and going about their business, but today was a different story. What people they saw looked to be in a great hurry and those that weren’t looked simply confused, standing around on street corners and surveying the damage. It was hard not to view the city as a great waterlogged corpse in search of a grave and those few people standing about as mourners.

It was bad and this was just in the more passable areas of the city. Places like River Town and Bethany were pretty much underwater now and, if what people were saying could be believed, there were bodies everywhere.

“I think our hometown is on its last legs,” Tommy said.

There was no arguing that. There was a steady stream of traffic heading out to Highway 6 which led out of the city and out of the Black River Valley.

“They’re running,” Harry said, “and you can’t blame ‘em, can you? Not with what’s going on. I think the flooding is one thing, but dead things walking around is another. Lot of people, you know, they saw things last night and they don’t want to go through that again.”

Mitch knew that to be true. A lot of people died last night and a lot of them wouldn’t stay dead. That was the scary part. Tonight, the city would be an absolute graveyard. The water would rise and more of the zombies would reach areas they had been denied up to now. Witcham would be a house of horrors tonight.

Tommy brought them over to East Genesee without asking. Lisa Bell’s house was still empty as far as they could tell. No signs of occupancy, anyway. Heather Sale’s VW bug was not around. Over in Elmwood Hills, at the Sale house, the bug was not to be seen either. And what was worse, the front door was open and no one was around.

Harry did not ask what they were doing. Not until they reached the Sale house and Mitch told him flatly that they were looking for his daughter. He volunteered nothing else.

Tommy drove back towards Crandon, taking it slow, the water near the top of his wheels in places. Everywhere they went, desertion. Mass desertion. If it hadn’t been for the water everywhere, it would have looked like one of those cities in a movie that had been evacuated for an A-bomb attack.

“You can almost feel it, can’t you?” Mitch said.

Tommy nodded. “Yeah, it’s different. It’s bad. A real ugly kind of feel. City’s gone bad right to its roots.”

Mitch just grunted because that’s pretty much what he’d been feeling. It smelled like an open, rainy grave and now it felt like one, too. Just low and dank and mean like a subterranean tomb.

“I’m thinking about what that Osbourne guy said at the base,” Harry said. “That stuff that raises the dead and mutates things…it’s in this rain. And it keeps falling. I mean, shit, we’ve all been soaked in the stuff by now. Who knows what might happen to us.”

“You look okay,” Mitch told him. “I don’t see you growing any extra arms.”

Tommy laughed at that. “Relax, Harry. Way I see it is that this stuff that got pissed up into the air is gonna rain itself out. Maybe it already has. Maybe it’s just in the water itself now. It’ll run its course.”

Harry shrugged. “You’re probably right. But how much damage will be done by then? And how many of those things will be in the streets?”

Tommy kept driving until they hit The Strip in Crandon. Just about everything was closed there, too, though more than a few bars were open and doing pretty good business by the looks of things. They passed an intersection and some kid was standing in the middle of the street, water up to his knees almost. Mitch looked at him and then craned his neck and looked at him again.

“Stop the truck,” he told Tommy. “That kid back there.”

“One of the things?”

“No, just…I think I know him.”

Tommy pulled to a stop and then just reversed since there was no traffic around anyway. He pulled the truck to a stop and Mitch hopped out, going over to the boy standing there. The boy did not even look at him. He just watched the water moving past his legs.

“Chuck?” Mitch said. “Chuck Bittner?”

The boy looked up, his face wringing wet. He blinked a couple times.

“Don’t you remember me?” Mitch said.

The kid just stared. “No,” he said.

“It’s me, it’s Mitch Barron. Uncle Mitch.”

The kid cocked his head a bit, starting to remember Mitch’s face. Mitch understood. Christ, the kid hadn’t seen him in years. He was Lily’s sister’s kid, Marlene’s kid. Mitch had not seen him since Marlene had gotten her divorce and taken a walk on the wild side. He could not honestly remember if the kid had even been at Marlene’s funeral.

“Uncle Mitch?” the kid said, his voice breaking up.

“Yeah, Chuck. C’mere.”

The kid needed no prompting. He splashed forward and fell right against his uncle. Mitch felt his arms going around him, something in his heart tugging because he could feel the kid’s pain thrumming through him. They held onto each other in the street, impervious to the rain that fell.

“Where’s Aunt Lily?” Chuck wanted to know.

“Ah…shit, Chuck, she’s gone, you know? I don’t think she’ll be back”

The kid seemed to understand.

“What brings you way over to Crandon?”

The kid just looked up at him. “I was just walking. Last night…last night something happened.”

“You can tell me?”

So Chuck did. He was in a state of mind where he did not really care if he was believed or not. “I went home…my mom was there. She was one of them.”

Mitch felt himself stiffen. Lily had been right then, Marlene had returned. Jesus. Standing there in the rain, Chuck told him everything.

“I killed her with salt,” he finally said. “I killed her with salt.”

The kid started to sob and there was little Mitch could do but hold him tight. Tears came from his eyes, too. And he was glad for the rain that washed them away. When it had passed, he took the kid back to the truck and got him inside. With Tommy and Harry in there, Chuck had to sit on Mitch’s lap. But that was okay. That was just fine.

“We’re going to get you out of here, Chuck,” Mitch told him. “Out of the city before night. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“Why the hell not?” Tommy said.

“Because I want to kill them,” Chuck told them. “I want to kill all the dead ones.”

18

After they got back to Wanda’s and Mitch took the old woman aside and gave her the lowdown on Chuck, Harry led Tommy away from Deke and the Zirblanski twins. They went out into the garage and lit cigarettes.

“None of my business at all,” Harry said. “But what’s the scoop on Mitch’s wife and kid?”

“You’re right: none of your goddamn business. But I’ll tell you. You’re into this damn mess as deep as any of us now, I suppose.” He went over and sat on a crate. The garage smelled of machine oil and potting soil which was infinitely preferable to the gassy odors of the city. “Mitch’s wife…Lily…she sort of lost it, man. She had a twin sister named Marlene who was pretty much a piece of work, you come right down to it. Marlene killed herself awhile back and Lily was never the same after that.”

Harry nodded. “Twins…there’s a funny connection between them.”

“Yeah. That kid out there? Chuck? That’s Marlene’s kid, Mitch’s nephew.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Lily. She was a real tough, independent sort of woman. Really something. But when Marlene died, I think part of Lily died with her. She got real depressed, was on medications and shit. She just wasn’t right anymore.” Tommy’s mouth tensed a bit at this part. “Last night, when we were over here talking to Wanda…well, Lily was watching Rita and Rhonda and she just acted weird, walked out into the water in the streets. She was just gone. We looked and looked, but we couldn’t find her. Now his kid is missing, too.”

“Shit, that’s a tough break.”

“Tell me about it. Anyway, that’s about it. That’s why we haven’t left the city. We can’t until we know the kid’s okay.”

“I hope she is.”

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “Me, too. Wanda…you know how she is, visions and shit, she says the kid’s still here in town. That she’s alive. And Mitch has been having these feelings that she’s nearby or something. That’s how we ended up at the mannequin factory. He had one of those feelings. Anyway, he won’t leave until he finds her and, shit, he’s my best friend. My only friend, really. I’ll stay long as he does. We won’t stop looking.”

“Sure, I understand. I’ll stay, too. Where the hell else am I going to go? I’ll stick with you guys until they put me back inside again.”

“Mitch wants me to take the kids and Wanda outside the city to the National Guard camp out there. He doesn’t want them here tonight.”

“That’s a good idea. But we’re staying, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll bring ‘em out there in a little while. Mitch is telling them about that now. But I’m coming back.”

Harry pulled off his cigarette. “Mitch has a girl, eh? How old?”

Tommy looked skyward. “Let’s see…Chrissy would be fifteen, I’m thinking.”

Harry just stared at him. “Chrissy?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Chrissy?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

Harry was breathing real hard now. “At the University…I told you I was there with that asshole Jacky…there were two girls there. Chrissy and Lisa. Chrissy was a tall brunette and Lisa was a blonde, short.”

“Shit,” Tommy said, finding his feet. “What happened? You fuckers didn’t do anything…tell me you didn’t.”

Harry shook his head. “No, no, no. They were all right. I saw to that. Then that clown came and?”

But Harry didn’t finish that because there was a huge, violent rumbling in the distance and the entire house began to shake like it was falling apart.

19

At approximately 3:45 p.m., exactly one week after the torrential rains began falling, the Black River South Fork Dam failed completely. It was some six miles from Witcham and held the Black Lake Reservoir in check…which had been near to cresting for days, its intricate system of nearby spillways completely flooded. The Dam was 300 feet in height and two days previously, a leak was sighted near the northeast abutment, nearly a hundred feet below the crest. It was patched successfully, but by the time Mitch and the others had returned from Fort Providence, a new leak had appeared. It was some seventy-five feet down from the first. It started as a gigantic wet spot like the dam itself was beginning to sweat. And within thirty minutes, that spot of perspiration became heavy seepage which seriously undermined the integrity of the structure as a whole. The material began to slough and water ran freely from the cleft as erosion opened up the original leak until it reached the right bank to the dam embankment itself. Less than forty minutes later, the dam failed completely and collapsed.

The four-mile Black Lake Reservoir which was overspilling to begin with, released some forty-million tons of water into the narrow Black River Valley. Boiling with debris, uprooted trees, and a mountain of earth, the flood wall was sixty-feet in height when it struck Slayhoke Penitentiary and the result was devastating. As 4^th Battalion of the 1^st Air Cavalry Division, bolstered by the Wisconsin National Guard, were still attempting to restore order at the prison, the tidal wave of water hit with explosive force, obliterating the high razor-wire topped walls and smashing its way through the tall brick cell blocks which utterly collapsed, the upper stories completely sheering off. The high smokestacks fell and outbuildings were smashed, their wreckage?indeed all the wreckage of Slayhoke including trucks and cars and gravel piles, thousands of human beings and tons and tons of rock and brick?were swept along with that churning wall of water.

The Fort Providence Military Reservation was next in the path.

The water pushed right through, stripping the base flat, turning hills to valleys and scooping up millions of tons of sand and rock, and kept right on rolling, leveling everything in its path. Between Fort Providence and Witcham there was a nearly unbroken belt of forest and wooded hills some four miles thick. The flood wall, cutting its own channel as it roared towards the city, hit the forest and turned hills to mudslides, cutting down acre after acre of prime woodland?sugar maple, red oak, hickory, and birch, hemlock, jackpine, and spruce. But this forest significantly slowed the rampaging flood wall which would have completely destroyed the city.

When it reached Witcham?a rushing torrent of oily, muddy water inundated with millions upon millions of tons of grinding debris?it crested at nearly thirty feet. It hit the outlying areas first, dissolving hills and shattering bridges and turning homes to kindling, then it rolled right into Elmwood and Crandon following the path of the Black River, a tidal wave that smashed its way through Bethany and River Town and East Genesee. It swept everything before it, houses and factories and bridges. Water towers fell and buildings collapsed, telephone poles were torn up by their roots and mobile home parks turned into graveyards of sheet metal. Buildings that had stood a hundred years or more fell into themselves as did mills and foundries.

All the rubble and mud and debris were sucked into a massive whirlpool centered in the old Black River floodplain. River Town and Bethany were ground zero.

From above it looked like a wall of frothing brown water rushing into a city of sandcastles that simply disintegrated and were washed into a dirty foam. At the southern tip of Crandon, rows of high elms went down like bowling pins and blocks and blocks of houses simply vanished in the deluge. Others were crushed and some torn up from their foundations and carried off. Chatterly Park was gutted straight down to the bedrock. In River Town, those historic brick streets beneath the flooding fell right into sewers below. The Wiscon natural gas refinery went up with a booming explosion and plumes of yellow-white flame mushroomed above the city. Fuel tanks exploded into spirals of greasy, black smoke that the pouring rain dropped right back onto the city. At ground-level, that great rumbling wave of water shattered windows long before it physically reached them and when it did, walls and foundations were ruptured and roofs peeled free. The sound of that tidal wave was deafening, like a thousand bombs detonated simultaneously, their noise echoing and echoing and never seeming to die out. As the streets sank and structures fell, the water raged and sprayed and splashed and shot up into the air in great gouts.

And then, backflooding.

The water crested outside of Witcham and flooded right back, carrying trees and rubble, asphalt and concrete, glass and metal, cars and trucks, and thousands of bodies. It swept back into town, but its force was spent. In Witcham, the debris caught fire and became a river of flame that reached some sixteen city blocks. Houses and buildings that had stood the onslaught of water promptly ignited and the inferno burned and burned and burned, the pouring rain slowly bringing it under control. Survivors floated on scraps of building materials and the trunks of trees. Several hundred became entangled in miles and miles of barbwire from the WireWorks and if the waters finally did recede, it would take days to cut all those corpses free.

But for now, there was devastation.

The air was thick with a dusky haze that was part smoke and part fog and part suspended residue that slowly fell back into the flooded streets. The water was a bubbling stew of slime and waste, garbage and dead bodies.

The city had been on the verge of its grave for many days, but now it had finally found it and fell right in.

So by 6:00 p.m. that day, Witcham was a cemetery.

20

Alive.

By God, they were all still alive.

Mitch was looking out over the wreckage of the city which was so utterly complete that it left him breathless. Houses were gone, entire blocks were gone, but through it all, they had survived. It was enough to make you believe in a higher power. And if Chrissy had been there with him, he just might have.

When the rumbling started and that wave came rolling through the valley picking up speed and force, devouring Slayhoke and Fort Providence as appetizers and heading for the main course with slavering jaws, it was Tommy and Harry who had gotten everyone organized. They had no idea what was happening. With that rising noise and the ground trembling, maybe there was an earthquake or somebody had finally detonated a nuke out at the Army base like many had prophesied for so many years now. Maybe that was what was happening and that deadly shock wave was heading right at them.

There was no earthly way to know.

But they gathered up the Zirblanski twins and Deke Eriksen, Mitch and Wanda and Chuck Bittner. Got them together as the volume was turned up and the house shook. They didn’t know what was coming but they knew it was going to be bad beyond belief. They had organized things, but it had been Wanda who told them what was coming.

“Dam went,” she said, almost calmly. “Tidal wave coming.”

They had about ten minutes to take action. Tommy got Rita and Rhonda, Chuck and Deke up onto the roof using a ladder and Harry had carried Wanda up there, even though she said she did not want to go. Mitch came up last. But before he went up, Tommy came down and they grabbed lanterns and flashlights, blankets and bottled water, three five-pound bags of salt and their guns. It wasn’t much, but it was all they had time for.

Sitting up on the peak of Wanda’s roof, there hadn’t been time to do much but hold onto each other and hope for the best. The water hit with devastating force, peeling the siding from the house, taking the rain gutters, and Tommy’s truck as a souvenir. The rumbling and roaring were so loud, you could not have even yelled above it. Trees went down and power lines followed. Mitch watched in absolute horror as the Zirblanski’s house literally crumbled into jackstraw and took the Blake house with it. Arland Mattson’s ranch was engulfed and then Mitch’s red brick two-story simply fell apart. All those houses just sank into the swirling, foaming waters and were seen no more.

But when it finally ended, Wanda Sepperly’s was still standing.

And they were all still alive. Petrified and shocked and overwhelmed, but certainly no worse for the wear.

Other than that, Kneale Street had been pretty much decimated. If he squinted his eyes through the misty drizzle, Mitch could see the shells of a few houses, but they were pretty much gutted. The Chambers’ chimney still stood, but nothing else. The Gendrou’s garage was still there, but the house wasn’t. The Procton house was still standing, though everything around it was missing…garage, trees, everything.

Devastation.

Good God, the devastation.

Mitch just watched that silent yellow river of contaminated water passing by Wanda’s house. It moved with a lazy current now, but still the water was nearly up to the roofline and the stink…of sewage and smoke and rot…was unbelievable. Steam rose from it in twisting plumes, a dense fog blowing over its surface. Logs and broken furniture floated by. Entire sheds and amputated roofs, bobbing cars and trucks, the walls of houses and picnic tables, garbage and scraps and fragments. And bodies. Dozens and dozens of bodies moving past in slow dead man’s rolls. In whole and in part. Many of them inhabited by confused rats and birds.

And the flies.

Christ, he’d never seen so many flies in his life. The air was thick with them. They rose off the bobbing wreckage in black, angry clouds, hundreds and hundreds of them. They got in your hair and crawled over your arms and nipped as flies do before a rain comes. But the rain was already falling. It had much been lighter since the wave hammered through the streets, but nobody wanted to get their hopes up. It had to stop sooner or later. For now it was a chill misting rain and no more and that was livable. But the flies? They never lightened. They were breeding by the millions with all the floating garbage and carrion. It was a feast to them.

Mitch put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Harry,” he said. “Tell me again and don’t leave anything out.”

As soon as the water subsided, or as much as it was going to, Tommy had Harry tell him about what happened at the University. It hadn’t been a pretty picture. Jacky Kripp was some kind of animal. Harry said when they picked Chrissy and Lisa up, he hadn’t been sure that was what Jacky was up to. That at the University, before Giggles the Clown showed, he had put a stop to what Jacky had in mind. Jacky and he were about to go to it hot and heavy when the zombies stopped by for a snack. Mitch wanted to believe Harry. Something inside told him that he could believe Harry. But there was still that protective, parental doubt worming at him.

For what if Harry was lying? What if he and Jacky had actually raped them or something even worse? For after all, they were both bad boys. Sure, Harry Teal seemed okay…but was he?

You have to believe him, Mitch, that indefatigable voice of reason told him. You don’t have a choice. If he had done something other than what he was saying, then why bring it up at all? Why even mention Chrissy?

That was true. That was very true and it made perfect sense, but fatherly paranoia was fatherly paranoia. The idea of someone violating or hurting Chrissy was enough to make Mitch boil inside. But he had to keep it in context. Harry had protected the girls. That’s what he claimed and either he was a very good liar?being a professional criminal, he probably was?or he was telling the truth. When Mitch first heard him out, he’d looked over at Wanda when he was done and Wanda had simply nodded her head. Wanda believed him. Tommy seemed to. And Mitch himself? Yeah, deep down, he believed Harry. Because maybe Harry was a lot of things, but he didn’t see the man as some kind of sexual predator.

“That’s about all there is to tell,” Harry finished.

“And that’s what that sick squeeze of shit said?” Tommy prompted him. “That you couldn’t find him because he was going where the bad boys and bad girls go? The ones no one wants?”

Mitch was filled with venom, helpless, utterly helpless. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Tommy considered it yet again, only this time he seemed to be onto something. “Think about it, Mitch. Where do boys and girls that no one wants go? What kind of place to they put them in?”

And Mitch got it. Yes, yes of course. “The orphanage.”

21

The rumbling had stopped.

Whatever had hit the city, whether it was a bomb or an earthquake, it had settled down now. Chrissy had hoped that whatever it was would shake the building down around her, but it hadn’t happened. The building?or whatever it was?had indeed shook and reeled, but it had not fallen.

So much for that.

There were nineteen people in the pit with Chrissy.

That was easy enough to ascertain. The clown had brought them all here, but he hadn’t bothered taking any of their personals from them. So while they didn’t have any flashlights, they did have disposable lighters and matches. It wasn’t a pit really, it was a cellar. But in Chrissy’s mind, it was a pit, all right. Dark and dusty and cobwebbed. There were nineteen people in there. Men and women, no children, thank God. But of the nineteen only two others seemed capable of doing more than going mad. Quite a few were in shock, others just simply insane, talking to people who weren’t there, sobbing and whispering. The others were mostly silent. Beaten and injured.

There were only the two that Chrissy could count on: Albert Accaro, an unmarried auto mechanic; and Alona Seelig, who was apparently some kind of biker chick with a bad attitude.

These were the three.

Of the others, only Ed Watts, had bothered speaking to them or answering direct questions. He was in his right mind for the most part, but he was no help in anything. “I don’t know what you people are planning, but you’d better be careful. That clown is right outside the door and I’m not going to allow you to make things worse for the rest of us.”

To which Alona promptly said, “Shut the fuck up, Ed.”

Yes, the clown was outside the door. That scathed wooden door with no handle on the inside. There was no doubt of that. They could hear him out there from time to time, singing or humming and there was no mistaking the odor that came off of him?like a bin filled with bad meat, maybe flavored with hospital waste and coffin mold for spice. Yes, he was out there and from time to time he pressed up against the door, drawing his nails…or claws…over the outside panel, making people wince and whimper. Sometimes he’d call individuals by name, tell them how he would eat them, or simply spill all the dirty details of their private lives. Things that monster could not possibly know, but seemed to know just fine.

Right then he was singing, “Rain, rain, go away! Come again another day! Little Grimshanks wants to playyyyy!”

His voice was like forks and knives scraping over concrete and like that, it went right up your spine. Grimshanks the Clown was about as terrible of a thing as Chrissy could imagine. He was a zombie like the others, but yet, he wasn’t exactly like the others. They were evil, too, but he was just a little higher on the insanity scale. He terrified everyone…except maybe Alona. Alona kept mouthing off to him and the funny things was, although he roared and made the door shake in its frame, he did not come after her.

That was interesting.

Other than that door which was like a portal into an ogre’s kitchen, there was only one possible way out. Up near the ceiling there was a boarded over window. They had no idea where they were or what was outside, but they intended to find out. The window was about two feet wide and just over a foot tall. Chrissy figured she could wiggle through there and most of the others, too. It would be a tight squeeze for Alona, but she’d make it. That lady was nothing if not tenacious. She hated that goddamn clown maybe worse than the others and she wanted to piss it off, do anything to give it trouble. And escaping would surely piss Grimshanks off.

“These boards are old,” Albert said, examining them by matchlight. “They’d be pretty easy to bust off, but it would make noise. Last thing we want here is to make too much noise.”

Alona checked ‘em out on tippy-toe. “We’ll have to force ‘em real slow, maybe muffle ‘em with clothes or something.”

She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. She stripped it off in the darkness and handed it to Albert. He pressed it up against the boards and tucked it in tight. All he had to use for leverage was a long quarter-inch piece of pipe he’d pried from the wall. It was rusty, but firm. It would work if he could just wedge it behind that lower board. Using the blade of his jackknife, he began to loosen that board, working very patiently and carefully. Each time he pulled it out, light spilled in.

“I know what you people are up to,” Ed Watts said.

“Glad to hear it, Ed,” Alona said. “Now be a good boy and fuck off.”

“You’re endangering all of us.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re already endangered, you idiot.”

“I’m just saying, is all.”

Alona glared at him in the darkness. “Listen to me, Ed, and listen to me very carefully. What we’re doing is for everyone. If you cause any trouble or slink over to the door to tell Pervo the Clown what we’re doing, I will tear your balls off with my bare hands. And then I’ll make you eat them. Are we on the same fucking page here, Ed?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Glad to hear it.”

Chrissy just stood there speechlessly. Alona was really something. Though she wasn’t much over five-feet tall, she had a ten-foot attitude.

Albert kept prying the board. It groaned once and then he stopped, waited for Grimshanks to say something or come slithering under the door, but he didn’t. Wiping sweat from his face, Albert went back at it. He was making progress, but it was slow.

Then outside the door, there was a scratching. “Hey, hey, Chrissy-poo! Chrissy Barron! I know you can hear me, you little twat! I just wanted you to know that I’m thinking about you! Did you tell your friends how you like to touch yourself? How you like to squeeze your tits and slide your fingers in your hot little la-la! Did you tell them that? I bet you didn’t! Deke likes it when you give him handjobs! No oral yet, but you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

Chrissy stepped farther into the room with Alona at her side. Maybe it was time to test the waters. What he was saying was private and that made it all that much more creepy to hear. But she was beyond Grimshanks’ little games by that point. Sure, he was evil and wicked and demented, but he was one-dimensional. He liked to get a rise out of you. Liked to piss you off and scare you. He seemed to feed off the negative emotions he created. When you let him get to you, he got louder; when you ignored him, he seemed to shrink away.

Chrissy thought maybe it was time to get him louder, that might cover the sound of what Albert was doing.

“Chrissy, I want you to give me a handjob! Oh, pretty, pretty please, you hot little cunt! And when I come, oh hee hee, I’ll make you suck me off! I’ll shoot my wormy jizz right down your fucking throat! Isn’t that a lark? Isn’t that a funny? Isn’t that a silly game for us to play?”

“Just leave me alone!” Chrissy shouted at the door.

Grimshanks cackled. “But I won’t! I won’t! I won’t won’t won’t! And you can’t make me! I’ll get you, Chrissy-pissy, fingers in her pie, teased the boys and made them cry! I’ll get you! I’ll have you! I’ll fuck you so hard you’ll bleed, you little snatch! Grimshanks will shove his rotten prick in you and hump you, hump you, hump you! Just like Deke wants to! Hump! Hump! Hump! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! And when I’m done, I’ll shoot my happy stuff in you and you’ll get pregnant! You’ll have my baby! I’ll plant my seeds in your hotbox! I’ll sink my eggs into your sweet soil like a wasp injecting its eggs into a spider! Oh, and when my baby is born, it’ll eat you from the inside out! Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! Little Chrissy, gimme a blow!”

Chrissy was set to open her mouth and scream at him, but Alona stepped in front of her. “You ain’t got any lead in your pencil, you little faggot! You forget that?” she railed at him. “You’re nothing but a little queer-boy, ain’t nothing but a little queer-boy!”

Something thudded into the door out there and Grimshanks growled low and bestial like a rabid dog. “You shut up, biker cunt! You don’t know anything!”

“But I do! We all do! You told us, you told us all about it!”

“I did? Oh yes, I did, didn’t I? Ha, ha, ha!”

“That’s why we know you’re nothing but a little queer-boy! You like boys and you probably always liked boys! Who did it to you, Grimshanks? Who fucked you the first time? Your daddy? Your mommy? Your uncle, your brother?”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you cunt!” he shrieked out there, scratching at the door like maybe he didn’t have fingernails now, but roofing nails. “You better shut your whoring fucking head up or I’ll come in there! I’ll come in there and get you!”

“Then come and get me!” Alona shouted at him. “You won’t because you’re afraid, you little queer-boy! You’re afraid of women! You’re just a little faggot who got so sick of the pervert he was, that he hanged himself! Just like a little pussy queer-boy!”

Grimshanks was roaring like a beast now, howling and chattering his teeth and pounding the door. Dust fell from the ceiling and plaster fell from the walls. “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! DIRTY FUCKING BIKER

CUNT! I’LL KILL YOU! KILL YOU! KILLLLL YOOOOUUUUU!”

And then there was nothing but silence out there.

Grimshanks was gone.

There was no doubt of that. He was gone and Chrissy could feel his absence. The stink, the invasive malevolence, the stupid childish hatred…gone and gone. Chrissy knew he was no longer out there, same way you knew when a garbage can full of rotting fish had been removed…by the smell. Alona had scared him away or pissed him off so bad he had to leave before he did something he knew he wasn’t supposed to.

But what was it all about?

All Chrissy knew is what the clown bragged about. That there was going to be a party tonight, a festival celebrating the death of Witcham, and that they?all of them in the pit?were going to be used as party favors. No, Grimshanks had not said they would be dismembered and eaten, but then he didn’t have to.

Albert got his pipe behind the lower board and gently eased it away from the window. There was a creak and a groan, but not much else. He pulled it off and handed it to Alona.

“Can you see where we are?” Chrissy asked him.

“No…not really.”

He started in on the other board. It was looser than the first one. He worked it carefully with his strong hands and it started coming away from the window. Except, of course, there was no window there, just an empty frame where one had been kicked out years before.

Though Chrissy and Albert were too preoccupied to pay attention to Ed Watts, Alona had just been waiting for him to try something. And then, as that second board was almost off, he did. He sprang at the door. “Grimshanks! Grimshanks! Grimsh?”

But there was a meaty thud as the board in Alona’s hands caught him on top of the head and he hit the ground, out cold.

“That’s one worm down,” she said, looking around. “Any you other shitbags want to step up to bat?”

22

It was a sign of faith.

It was a sign of trust.

That’s what Harry Teal was thinking as he waited on that rooftop with Wanda, the girls, and Chuck Bittner. Tommy and Mitch were gone now and Deke had went with them. They had seen an overturned rowboat float by and Tommy had dove right in after it. Then Mitch went. And finally Deke. They got it righted after some moments and paddled it back to the roof. They were going after Chrissy. They were certain that the clown could have taken her only one place: the Bleeding Heart Catholic Orphanage, which, according to Tommy, was pretty much abandoned and the mother of all spookhouses now. A grim and desolate place atop a hill. Deke went with them. The gentle current was carrying everything downtown, in the general direction of the orphanage.

They had left Tommy’s four-ten, some shells, one of the lanterns, a bag of salt, and all the blankets.

It was a sign of trust, that’s what it was.

They trusted him enough, apparently, to leave him in charge of two girls, a young boy, and an old lady, a feisty one, but an old lady all the same. Jesus, if Harry had been in their shoes, he wasn’t sure he would have made the same choice, him being a convict and all. But they seemed to trust him, seemed to know he was no danger whatsoever.

And they were right.

He would not betray their trust.

He kept hearing helicopters from time to time. Probably the National Guard out plucking people from wreckage and rooftops. He hoped they’d come for them soon. For it would be dark in less than two hours.

Christ, he hoped they’d hurry.

“Harry?” Rita Zirblanski said. “Are we going to be all right?”

He went over there, put an arm around her. “Of course we’re going to be all right. I wouldn’t have it any other way, honey.”

Wanda looked over at him and winked.

Mr. Cheese, Deke’s cat, meowed.

Chuck Bittner just nodded. “Don’t worry, girls, they won’t show up…unless they want to die again.”

23

“Those look like bodies,” Deke said in a very nervous voice.

“Goddamn, I think you’re right,” Tommy said. “Give the man a big cigar.”

“I’m just saying is all,” Deke said, water running down his face.

Ahead, there were lots of things floating. Pieces of wood and siding, a Rubbermaid bin and a garbage can lid, the wishing well from somebody’s front yard. Lots of unknown rubbish coated in yellow leaves and, yes, bodies. About a dozen of them caught in some kind of crazy daisy-chain like paper dolls. Only these dolls were swollen with gas and gray as rainy concrete. Some kind of weird magnetism had welded them together and maybe it was just decomposition.

Mitch had his Remington Auto-loader balanced across his knees, the bag of salt held on the seat between his legs. Sure, those looked like just your average dead bodies, waterlogged and bloated up, a veil of flies over them…but you could never tell in Witcham these days, you just couldn’t tell.

Deke and Tommy were rowing with slats of wood that had drifted by. Mitch was in the bow. They were making progress, but this was not a good development. In order to keep going, they’d have to try and row around the corpses or cut right through them.

Mitch knew it was his call.

He wrinkled his nose against the stink, said, “Keep rowing, we’ll just have to slice our way through.”

“Through…through that?” Deke said.

“You heard the man,” Tommy said. “Jesus Christ.”

For some reason, Tommy had been at Deke ever since they hopped into the rowboat. He didn’t even know the kid…yet he had taken a dislike to him or maybe it was just that he had had enough and he needed someone to strike out at.

Deke licked his lips. “I was just thinking maybe we should go around. The way the dead are these days, you know.”

“Nobody told you to think,” Tommy said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Deke said.

Tommy scowled. “You mouth off to me again, punk, and you go overboard.”

“Go ahead, you think you’re up to it.”

“All right,” Mitch said. “Take it easy, the both of you.”

This was the last thing he needed. Tommy just couldn’t stop picking at the kid. Maybe it was his shaven head or the red braided King Tut beard he wore. But that was fashion, that was window-trimming, inside, Deke was okay. Mitch knew that or he wouldn’t be with Chrissy. Tommy couldn’t stop, though. He was acting like some redneck who found himself a hippie to torment. It was not like Tommy. He might have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t some intolerant redneck.

“Listen, Mr. Barron,” Deke said. “I just came to help. I know this guy is your friend, but this is getting old, man.”

“You’re right, it is,” Mitch said.

Tommy looked like he’d been slapped. “Christ, Mitch, you’re siding with this fucking punk against me?”

“I’m not siding with anyone.”

But Tommy didn’t seem to believe that. “Lookit this guy, Mitch! Fucking head shaved like one of faggot gangbangers, that silly-ass beard…damn. You think he’s up to what we have to do? What might be waiting for us? He’s wet behind the ears. He don’t have the balls for this.”

“I think he does.”

“I do,” Deke said. “You think I haven’t seen the same shit you have, dude? You think you’re the only one whose seen dead people walking around or had them try to kill you? Well, guess again. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I know it. So don’t you judge me, because you don’t know shit.”

Tommy looked like he was ready to swing.

Just great.

Out in a rowboat in a flooded city full of dead people that wanted nothing better than to yank out your guts and eat them raw and they were going to fight. Oh, it was about as ludicrous as ludicrous got. Tommy was an old toughie; no doubt about that. He knew how to handle himself, he had the experience. But Deke had fifty pounds on him, muscle and stamina. He played football, was a defensive tackle, and had a black belt in karate. The odds didn’t sound too good and what sounded even worse, in Mitch’s opinion, was that if they started any of that happy horseshit, the boat would tip and back into the water they’d all go.

“So are you our resident zombie-killer?” Tommy said. “Is that what you’re selling, kid?”

“I’m not selling anything, you fucking hayseed. I’ve seen shit you couldn’t handle.”

Tommy laughed, swatting flies away from his face. “No shit? This I gotta hear.”

“Knock it off,” Mitch said to the both of them. “I won’t have it. I won’t have any of this. Both of you, act your fucking ages or I’ll throw both of you overboard. You hearing me on this?”

They both fell silent, so he figured they got it, all right.

Mitch didn’t have time for it. None of it. Lily was dead and maybe Chrissy, too, and he wasn’t going on much here, his batteries were dry and his heart was split wide open and bleeding, and he did not have time for anything that did not get them to that fucking orphanage.

“Row,” he told them. “Row.”

They did.

The boat surged forward through that oily, leaf-congested water and the bow sliced right into those bodies and the stink was instantaneous and sickening, enough to make you vomit your stomach out. A week ago, Mitch would have done just that. But now…well, he was almost used to it and wasn’t that a horrible thing to realize? That you could really get used to something like that?

Deke was gagging.

Tommy was, too, but he was holding it in. “Just don’t puke on me,” he said.

“If I did,” Deke gasped, “it would be purely out of respect.”

Tommy stared at him and burst out laughing. Then Mitch followed suit and Deke, too, letting out a blast of air. It was insane. Insane that anything could be funny in such a situation, yet it was. And maybe the laughter was a necessary thing. Maybe they needed it. Needed to let out some steam.

But the humor died pretty quickly.

As the boat nosed through the daisy-chain, Deke said, “That one…that one just moved.”

And Mitch was going to say, sure, we’re knocking ‘em aside, son…but this was something else. The bodies were all moving. They were gyrating, trembling, then thrashing. It looked like maybe they were all going to wake up, but that wasn’t it at all. For the bodies were just camouflage of a sort for what lived beneath them.

Children.

Six of seven them, boys and girls, white and pulpy, their faces the color of newly-risen moons. They slid out of the water, scrambling atop their corpse-floats. Their eyes were black and translucent, windows looking into some dead-end cellar of nonexistence and non-entity. Several of them pointed at the men in the boat, hissing and screaming, vomiting out clods of river mud. Gray water ran from their puckered, fish-like mouths and sunken nostrils.

What came next was almost obscene.

Using their host corpses like inflatable floats in a swimming pool, they began kicking their way at the boat, circling in like sharks looking for fresh meat. Tommy hit one square in the face with an oar, a little girl with swelling nodules on her face that bled a discolored slime. He hit her with his board and her head imploded like a water balloon stuffed with gray meat and black filth.

Deke let out a cry and followed suit.

A little boy reached up at the boat and he swung his board, those outstretched fingers exploding in a spray of bile and tissue.

And by then, Mitch was at it.

He didn’t even bother with the gun. He grabbed his bag of salt and let fly with what was inside, digging out handfuls and scattering them at those loathsome children like he was salting the icy steps in mid-winter. The first one that tasted the salt screamed in rage and possibly pain. Her filmed eyeballs rolled back in her head and she twisted and turned in the water, black ooze pouring out of her. The others didn’t like it much better. The salt ate right into them, making them steam and sputter and shrivel. Their skins yellowed and tightened and they squirmed like snakes, looping and wriggling, mouths pulled back from the slats of their teeth. Eyes popped like dirty soap bubbles and faces went spongy like rotting humus.

And they sank from view, plumes of smoke rising from the water, bits of flesh and fat sizzling on the surface. Then there was just a greasy wake and nothing else.

“Row,” Mitch said.

They did. They dug their oars into that slopping water and propelled the boat away from the floating corpses with renewed zeal. After about ten minutes of that, their arms aching, they stopped.

“Look,” Deke said.

At first, Mitch just saw that fog rising from the water, the mist of rain falling, rows of houses that had been smashed into one another by the tidal wave. But then he saw it.

Coming out of the murky distance.

The orphanage.

24

The breakout.

Albert had both boards off now. A light that was grainy and filled with suspended motes of dust was coming in, illuminating the pit and those that languished in it. They were a ragged bunch. Most were injured and some injured so badly they were in shock or feverish and half out of their heads. The others were just terrified into silence. Chrissy had tried to bring a lot of them out of it ever since she woke up down there, but they weren’t having it. Albert had told her it was a waste of time and Alona agreed.

But then, with the light coming in, it was like they all woke up.

Or those that could. The ones in bad shape didn’t seem to notice and others, like Ed Watts, for example, were dead. No, Alona hadn’t meant to kill him. She admitted that much and Chrissy believed her. All that pent-up rage…when Watts tried to call out to the clown, well, he brought it on himself.

“I never killed anyone before,” Alona admitted. “But one of these other SOB’s tries something, I’ll do it again.”

Desperate times called for desperate measures, as they said.

Now it wasn’t just Albert and Chrissy and Alona over near the window, it was ten other people who wanted out. They hadn’t had the balls to help, but they weren’t too ashamed to reap the benefits.

Alona said, “We’re going to do this orderly, people. You and you and you,” she said, picking out three people at random. “Get over to that door. If you hear Pervo the Clown coming back, give us a holler.”

They did what she said. Maybe it was that she was hot-headed and dangerous with a board in her hands or maybe it was just that somebody had to take charge and there was a sort of military efficiency to the woman.

“I’ll go first,” Albert said to Chrissy. “If something’s waiting out there, better me than you, kid.”

Alona and another man gave him a boost and he put his head through into the gray daylight. He looked both ways and saw nothing that concerned him. He pulled himself out and dragged himself through the grass. He saw where they were, just like he could see what had had happened to Witcham through the drizzle and mist. The sight of the destruction made him swallow and then swallow again.

“Christ,” he said.

“What?” Chrissy asked. “What do you see?”

“Nothing…it’s nothing.”

He reached a hand down and she took it and he pulled her up with amazing strength. She barked her back on the top of the window and then she, too, was up. She crawled through the wet grass, shielding her eyes. After being in that damn pit so long, even the dirty overcast afternoon seemed bright. But then her eyes adjusted and through the trees that dotted Crooked Hill, she saw the devastation of her home town, how high the water had risen. She just stood there in awe, a sinking feeling in her belly. Down there, somewhere, were her mother, Mitch, Deke…oh dear God.

She stumbled back, knowing where she was, knowing that she was on top of Crooked Hill, the highest point in the city, but a sudden wave of unreality passed through her. Her head spun with vertigo and her breath didn’t want to come. She went down on her ass and then found herself looking up at the Bleeding Heart Orphanage rising above her. It was tall and sagging, shuttered and weathered gray. Windows were broken and siding hanging loose. A rain gutter creaked high above and the bricks were crumbling away up near the roof.

More people were coming out now.

While Chrissy was taking it all in, Albert was pulling them out. Three women, two men, another guy wiggling his way out. Albert pulled him up and the guy?a middle-aged man in dirty suit?started crying and actually kissed the grass, not caring that wet leaves got stuck to his face.

A woman named Gail had her arm around Chrissy. She was crying, trying to tell her something that made absolutely no sense.

Alona came next, having to do a bit of wiggling to get through, but she made it, all right. “Praise the goddamn Lord,” she said.

And a voice in Chrissy’s head chose that moment to say: This is all going a little too smoothly, don’t you think? Grimshanks might be a lot of things in this world and mostly out of it, but he’s not stupid. Whatever crawling pestilence has invaded his corpse, it’s surely not stupid?

“Come on,” Albert called through the window.

There were still a few left that could make it under their own power, but they weren’t coming.

“Screw ‘em,” Alona said.

But that wasn’t Albert’s way. “Come on in there, you people.”

But nobody was coming. From where Chrissy was standing, she could not see anything. Just that square of blackness and nothing else. Not so much as a face. Chrissy felt herself tensing inside. This was not good, this was not good at all.

Then a voice, weak and rasping said, “Gimme a hand, will ya?”

And Chrissy almost told Albert not to, because there was something wrong with that voice and everybody suddenly seemed to sense that. They all took a few steps back from the window. One woman let out a muffled cry and ran off. But Albert, good old Albert, he stuck his hand down there and then jerked as it was seized. He tried to pull it back, but it would not let go.

Chrissy saw an oversized white hand gripping his wrist.

“Well, well, well,” Grimshanks said, “when the cat’s away, my how the mice will play.”

Then she caught a glimpse of his face down there…white and swollen and undulant on the bone beneath, a series of pink scars spreading out across his nose in a fine threading like that face had shattered and been stitched back together. His eyes were huge and yellow, lacking pupils. And his teeth, like skinning knives.

Albert screamed. “Help me! Help me! Get that fucking thing offa me! Get it offa me! Oh Jesus Christ…”

He was not the sort of guy who would have ever screamed in the normal course of events, but this was certainly not normal. He was thrashing and pulling, that huge, rubbery white hand tightening down like a vise. It would never let go and you could see that. Grimshanks was giggling and squeezing that arm and then the flesh of his hand did not look like flesh, it was not smooth and riddled with dripping sores as before. Now it was lumpy and blistering and bubbling. What had been porous white flesh was now thousands of plump grave maggots, glistening and squirming…they surged right up Albert’s arm in a crawling mass. And then they weren’t maggots, but just a stringy and spreading mat of skin that slowly slid back down Albert’s arm and formed itself into that bulbous, sausage-fingered hand.

Albert was screaming hysterically by then.

Alona took hold of him. “Let him go, you fucking queer boy! Let him fucking go!”

Chrissy grabbed Albert around the waist and pulled with Alona. But it was no good. As she strained and sobbed and wailed, Grimshanks just laughed that much louder.

Finally, Chrissy fell away.

“Motherfucker,” Alona said, falling away, too.

Black juice dripped from Albert’s arm and smoke rose from it. And there was a good reason for that: where that white and worming clown-flesh had touched his own, there was no skin. Just raw quilts of bleeding muscle and straining pink tendon. His arm had been eaten right down to basal anatomy.

And then as Grimshanks cackled with a sound of shattering glass, that hand of his tightened over Albert’s forearm, actually seeming to loop around it in an unbroken ring of white. Then Grimshanks started jerking on Albert’s arm. Each time driving his head into the brick facade of the building. The first two impacts left Albert stunned, the third and fourth, senseless. By the sixth and seventh, there was a bloody stain on the bricks. And Grimshanks kept doing it until Albert’s skull was smashed and his scalp slopped bonelessly like there was nothing but jelly beneath his hair. Then there was a violent, wet snapping noise and Albert fell dead into the grass, rolling away from the window, nothing but a bloody knob of bone left where his arm had been.

Chrissy was the one screaming now.

“Run!” Alona said. “Run like hell!”

The only other person there was Gail and she took hold of Chrissy and pulled her away. The others were all running in every which direction.

Albert’s arm came spinning out of the window, going right over the top of Chrissy’s head and then the clown’s lewd face filled the opening. He was grinning, spatters of dark blood sprinkled over his white flesh. His yellow eyes were huge like harvest moons, tiny red beetles crawling over their surface.

“How about it, Chrissy-pissy?” he groaned. “How about giving a fellah a hand? Huh? Huh? What say?”

And what came out then was not that grotesque hand of his, but a great hooked talon, claws curving downward like the blades of a scythe. Those claws just missed Chrissy’s foot by a few inches, sinking into the earth and digging three-inch deep furrows as they were pulled back to the window.

“Kiss my ass!” Alona told him.

And then she was running with Chrissy and Gail.

Chrissy’s mind was moving in about ten directions at the same time. She was thinking about her mother and Mitch. About Deke. About what she had just seen and what she had lived through thus far. And she was also thinking about the fact that it looked as if Witcham was a lake now and Crooked Hill was an island thrusting from it. And that there probably was no escape.

Alona shouted for them to follow, but Gail pulled Chrissy off in a different direction.

“No!” Chrissy said. “We have to go with her!”

But Gail yanked her into the trees, dragging her into a thicket that was close-pressed and thick with clouds of nipping flies. They fought their way forward, crunching through leaves, stumbling and falling and generally making enough noise to wake the dead…or to alert the already woken dead as to where they were going.

Not good. Not good at all.

Chrissy was as frightened as any that had escaped that cellar, but she knew that they?all of them, in fact?were making terrible mistakes. They should have stayed together and put up a united front, found a way to defend themselves. But instead they’d all scattered to the four winds and that was just plain stupid. Alone or in pairs, Grimshanks could hunt them down and kill them. But all together, they might be too much for him.

So much for reasoning.

Now there was only terror. The terror of the hunted.

The mist was thick, the rain falling gently. Gail led on, moving pretty much in circles. Starting this way, running into thick wet brush, stopping and starting again. It was ridiculous. They came into an opening of sorts and the trees thinned somewhat. Chrissy looked back once and saw Grimshanks. He was climbing down the face of the orphanage. Like some fat white spider, he was crawling down the building from the roof of all places.

Oh, Jesus.

She was trying to remember what she knew of Crooked Hill. There was the orphanage on top, of course, and the ruined church. A little graveyard on the other side. The whole thing circled by a rusty wrought-iron fence. A winding drive that led up there. There were lots of trees that had lost most of their leaves now. That’s what she was seeing as they entered the tangled woods, yellow and orange leaves everywhere, a veritable carpet of them.

“Stop,” Gail said, pulling Chrissy down behind a fallen tree. “We have to think. We can’t let that monster run us like dogs. We have to think.”

Chrissy almost told her it was a little too late for that. “We should have stayed together. Now he can get to us one by one.”

“Well, we can’t let him. We have to do something.”

But what?

Crooked Hill was essentially an island now. And they were trapped on it. They could hide in the woods and play tag with that fucking demonic clown, but sooner or later he would find them. And when he did, when he did…

Chrissy looked around.

Just those stripped trees everywhere. Some had fallen against one another and overhead their branches were woven tightly together. Stumps, logs, piles of leaves. Patches of mist. Water dripping from tree limbs.

A branch snapped in the distance.

“What now?” Chrissy said.

“We…we should move.”

They got up and hopped over the tree. They tried to move soundlessly, placing their feet down carefully, but all those leaves made every step crackle and crunch. They held hands, terrified, exhausted, subsisting on raw adrenaline now. They could hear branches snapping and leaves crunching and they seemed to be coming from every direction.

“He’s coming,” Gail said, her eyes wide and alert like those of a hunted animal.

Chrissy didn’t know.

Yet she did. Maybe it wasn’t Grimshanks looking for her, but somebody definitely was. There were more than one and they were getting closer. There were shapes coming out of the mist, long-armed shapes moving through the trees. Gail looked this way, then that.

Dead, anemic faces were watching them from the foliage. Gail screamed and ran, disappearing into the fog and cover. Chrissy started after her, stopped, looked around and saw nothing. But, oh, they were there, tightening the noose, springing the trap and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

There was a sighing sibilance behind her as something had flown past.

She turned and saw what it was.

Had time to scream as those huge white hands reached out for Gail, seizing her and holding her up in the air by the throat. Gail made a gurgling sound as Grimshanks squeezed her throat and her neck snapped.

“See how pretty the lady is, Chrissy?” the clown said. “See how she dances?” He shook Gail’s corpse around, dancing with it in a circle, pirouetting and dipping and twisting. Blood ran from Gail’s mouth, her head flopped bonelessly on her snapped neck. “See how she likes to dance, Chrissy? You’ll like it, too! Just as they all liked it when Grimshanks made them dance!”

Chrissy tried to scream and she just couldn’t. She was just screamed out.

An abomination, that’s what he was. An absolute abomination. Grimshanks was a clown from a mortuary. As he danced around, the bells on his jester’s cap jingled and jingled. And the fact that he was dressed in that silly clown’s outfit with the green pom-poms made it all that much more ludicrous and perverse.

Remember, a voice told her, he wants you to be afraid. He wants you to scream and carry on. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

But how could she not? He had her and he knew it. There was nowhere to run, no way to fight him. Nothing, nothing. This is how it ended. Right here. In these goddamn woods with this fucking obscene clown making a sick game of her death.

Grimshanks roared with laughter. Behind those swollen black lips, his teeth were long and yellow and sharp. He sank them into Gail’s throat and started to chew and tear and gulp.

“There he is!” someone said. “Get him!”

Chrissy felt herself swoon. She went right down to her knees as the cavalry came charging in. It was led by Alona. She had six or seven people with her brandishing clubs and spears made from fenceposts of all things.

Grimshanks hissed at them and barred his bloody teeth. Flies came out of his mouth in droning, black clouds. He tossed Gail’s corpse aside and his fingers became hooks. He made an impressive and chilling show of it, growling and snapping and shrieking at Alona and the others in a weird, shrilling voice that made the hairs stand up on the back of Chrissy’s neck.

But it was all bluff.

The cavalry was coming on, charging through the drizzle.

Grimshanks had tormented them, belittled them, made light of their most private secrets, and boasted on how he would slaughter them all. Not only them but their wives and husbands, children and parents. They were pissed. Beyond pissed. They wanted payback. They wanted their pound of flesh and they planned on having it.

Chrissy could feel their simmering, animalistic rage as they pounded forward in a tribal line. She thought Grimshanks could, too. Because suddenly he did not look so big and scary and omnipotent. In fact, he looked small and nervous and, yes, maybe even afraid.

“They’re coming for you,” Chrissy told him, wiping sweat and rain from her face. “And when they catch you, they’ll pull you apart! They’ll rip you to pieces! Do you hear me, you silly fucking clown? They’ll rip you to pieces!”

Grimshanks screeched in her face with a hot blast of fetid meat and then he made to grab her, but he wasn’t quick enough. She darted under his hands and came back up, just filled with anger and attitude. Her nails were long and she slashed at his face, cutting furrows in that pulpy white flesh, shearing open one blood-veined eyeball and making him cry out, making him fall back.

And then the others were there.

Clubs were in motion, pummeling the clown. Alona took a sharpened fencepost and rammed it right into his side. Black blood poured forth in a torrent, splashing out and steaming. Beetles and flies and maggots rained out. A club smashed his head, another snapped his wrist. They were getting the better of him. They were actually getting the better of him. He screamed and roared and howled as those clubs rose and fell, rose and fell…and then he just collapsed. He hit the ground, broken and bleeding that vile black sap, insects pouring from him and great red worms foaming from his shattered skull.

And then he was not moving.

A gray and foul steam rose from him and everyone just stood around, breathing and staring and hating.

“There,” Alona said. “That does it for that fucking pedophile.”

Everyone just stood there. Chrissy looked from Gail’s corpse to the remains of Grimshanks. She found she could say nothing. She could not believe he was dead. It had seemed too…easy. Things like him did not just die like that. You could not simply beat them to death and wipe your hands clean and say, there, that’s that.

“Goddamn piece of shit,” Alona said. “I should squat and piss all over him.”

“No, don’t get too close,” Chrissy said.

“Why? He’s dead.”

The others mumbled that it was true.

But then Grimshanks began to move. Oh, Chrissy had felt it building like an electrical charge in the air. Shadows seemed to crawl and slither over the clown’s body, rippling and spreading, gathering and shifting.

“What the hell?” somebody said.

His flesh began to move like liquid white rubber. You could hear things rearranging themselves, bones popping back into place. His skull sealed itself and his face smoothed out, those eyes rising out of the mess. He was breathing. Breathing and living, cells dividing, flesh pulsing and repairing and regenerating and nobody did a thing. Nobody could bring themselves to do a damn thing.

“Oh no,” Chrissy said.

Those eyes blazed with malignant life and those yellow teeth slid from their gums. And so quickly nobody could do anything but gasp.

Grimshanks said, “Silly cunts.”

His head darted out with amazing speed like a rattlesnake striking and his jaws fastened on a woman’s ankle, biting right through it. Then he was up, moving and slashing with claws that opened bellies and spitting black acidic juices into faces that liquefied instantly.

Everyone scattered.

Those that were capable, anyway.

The others fell to the grass, bleeding and sizzling and moaning.

Alona and Chrissy fell back and away.

Grimshanks rose up before them and drifted up and up, above their heads, spinning around and around, cackling madly the whole while. As he passed above the treetops, they heard his voice echoing out: “Oh, you’ll pay now! You’ll all fucking pay now and in ways you cannot imagine! ALL OF YOU! PAY! PAY! PAY!”

Then he was gone.

25

The question was: where were they?

Harry Teal didn’t believe for one flipping minute that the waters of Witcham were not crawling…or swimming…with zombies and maybe even things much worse. He was not so naive to think otherwise.

Mitch and Tommy and Deke had been gone over an hour now and night couldn’t be too far away. But there was hope, oh yes, there was certainly hope. A helicopter had passed overhead not twenty minutes before, circled, then flown away. But a voice had announced over the loudspeaker that they would be back. To just wait. It wouldn’t be long.

So they had that going for them.

Wanda had Rita and Rhonda on either side of her. The cat on her lap. The three of them had their backs up against the chimney, were cuddling together under the blankets. Chuck was pretty much keeping lookout with Harry. And what that meant for the most part was swatting at flies and keeping an eye on the water for anything suspicious.

Harry had not known any of them twenty-four hours ago, but now they were like family to him. That might have sounded odd, but after doing time and then being thrust into the madhouse of Witcham, he had bonded to them very quickly. Mitch and Tommy had trusted him with their lives and that’s all he saw now. His duty. Maybe he hadn’t been real strong on duty thus far in his life, but now he saw it and understood it and would not let it go. Like the girls were his nieces, Chuck his kid brother, and old Wanda was maybe his grandma.

He just wished that helicopter would come back.

But there were probably dozens if not hundreds of people waiting on rooftops to be plucked off. They would just have to wait their turn, that was all.

Harry squatted there, the four-ten on his lap, waiting for something. Something good or something bad, whatever shape it might take.

There was a thumping from beneath the waterline.

Muffled, sure, but he heard it and so did the others.

“Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “Oh, no.”

“Hush,” Wanda told her.

Chuck made ready with the salt.

Mr. Cheese growled.

“We’re okay,” Harry said to them. “We’re all okay.”

Wanda looked over at him, didn’t seem to believe it for a minute.

And then he saw her eyes, staring at something behind him, her lips attempting to say something. He swung around, bringing up Tommy’s shotgun. A yellow, leprous hand was reaching from the water, fingers clutching madly. And then another hand and still another. They clawed along the lip of the roof, trying to find something they could pull themselves up with.

Rita or Rhonda, or maybe both of them, let out a muted scream. He took up the shotgun. The hands were everywhere now, some bloated and fleshy, others scabrous and decayed, scratching at the roof and yanking off shingles. He saw faces emerging from the black water. Ruined and wrecked faces, collapsed from going to soft rot in the water.

Harry started shooting.

All there was was the sound of Rita and Rhonda whimpering and Harry jerking that trigger. He kept shooting until he had no more shells left. He blasted faces from skulls and fingers from hands and still they kept coming, the legions of the grave.

And then Wanda said, “The salt, boy! The salt!”

Chuck seemed to remember then.

He took up the five-pound bag of Morton’s and fumbled it in his hands, nearly dropping it. Then he had it open. He dug out handfuls and tossed them at the advancing dead. They began to smoke and blister, screaming as the salt burned into them. Chuck kept throwing and they slid back into the water.

“Harry…help us,” Wanda said.

One of the things had come over the other side of the roof. It had Rita by the hair with a gray, flaking hand. Rhonda was punching at the thing, but with little effect. Harry went over there and threw salt in the zombie’s face. Right away, it began to steam, the flesh going to wax. It lost its balance and tumbled down the roof incline and into the water, losing pieces of itself in the process.

But they weren’t gone.

They were still out there. Harry could see them just under the surface, maybe a dozen or more. Just watching and watching with those black, watery eyes.

Those that had eyes.

26

Here’s what Chrissy said to Alona: “That’s a stupid idea. I’m sorry, but that’s just stupid.”

“Listen, honey, and listen good. Because we don’t have much time,” Alona said after they had left Gail’s corpse in the clearing and the newly-resurrected Grimshanks had drifted away like a balloon. “This hill, Crooked Hill, do you know what it is now? It’s an island. A stinking, pissing little island. What’s here? The orphanage. A falling-down church. A little old graveyard. Some woods and fields. Not squat else, honey. Those other idiots ran off and this after I had a hell of a time corralling them together in the first place. Now it’s just me and you. Again, I say, Crooked Hill is an island now. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. That fucking clown will hunt us like rabbits out in the open. We have to use our heads. We have to hide somewhere defensible, all right? We have hide in plain sight.”

“But the orphanage?”

“Yes, the orphanage for chrissake.”

Chrissy didn’t bother arguing after that, because, really, what was there to argue about? Alona was right. Alona was not Gail who wandered in circles out of sheer panic. She was different. She was tough. She had attitude and balls. People like her made a habit of surviving because they were essentially militaristic by nature.

“Okay, okay.”

Alona grabbed her and they broke from the treeline and made for the orphanage, which looked like the mother of all haunted houses. The prototype that artists used when they painted spook houses for Halloween decorations: tall and dark and craggy, a rambling pile of brick that seemed to lean out over the overgrown lawn at you like it wanted to catch you in its shadow. It must have had a hundred boarded windows, jagged gables, lots of tall crumbling chimneys and towers and crooked weathervanes. Weathered and water-stained and sagging, you could not get past the idea that there was something impossibly sinister about it.

Jesus.

Chrissy stopped. Looking up at it made her seize up inside. How could you possibly expect to find sanctuary in a tomb like that? She didn’t honestly know if she could do this. Every terror from childhood had suddenly leaped into her belly fully-formed with a terrible, black weight. She could feel them in there, unfurling their spidery legs and reminding her of everything she had been scared of as a little girl.

The rain started again, falling in gray sheets, hammering down and then lessening a bit. It stirred up the mold on the ground and gave everything a dank, rotten smell.

“Move!” Alona said, shoving her along.

They were coming at it from the front now, along the overgrown drive, the grounds wild with shrubs and bushes and gnarled dead trees. The grasses were up past their knees and Chrissy kept expecting to find bones twisted in them. Everything around that malefic building was dead. There was no avoiding that. As if the orphanage itself were poisoned and year by year, that poison seeped farther out, contaminating more of the earth.

On the porch overhang, there were letters chiseled from stone: MANUAL TRAINING ACADEMY, they read.

That’s nice, Chrissy though. Very homey.

Finally, they stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the entrance. The orphanage rose up above them, rotting boards barely concealing the darkness behind those ancient windows. The feeling Chrissy got looking up at it against that gray, overcast sky was not good. This place was filled with death and she could not convince herself otherwise.

The steps before them were wide and warped, heaved-up in spots from frost. Weeds grew from cracks in them. The railings were rusted, the porch itself wide and long, its boards warped and feathered with mold.

“Watch your step,” Alona said.

She led the way up to the massive double doors. One of them stood straight and tall, the other had fallen in. Gaining entrance then would be no problem at all. A smell came wafting out and it described the interior just fine: wood rot and wetness and yellowed bones.

“C’mon,” Alona said, ducking through the door with apparently no fear whatsoever.

Inside the stench increased. It was almost gagging, like sticking your head down an old, poisoned well and breathing deep. Just mephitic and cloying. They were in some sort of lobby. Corridors ran off in either direction. A massive staircase set before them. The walls were bowed, the ceilings rotting right through in places from water damage. The wainscoting was wormholed and chewed as if mice had been at it. Everywhere, threading cobwebs and abandoned bird’s nest poking from holes in the walls. The floor was tiled in pink and green, dead leaves blown everywhere, many floating in standing pools of water. Shadows spilled from doorways, thick and spreading. Dust was settled over everything, but much of it had been disturbed as if many feet had trod through it.

“Well?” Chrissy said. “What now?”

Alona looked around, saw something leaning in a corner that interested her. A crowbar. “Ha!” she said. “I bet somebody pried that door open and then ran off when they got inside. Probably scared to death.”

“I don’t blame them.”

They passed an old office that was empty save for a pile of rotting wood against one wall and an old calendar still hanging on the wall. It was so filthy you could not read what year it was from. The only good thing they’d found so far was that many of the boards had fallen from the windows and light came in. Dreary grayish light, but light all the same.

“This way,” Alona said, slapping the crowbar in her hands.

They followed a passageway near the stairs and it led into what might have been a dining hall in the old days. A few long wooden tables arranged in the center. A variety of initials and profanity were scratched into them. Probably by kids, but certainly not while the orphanage was in operation. The place had been closed before Chrissy was born, but there were plenty of stories of it floating around Witcham. And they all agreed on one thing: Bleeding Heart had been a grim, unpleasant place.

Alona led them away and through a high stone archway.

“The chapel,” she said.

Yes, of course. It had been a Catholic-run orphanage and you could almost hear the swishing of the nun’s habits, hear the sound of their sticks colliding with the backsides of naughty children. This was not a place that had been intended to be charming or comforting. It had been rigid and well-ordered and utilitarian, run by stern women who saw no love or joy in what they did.

The chapel was dusty and dirty in there, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The plaster walls rotted through with great holes. Things scratching and skittering in them. You had to descend a few short steps to get in there and Alona did, of course, dragging Chrissy with her. Not so brave now, but clutching her close like a girl with her kid sister in tow making her way through a carnival haunted house.

The smell in here was not just animal droppings and plaster rot and seeping water, but the overpowering reek of decay. Fleshy decay.

And they both saw why in the dim light that filtered in.

They were in a nest of the undead.

“Oh, shit,” Chrissy said.

Alona clamped a hand over her mouth.

The dead were everywhere, but they were not moving. Dozens and dozens of them were sprawled around like heaps of laundry. They laid singly and in piles, many right on top of others. Men, women, children. Even a few babies clutched in the spidery arms of their mothers. All of them were a ghastly white, their faces and arms and exposed parts set with sores and contusions and lumpy, cancerous growths. Many were covered in flies and some were riddled with worms and crawly things. Some wore dirty clothes, others were naked, and still others had draped themselves in mildewed sheets. They looked like they were just sleeping…some in fetal positions, others with arms thrown over their bosoms or over their faces, limbs awry…but they weren’t sleeping.

Chrissy and Alona were absolutely silent and they could hear things scuttling in the walls, but no breathing. Not so much as a whisper. Nothing but the buzzing of flies. This was some form of cold dormancy. They were essentially dead, but they would not stay that way and they might wake at any moment.

Alona tugged on Chrissy’s arm, pointed.

There was something up on the altar.

A form leaning up there like a wooden dummy, as dormant as the rest. A man…or something like a man. A wraith dressed in an oily leather coat with a bloody gray shift beneath. His feet were bare, bloodless and mottled. But what was worse was that you could not see his face, for he wore a mask. A death mask that must have been peeled off a corpse…a seamed and cadaverous thing with the eyes cut out and an intact scalp of greasy black hair that hung to the shoulders. The lower portion had been cut away so that its wearer’s mouth was unimpeded. Chrissy could not see much of the face beneath, only that the skin had been peeled away from its jaw and mouth, and what was left was muscle and ligament and sharp yellow teeth clenched together.

The sight of that thing made her want to scream.

Made her want to slit open her wrists and drink lye and gouge out her eyes with a dull knife. Anything, anything to be spared the horror of looking at it and the horror that would come when it actually moved.

There were flies crawling all over it, buzzing and droning, rising in a dark, busy mist and descending once again to feed and lay their eggs. Already, it seemed, some of those eggs had hatched and you could see them moving under that mask.

Yes, this was the messiah.

She could not know that, but she did not doubt it.

This was the messiah and scattered at his dead feet were coffins. Well, maybe not coffins, more like simple wooden crates, but they no doubt served the same purpose. There were no lids on any of them and even in the dusty light, you could see the awful things that slept in them, waiting for their master to call them up like genies from bottles and evil spirits from beyond the grave.

No, no, this was too much.

Just too fucking much.

Chrissy could not let herself be here when they began to wake, when those corpses rose and grinned at her with melting, marble-white faces. And she must be far away when that wraith pulled itself down from the altar. For if she saw such a thing move…what mind could remain intact after such a vision? It would be like gulping down a bottle of Drano and expecting your guts not to burn and liquefy, come splashing out your mouth in a blue foam.

She would go insane.

And, yes, she would welcome it. Because the deepest, blighted depths of her mind would be infinitely preferable to what would come next. If that monstrosity got its hands on her, her end would be legendary in its agony and duration.

Alona guided her quietly from the chapel and back into the passage beyond. The need to run was strong, but Alona would not have it. Chrissy could feel how tense she was next to her, her muscles standing taut under the skin.

When they got back to the lobby, Alona directed her towards the stairs.

“Maybe we should just go outside,” Chrissy suggested.

“No, we’ll stick to our plan. We’ll hide amongst them. Help will be coming. It’s only a matter of time. I want to be alive when they get here.”

They started up the stairs, pressing their feet down carefully. The steps creaked, but held. Some of them were in such terrible shape, it did not seem as if they could hold much more weight. They went up slowly, tense and expectant, not knowing what they might be walking into. You could hear the water falling outside, hear it running through cracks and crevices and dripping. Rats scuttled and scratched in the walls. But rats were hardly a threat to them.

Chrissy held onto Alona as they went up. She was trembling and sweaty, literally on the verge of falling to pieces. Fear had not just entered her through every pore, but had consumed her. She could almost smell its thick, noxious odor clinging to her. If any place in the world could realistically be called haunted, it was this place. Yes, maybe it was just brick and wood, mortar and nails and marble…but it seemed so much more. You could almost smell the evil seeping from every crack and wormhole, a gassy and violent odor like the excrement of ghosts, a spiritually rancid emanation that made your guts curl-up in your belly.

Nothing wholesome, nothing good could smell like that.

Up they went, expecting the worse but getting nothing but the sounds of rats scampering and scratching in the walls. The corridor at the top was very shadowy, the air moist and almost slimy. They checked it out room by room, but saw nothing dead or nothing pretending to be that way.

“Listen,” Alona suddenly said.

Chrissy did, her heart hammering. She heard nothing at first, but she was feeling everything. The orphanage was like some rotting coffin they had been thrust into. All around them she was sensing movement, crawling shadows and creeping things. It was all brewing darkly in her soul, making her want to scream so badly that she had to press a hand to her mouth.

And then she heard it.

Behind them, maybe coming up the stairs, a rustling and secretive sound as something dragged itself upward. As it came, a hot and flyblown odor wafted from it, becoming stronger and more nauseating by the moment. She could hear something like fingernails being dragged up the staircase banister. A clotted, rasping noise that might have been breathing. Dear God, any moment now it would be upon them, a grinning and morbid malignancy with hollowed yellow eyes?

Alona grabbed her and pushed her through the first doorway they came to, into a dim, dusty room that was long and narrow like a hospital ward in an old movie. There were boarded windows on the far wall.

Whatever it was, it was upstairs now.

They could hear its shuffling footsteps and they were coming.

Getting closer and closer.

27

Mitch saw it, felt he was being seen.

There was Crooked Hill, as it had always been called, and capping it, the orphanage. Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. A three-story pile of crumbling brick, the sort of grim and harrowing place that etched itself into the mind instantly as a place of ghosts and the restless dead. How could it be anything else? It was built in 19^th century Midwestern Carpenter Gothic style, tall and dark and forbidding, just a crazy-quilt of tall and narrow windows, overhanging eaves, and razorbacked gables. A catacomb of rooms leading into rooms, attics and cellars and crawlspaces and leaning stairways. Its roof was jagged and sharp and rising like mountain peaks in some expressionistic film, each one sharp enough to slit open the belly of the sky. And on them, ancient lightning rods and rusted weathervanes and soot-covered stacked chimneys leaning precariously this way and that. A great and rambling surreal tomb.

What had they been thinking? Mitch thought then and there. What in the name of all that’s holy had they been thinking when they converted that relic into an orphanage? Just the sight of it is enough to inspire nightmares and breathless dreams of haunted houses. What had children thought when they were brought here? Or did they even think? Did the sight of that architectural graveyard simply rip their minds open and make them scream themselves numb?

“Jesus,” Tommy said. “I can almost feel it waiting for us.”

Deke swallowed as they drifted up towards Crooked Hill. “When I was…when I was in Junior High, we came up here on a dare. And you know what? We made it to the front door and they we turned and ran.”

Mitch did not doubt that.

When he was a kid the place had actually been in operation. He’d even known a few kids that had lived there. And although they’d claimed that the place did not bother them, he’d never believed it. For on a clear day, you could see that monstrosity practically from anywhere in the city, a great heap of black bones lording over Witcham itself. And now, right now, he could sense all the nights locked up in the old place, the dismal lives spent in its guts, the horror and despair and godawful loneliness that dripped from the walls like blood.

And as he looked at it, feeling the childhood terror he’d had of the place spreading out in his belly, he felt something else. Something electric and inexplicable.

Chrissy.

Chrissy.

Chrissy.

Chrissy was in there.

“Let’s go get Chrissy,” he said.

“If she’s there,” Tommy said.

“Oh, she’s there, all right. Can’t you feel her?”

Maybe Tommy could and maybe he couldn’t and maybe he had shut down things like feelings because you didn’t want to be emoting in this place. They rowed the boat up to the hill, took hold of a bush and pulled themselves in. When they were all out on the grass, they dragged the boat up in case they needed it later.

Mitch figured they had roughly thirty minutes of daylight left. That wasn’t a lot, but it would have to do. It seemed wrong going into the orphanage in broad daylight, even if that broad daylight happened to be rainy and misting and overcast, the light dull and leaden like it were strained through motheaten cloth. It seemed like you couldn’t go into such a place until after nightfall, like maybe the doors wouldn’t open until the sun had set. Midnight, would have been better. Midnight on an especially dark and wind-blown Halloween night.

But he figured for places like the orphanage, Halloween was every day.

Side by side, they moved up through the trees, not saying a word. There was an old churchyard near to where they were, flanking the ruined hulk of an equally old church. Mitch knew where the orphanage itself was, led them towards it. They stumbled through the moist undergrowth until they came to a road. Its pavement was buckled and frost-heaved, but it beat the shit out of the woods.

The rain started coming down hard again, pelting them and stinging their faces, reducing visibility to just a few yards. They kept moving, drenched and heavy. The ground was a sluicing bog of mud. The dead could have been anywhere in that sodden grayness. Anywhere.

“If I ever get dry again,” Tommy said, water funneling off the brim of his baseball cap, “I mean really fucking dry, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself.”

“Rain, rain, rain,” Deke grumbled.

Mitch would have complained, too, but the way he was looking at it, at least the rain was just water. It could have been that yellow rain that melted people. The road up to the orphanage was a river now. Water was rolling down hill and trying to wash them off their feet.

Squinting in the rain, Mitch said, “A few turns and we’ll be there.”

Tommy opened his mouth to say something and there was a load booming sound, a cracking sound. Gunfire. Something sprayed into the brush just ahead of them. It was muffled by the driving rain, but there was no mistaking it.

“Shotgun,” Tommy said, pushing himself and the others into the ditch at the side of the road. Right into some three feet of standing water.

“You missed,” a voice called from the trees. “You goddamned well missed. What kind of monkey-assed, shit-fucking shooting was that?”

Jesus Christ, Mitch thought, that voice. It was?

“Hubb Sadler,” Tommy said. “That’s Hubb Sadler.”

Of all goddamned things.

“I can’t get a clear shot in this rain, now can I?” Knucker said.

“You better leave the shooting to them what knows how,” Hardy James said.

The three of them began to bicker back and forth until Hubb started to shout at them, calling them a bunch of “silly, useless, dick-happy cock-knockers.” Tommy was chuckling and so was Mitch. Deke was at a loss as to what was so funny about them being shot at by this bunch of nutcases.

“Hey! Hubb Sadler!” Tommy called out. “Lower your goddamn gun! We’re friendly over here.”

A moment of silence punctuated by the pouring rain.

“Who’s that? Who in the name of the fuck-humping Christ is that?”

Tommy identified himself. “I’m with Mitch Barron. We’re coming out. Don’t be peppering our asses or we’ll shoot back.”

“Come out slow, you fucking asshole,” Hubb said.

Tommy laughed. “Same old Hubb.”

Tommy and Mitch led the way forward out of that chilly, flooded ditch and up the road until the figures of several people were visible in the trees. Sure, there they were, the Three Musketeers or The Three Stooges…depending entirely how you looked at it: Hubb Sadler, Hardy James, and old Knucker herself who could drink any living man under the table and had been one mean-assed arm wrestler in her younger days. But they weren’t alone. With them, dressed in yellow rain slickers were a couple others from the store: Hot Tamale and Herb.

“Be careful,” Hot Tamale warned her little group. “They might look alive, but that don’t mean that they are. I say we shoot ‘em to be sure.”

“I say you help feed the third world and go on a diet,” Tommy said.

Hot Tamale took a step forward, very round and very excited. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Mouth. All the fucking people in the world and we got to hook up with a weasel like you.”

Tommy laughed. “Oh, I get it, Hubb. You got this pig with to use as bait. You draw in those zombies and throw her at ‘em, take off running. The meat on her, she’d keep a dozen busy for at least an hour.”

Mitch sighed. “Tommy…”

“You’ll wanna watch that mouth of yours, you skinny-assed little piece of shit,” Hot Tamale said, ready to swing. “Else I’ll shut it for you. How’s that sound? Because if I can’t, Herb here sure as shit can.”

Herb just stood there looking dazed under the brim of his cowboy hat. “Huh?” he said.

“Oh, shut the hell up, you mother-rapers,” Hubb told them. “Mitch, Jesus, what in the fuck are you doing out here?”

So Mitch told him. It was Chrissy. Chrissy had brought them here. They thought she was being held in the orphanage. Hubb said he’d rallied his own troops after the “big flood” as he called it for an assault on that old spook house because the way he was seeing it, it had to be the epicenter of the whole mess.

“You cut off a snake’s head,” Hardy said, “and the body dies soon enough.”

They were much better provisioned than Mitch’s crew. They were all carrying 12-gauge pump shotguns and wore duck hunting vests equipped with ammo pouches. Clipped on the vests were flashlights and road flares. Hot Tamale and Herb carried duffels of gas bombs made from beer bottles with tampons shoved down the throats.

“Gonna have ourselves a wienie roast,” Herb told them.

Knucker held up her shotgun. “Rock salt. We emptied the pellets from our shells and loaded ‘em with rock salt. Them things don’t like salt. It eats ‘em right up. One good round usually does it.”

Another fully-loaded 12 gauge was slung over her back and she handed it to Tommy.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

“All right,” Hubb said, “enough of this cocksucking hen party, lets go do what we came to get done.”

They formed a skirmish line, stopping now and again so Hubb could take a pull off the little oxygen bottle he carried. Side by side, the eight of them moved slowly up the winding road to the old gates of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. The gates had long ago fallen down and were knotted in grasses and creepers. The orphanage rose up before them, crumbling and rotting like some medieval castle. Nobody hesitated. They slipped through the gates and re-formed their line. Mitch and Tommy were at one end with Deke, Hubb and the others spreading out in the other direction.

“We got company,” Hot Tamale said.

In the driving rain, they hadn’t seen what was in a little dip just before them. Not until they were almost on top of it. Six of the ghouls were on their hands and knees, feeding on the remains of a couple corpses sprawled before them. The bodies were so mutilated, gutted and gnawed and stripped, you could not tell if they had been men or women. The zombies just kept on feeding, tearing off bits of meat and chewing on bones. It was revolting.

“Holy oh cow,” Herb said.

The zombies looked up now, seeing they had an audience. Two of them were little girls with filthy school uniforms on and plaid skirts. Catholic schoolgirls from hell. They were white-faced and black-eyed, gore dripping from their mouths. The others were adults…or had been. The one that stood up first to challenge the intruders had been a young woman. At least, she looked like a young woman. She was naked, just as cold and white as cemetery marble. Her face was like some bubbly clot of mortician’s wax, set with holes and bulging growths. The lot of it looking like it had melted and ran…tendrils and ropes of it hanging like the strings of a dirty mop, growing right into her chest. She said something that was utterly unintelligible.

The girls kept gnawing on bones, sitting Indian-style on the muddy ground, watching what was about to take place with their huge, glistening black eyes. Transfixed like children watching a scary movie and munching popcorn.

The others stood up with the woman and started forward.

“All right,” Hubb said, “pay attention, you boys, this is how it’s done.”

He stepped forward with Hardy and Knucker. Hot Tamale and Herb stayed back.

As the dead came up out of that dip, Hubb gave the signal and the three of them opened up. They spent two shells each and the effect was devastating. The 12 gauge rounds hit their marks easily at such close range. One of the adults actually exploded in a spray of gray flesh and rubbery bones, lots of that black fluid. The others did not come apart. Pieces of them were blown off, but they still stood. At least, for about a second or two and then the rock salt did its business. What happened then was like some crafty, visceral piece of Hollywood special effects magic. The zombies moaned and cried out and literally folded right up, smoking and steaming and melting. Flopping about on the ground in the rain, their skins bursting open and letting forth a tide of black goo and worms. And that was about it.

“Shit,” Deke said, turning away.

The smell that came from them was hot and nauseating, like thousands of boiling dead fish.

“Works even better than table salt,” Tommy said.

28

Chrissy had thought that one thing was coming after Alona and her, but now she just wasn’t so sure about that. Whatever was down the hallway, it sounded as if there were more than one. She could hear the slap of bare feet, many feet, and now they had just stopped down there. Somewhere.

The waiting began.

Chrissy and Alona huddled in the dimness of that room Alona had shuttled them quickly into. It was a big room they were in. With what light came in through the rotting planks nailed over the broken windows at the far end, Chrissy could see that it must have been some sort of dormitory at one time. She could just imagine rows of metal-framed beds lined up against the peeling, mustard-colored walls. But now, it was just a long and dusty closet with cobwebs draped overhead and dust on the floors that had to be an inch deep. It was just filthy in there. The remains of broken beer bottles on the floor, cast-off cigarette butts, old leaves, rat droppings in the corners. A great hole was eaten through one of the walls. It was so big you could look into the room next door. The ceiling was drooping from water damage, many of the tiles having dropped to the floor. The air was thick and damp, stinking of plaster rot and something like old urine.

Chrissy and Alona squatted against one wall, holding onto each other. They were both sweating and shivering, tense and waiting. They were in a hell of a fix and they both knew it. Other than the crowbar Alona had, they were pretty much defenseless. The only thing in the room that could be used as a weapon were those shattered beer bottles.

But they were over near the door and Chrissy did not want to go over there.

And that was another problem: the door would not close.

Its frame was so swollen from damp rot that it simply would not shut. You could only get it partially closed before it wedged tight and even then it was still open an inch.

They were coming.

Whatever was out there, was coming. Perhaps they’d been standing around in indecision for a time, but now they were coming. Chrissy heard them with a sinking feeling in her chest. They were coming and there was no way to stop them. And, of course, she was not so naive as to believe that what was coming up that shadowy hallway were people. No, of course not. These were dead things and she could smell the earthen boxes and narrow ditches they’d crawled out from. They came on with a stink of wet soil and green mildew and decayed shrouds. Any second now they would spy the partially open door and come right in in a mist of flies and grave stench.

Alona had the crowbar in her hands. She was holding it like a batter, breathing very fast.

Out in the hallway, they could hear the sound of nails being dragged along the walls and then something very peculiar: a slapping, thumping sound as if whatever was out there were guiding themselves along like blind men…by feel. The stink grew stronger. There had to be at least four or five of them judging by the shuffle of bare feet. They were nearing the door, patting the walls as they came.

It made no sense.

Surely they could see the door cracked open.

More thumping, bumping sounds. They passed by the door and the sound of flies buzzing passed with them. Their footfalls were mucky and moist. Down the hallway they went, slapping the walls, dripping and rotten and infested with vermin.

Chrissy and Alona looked at each other.

Alona shook her head.

Was there room for a glimmer of hope here? Chrissy wasn’t going to let herself believe that. There’s no way in hell those dead things weren’t going to find them. Just no way.

The footsteps were returning now, slow and inexorable. Those things were not slapping the walls now, but just running their hands along them. The noise it made was like wet dishrags dragged over concrete. She could hear them breathing with a sound as if their lungs were filled with sludge.

“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.

Mitch steered Hubb into a classroom and tried to hold the door as the dead battered against the other side, screaming and hissing and pounding their fists. They got it closed and locked, but how long it might hold, they did not know.

The crazy thing was, Hardy James was not dead. He’d been bitten and beaten, clawed and stomped, but not devoured. It was Knucker’s brave counterattack that had saved his life. As firebombs exploded and the dead circled around in confusion, he crawled away into one of the offices.

He even managed to get the door shut.

At least for a few minutes.

Then it blew right open, slamming him up against the wall. He tried to force it back shut, but those wormy hands found him, a dozen of them, yanking him in opposite directions. They pulled him by the hair and the arms, the body and the legs. More hands pressed in, hooked like talons, peeling the skin from his face and the meat from his throat. He felt one of his arms get ripped free, one of his knees snap. His left eye was thumbed from its socket, his nose broken, his cheek torn from the skull beneath. They mauled him and crushed him and bit into him. And he went down as they towered over him, greedy and ravenous. All those faces pushed in, looking like watercolor paintings that had run…color and flesh and features oozing from the bone in a seething mass alive with worms.

He died most horribly.

Herb was separated from Hot Tamale.

He made it into the industrial-sized kitchen back beyond the chapel and a swarm of the dead crushed into him, slamming him to linoleum floor. There were dozens of them, pale and blubbery and reaching. He saw one with too many eyes in its face and another whose flesh draped around it like a winding sheet. A dead woman carried a dead baby and a dead man carried a legless woman. He saw a mutated thing which seemed to be composed mostly of open sores and another with a row of fetal hands running down its belly. He saw a woman that was so unbearably white she was nearly phosphorescent and a little girl with too many rubbery limbs scamper right up the wall. He saw the dead and the decomposed, things with too many arms or heads or simply not enough. Some that looked like two or three people melted into a whole, slithering and hopping, unwinding as they came forward. Things wriggled and wormed, flew and stumbled. Things that should have walked, crawled. And others that should have crawled, walked.

An obscene freakshow of putrefaction and something far worse.

But then a woman took hold of his head and vomited a stream of black mud into his face and he, thankfully, saw no more. He could only hear the screamings and whispering and laughter, the wet ripping sounds as they tore out handfuls of their own furrowed and soggy meat and shoved it into his mouth, made him eat and swallow of their abundant spoilage, but by then his mind was long gone.

Mitch made a mistake and almost died because of it.

There were not one, but two doors leading into that cavernous classroom.

Hubb saw the other one starting to open at the other end. “Mitch!” he shouted. “Jesus whore-fucking Christ! Mitch!”

Mitch raced down there, leaping over a heap of lumber, jumping up just as that door came open and throwing his weight against it, slamming it shut. One of the thing’s hands was caught between the door and the jamb. Those wriggling fingers were severed. They fell to the floor and undulated like fat, deathless worms.

“Now what in the fuck?” Hubb said, panting and pulling off his oxygen mask. “Now what, Mitch?”

Listening to the carnage outside, Mitch had no idea.

30

“Don’t do anything foolish, boy,” Wanda Sepperley told Chuck Bittner on the rooftop as darkness began to descend over the town in folds of the blackest midnight satin. “Don’t be throwing that salt until you got something to throw it at.”

“Just take it easy,” Harry said.

But it was no easy bit, trying to take it easy. For as the shadows lengthened, the dead had begun to come out like worms after a good rain. They were gathering out there in that dirty, polluted water in numbers. They waited just beneath the surface and you could see their faces, white and phosphorescent.

“When are those helicopters coming?” Rhonda Zirblanski said.

“Soon, honey, soon.” She held the girls to either side of her and would not let them go. The cat waited with them.

“There’s got to be a hundred out there,” Chuck said, just sick about it.

Harry was watching them, too. “They want us to use up our salt. They want us to throw it into the water at them. If we do that, then they’ll come up after us.”

“That’s right, son. They’re baiting you.”

And they were.

Now and again, one of them would raise a rotting face above the water and call out to those on the rooftop by name. They called out in the voices of friends and loved ones and that was the hardest thing to tolerate. Chuck could barely stand it. The sound of his father’s voice coming from one of those crumbling mouths was bad enough, but it was the voice of his mother lilting into the dusk that truly shook him. Whatever demonic minds fueled the dead, they were not stupid. They knew very well how to torment and exactly what to say.

“You shouldn’t have let me die alone, Chuck,” that voice would say, echoing and echoing across the water. “How could you let me die alone, alone, alone, alone…”

“Don’t listen, son,” Wanda kept telling him. “That’s not your mother. That’s nobody’s mother.”

“How can they do that?” Rita asked. “How can they know those voices?”

Wanda patted her. “They know many things on both sides of the grave, child. They’re not people. They have no soul. Just awful crawling things that were never supposed to have been born. They live on fear and hate and death. They’re weak if you don’t give them power. So don’t listen and don’t ever believe. All they do is lie. They know nothing else.”

Harry lit the lantern to drive away the shadows. “Those choppers will be here soon,” he said and hoped it was true.

Out in that stinking bog of corruption, the undead waited.

31

In the Procton house, down the way from Mitch Barron’s, Russel Boyne and his mother, Margaret, were still alive. The house was the tallest on Kneale Street and they were in an upstairs bedroom on the third floor. They had a battery lantern and a few improvised weapons, nothing more. The house had held when the dam broke, but they were trapped. The water was nearly to the top of the stairs and if it rose much farther…

Russel sat there on the bed with a sharpened stake in his hands. “I don’t get any of this,” he said, pouting like the little boy he in fact was. “This never happened in any of them zombie pictures. Weren’t ever no flood like this.”

“Oh, shut up,” Margaret told him, finally tired of his role-playing. “This isn’t a movie, Russel. This is real.”

“But it’s like a movie.”

“Just be quiet,” she told him.

She heard something in the water. Splashing. A suggestion of movement. She rose up slowly, steeling herself for whatever it might be. It was more than likely nothing, but she had to know.

“What’s that?” Russel said. “A zombie?”

“Shut up.”

At the top of the steps, she paused and listened.

The lantern was still burning brightly. It probably had an hour or more left before they were plunged into darkness. Occasionally it flickered, sending giant, eerie shadows dancing across the walls in a spook show. She peered down the stairwell. The water was rippling. A few bubbles broke the surface. Then more.

She could see something just beneath the surface, a dark, irregular shape that was rising, rising. Something cold broke open in her stomach as absolute dread settled into her.

The waters parted and a head appeared, then shoulders, the upper half of a torso. The head had been bowed, only a nest of filthy leave-caked hair visible, now it lifted and looked at her.

Her insides went to liquid.

Yes, a zombie.

He had only one eye, the other just a black, mud-filled pit drilled into the tombstone gray of his face. His flesh was puckered and pitted with tiny holes, his nose fallen with rot into one central cavity. His lips hung in shreds, his blackened gums pierced with crumbling teeth.

Margaret’s knees were rubber now, she tottered drunkenly, a cold and raw horror spreading through her and stealing the warmth and hope from her pounding heart.

The thing looked at her, fixing her with that one yellow, glistening eye. “The cemetery,” it croaked, dirty water running from its mouth. “The cemetery…yesssss…” From deep inside its congested lungs, a belching, bubbling sound arose and more water and clods of mud vomited from its ripped and hollow throat.

Margaret had gone down on one knee.

It had come no closer. It just stood its ground, raining water and filth and madness. The lantern flickered wildly, casting lurching shadows over its pocketed skull-face.

Russel came forward with his stake. “Get back! Get back!”

“Margaret,” the thing gurgled, “yaaaahhhhhhhhh…”

And slowly, slowly it slid back beneath the water with a steaming sound, mist burning from its hide.

Margaret screamed.

There were others coming from the water now. The one she had seen before was bad enough, a ripped and decayed zombie, running corruption for a face, but these…much worse.

They were faceless, dripping things, their skins and ragged clothing gone an oily black with mud and sediment from the river bottom, gray filthy blankets of fungus where their faces should have been.

With a cry of terror, Margaret hauled her son backwards just as they reached for him. Turning she took hold of the door and slammed it, one of the things' fingers caught between the door and the jamb. The wriggling fingers were severed and came free, landing on the carpeting where they squirmed.

She threw the deadbolt on the door and kicked the fingers into the corner.

And outside the door, they began pounding. The dead. Not just a pounding, but a hammering and a battering and a ramming. The door shook, trembled, cracks running through it. It was just a cheap hollow panel job, not meant to really hold back anything, let alone what was out there now.

Russel stood there with his stake, Margaret behind him with a kitchen knife.

The door came right off its hinges and the dead swarmed in.

Russel fought but they overwhelmed him instantly. Margaret sank her knife into one bloated belly and then hands had her, tossing her back into the water. The dead moved around her, diving and swimming, but they did not take her down with them.

She came up and the lantern was out.

Just darkness.

Russel was maybe in the bedroom or had been pulled down into the deeps. But he was gone, gone, gone and she began to weep, still in the water, clinging to the steps.

If only she could see something.

The water was chill and slimy, things bobbing in it, others things sunken around her. She tried to climb up, fell and went under. She came up, gasping for air, shocked and terrified.

She hung there, with her head and shoulders out of the mire, shivering and mad, thinking things and feeling things and maybe even believing that they wouldn’t come for her. After a time, she moved back towards the stairs, clung to them, waiting for what she did not know.

A drop of water struck her face. Then another.

In the heavy, moist stillness, she could hear someone breathing. Someone was standing over her on the stairs, dripping on her.

“Take my hand,” a voice said, gurgling and waterlogged.

“Oh, please…”

“Take my hand.”

The voice was not necessarily evil or threatening, just morbidly awful like its owner’s throat was packed with wet leaves. She reached out to take the hand offered because there really was no other way. She found the hand and gripped it as it gripped her. It was clammy and spongy, juice squirted from between her fingers. She let out a subtle cry of horror and she was pulled out of the water and pushed against a pulpy, crawling mass. Then a cold and rubbery mouth was pressed against her own and black water was vomited down her throat, filling her.

All things considered, it was not the worst possible death.

32

Don’t breathe.

Don’t move.

Don’t even make a sound.

The dead boys were searching the room now, moving along and patting the walls, pausing to sniff the air like dogs casting for a scent. Chrissy was not only wet with rain, she was wet with hot salty sweat that ran down her face in rivulets. She could taste it on her lips, feeling it pooling beneath her eyes and filling them, making them sting. It was agonizing. She needed to rub them. She had to. She couldn’t sit here like this, terrified and sweating and cramped. She would go mad.

Alona held her tighter than ever, in a grip like a vice. She would allow no movement, no sound.

But sooner or later, those things would find them.

Quiet.

Don’t stir.

Don’t make a sound.

But how long could she possibly do that? How long? You want to move and you know it. Sooner or later you’re going to, Chrissy. And it probably won’t even be voluntary, just a tendon popping or a muscle jerking and making your arm move. Maybe you should just get it over with.

No!

Good God, no. The idea of those things touching her was madness itself. And if that didn’t turn her mind to slush, then what about the party Grimshanks had planned? Oh, now that was really going to be something. He would have hurt and demeaned her in the most unspeakable ways before, but that was before they had injured him, beaten and broken him. Now he would do things she could not possibly imagine. Things beyond mere horror and agony, fresh and untapped realms of psychotic and lewd violation.

The one with the blond greasy hair was stopped right in front of them now. He cocked his head to the side like a puppy, but it was hardly cute. Flies covered his face and exited his mouth when he spoke.

“Chrissy? Is that you? Reach out and take my hand…I’ll see that he makes it quick, then we can be together. Death won’t last. He’ll call you up just like he called us up…”

Chrissy’s breath was coming very fast now and she could do nothing to muffle its sound. He was hearing it and knowing she was near. This was it. This was really it.

Alona sensed the endgame coming, but she wasn’t about to be scared into doing something foolish. At least, not yet. She slid her hand off Chrissy’s arm with nary a sound and picked up a shard of glass from the floor. Counting under her breath, she flung it across the room where it landed near the windows. The dead things began to congregate in that direction, outstretched hands searching the air, fingers wiggling, voices whispering excitedly.

The blonde-haired one had not moved.

He chuckled low in his throat and something like an engorged black beetle crawled out of his mouth. “Neat trick, lady, neat trick. But you’re not fooling me.”

He turned in their direction, looking just above their heads, his hands coming up to seek them out. He moved his head from side to side as if he were trying to form a mental picture of where they were. He turned it this way, then that. Held it there. And they were able to see what they hadn’t been able to before: the other side of his head. It was a great gaping cavity filled with buzzing life. But not flies. These were gray, oily beetles, segmented and winged, looking much like cockroaches. There were dozens and dozens of them in that cavity, crawling about, infesting, brooding over a mass of squirming larva that must have been their young.

One of them flew out.

And then another and another.

They landed on the wall above Alona and Chrissy’s heads, started to crawl down towards them.

Another buzzed in Alona’s face.

One of them hovered in front of Chrissy’s eyes, then landed on her mouth, trying to force its way between her lips.

That was it.

Chrissy slapped it away and the game was up.

“Here,” said the blonde-haired one. “Right here.”

The others were coming now, rushing forward with seeking hands. The blonde-haired one reached out for Chrissy and Alona as they stood up. Alona stepped out to meet him with the crowbar.

“Since you know where we are, dipshit,” she said. “Let me introduce myself.”

As he came forward, she swung the crowbar with everything she had, which was considerable. The bar hit him right between the eyes…or where they would have been…and split his face right down to his jaw with a pulpy cracking. He howled and backed away and Alona hit him two more times, collapsing his skull and letting forth a swarm of those roaches that sought her out, buzzing and nipping, getting in her hair and seeking her eyes. She swung the crowbar again and it struck the boy’s arm and snapped it off beneath the elbow. He hit the floor, his face a discharge of black gummy blood, and his arm hit the wall, dropping to the floor and squirming with life.

Chrissy swatted roaches away from her.

But it was too late for Alona. The others had charged in and buried her in their bodies.

“Run!” she said. “For the love of God, Chrissy! Run!”

Chrissy did as they began to pull her apart and open her up, bathing in her blood. She made it to the door and bolted right out into the hallway, just running with no set destination.

Behind her, she heard Alona give out one last reedy scream.

33

Hot Tamale was alone.

She did not know where Herb was or any of the others. And right then, she would have been glad to see even Tommy Kastle and his big goddamned mouth. Because she was in a real fix now. During the attack, after Herb had been separated from her, she’d run blindly, trying to escape and had ended up here, down in the cellar. She’d found a room. A small room that seemed defensible…and then the floor had given out, plunging her into the blackness below.

She had lost her shotgun.

Had nothing but some roadflares now in their waterproof containers.

She was in the cellar, she supposed, the water right up to her waist. The room was long and narrow and the only door she’d found was wedged tight, swollen in its frame, no doubt. So she waited there in the flooded darkness with a flare in her hands, the sputtering flame throwing jumping, greasy shadows in every direction.

Yes, just her.

And the beetles.

She could feel them in the water. Nipping, scratching, cold and oily. They were whipping through the air like flying gravel, seeking soft flesh and warm blood to torment. They got into her hair and worried at her throat. Only the flare drove them off.

The beetles made another run at her, buzzing and whirring. She ducked her head under, kept only the flare above the water.

She surfaced then, drenched and shivering and filthy with mud. The storm of beetles was gone. She pulled a few stragglers off her arm, searching frantically around for shelter, for an oasis, but there was none to be had. She had to get out of here. Somewhere out of the reach of the water and the beetles.

Something bumped into her and she screamed.

The drifting corpse of child.

It was dead, thankfully. She shoved it away and splashed in the other direction, not liking the idea of it being near her.

She waited then, peeling beetles off herself like ticks. They were not so offensive or aggressive when they were not swarming. It was something. She kept wondering what would happen when she used her last flare up.

Don’t think about it.

Steeling herself, she moved further into the room. More corpses. Just floating and lifeless, but offensive all the same. That’s what this room was, a river of floating debris and beetle-covered corpses now.

She felt something brush by her in the water, something undulating and smooth. She let out a cry, stumbled to the side, thinking there was a big snake in the water. And although Hot Tamale was not afraid of many things, snakes were one of them. She caught a glimpse of something that roiled the surface, something squirming and whipping. It rose up, dusky and shiny and serpentine, like the tentacle of some abyssal squid, then simply slipped back into the drink.

Hot Tamale could feel her heart in her throat, thudding like a tom tom.

Noise.

She whirled around, looking and searching and wishing to God she still had her shotgun. There was a rippling not fifteen feet behind her. The flickering yellow light from the flare reflected off the surface of the water which was black as gushing oil. The rippling became a whirlpool that grew and grew and then more of those snake-like tentacles rose up, whipping and slinking in a pulsing, busy net. They broke the surface like swamp roots. And then, from the center of that twisting helix, the form of a man rose up and up and up. He was dark and slimy like he’d been rubbed down with fat, his face utterly gray just as his eyes were utterly yellow.

Hot Tamale screamed, diving and fighting away. She found herself beneath the hole that she’d fallen through. There was no way she could get back up there. Just no way. She looked around frantically. She could hear water running, see it flowing down the walls like a waterfall. Everything as ebon and still and lifeless as some waterlogged tomb.

Jesus, what was that, what sort of thing was that?

Think, she told herself, just think now. No time for anything else.

She moved through the darkness slowly, carefully like some miner in a flooded cavern. It was so dark she couldn’t see her own hands, let alone anything else. Bobbing things, biting things, refuse and just about anything that wouldn’t sink. She located the wall, planned on following it back to the door. She had to get it to open, she just had to. She guided herself forward, things crawling across her fingers, water dripping from above and running down her face like sweat.

The doorway.

There it was.

It had to give, it just had to.

Something brushed her leg and she screamed again, falling into the water, the flare going out. She came up, pulling another one from her vest and lighting it by twisting the cap.

There. Light.

She moved forward with a half-swimming, half-falling sort of motion, the splashing water echoing like she was trapped in the bowels of a well. She found the wall again, sweaty flagstone, brushed against crates and barrels and shovels hanging from hooks. She kept going and going, moving in circles, but afraid to stand still.

Her throat felt tight and scratchy and she began to sweat. It almost seemed that the darkness was pushing in closer around her and she told herself it was the stirrings of claustrophobia and nothing more-

Then light.

It exploded in the depths of the cellar and Hot Tamale had to put a hand up over her eyes it was so bright. But then she could see that she was at the far wall, nowhere near the doorway. The light was coming from a gas lantern hanging on a peg near where she’d fallen through. It flickered with a jumping amber light.

But somebody had lit it, somebody had…

She didn’t see anyone, though. Just that filthy water sliding around her like those tar pits that drowned animals and a few ripples. Ripples that were building, surging, rolling into swells and tides and breakers. Before her, a man rose up out of the murk and she screamed because she knew it was the one that was part squid and part man and altogether something inhuman.

He stood there, that dark man, dressed in something like tanned, oily hides, dark as snakeskin, that seemed to quiver and convulse like they were connected to some arcane musculature. He wore a shroud beneath. His eyes were yellow coins, his face gray and seamed and skullish. The skin was beaded and shiny like a lizard pelt.

“Who…who the hell are you?” she managed. “What do you want?”

The dark man just stood there, the water around him busy and rippling and roiling. All those tentacles were working and bunching. He glided forward as if something below was towing him and Hot Tamale let out a cry, trying to dash away, but something tripped her up and when she fought out of the water she was less than two feet from him, those eyes burning into her head like embers as something coiled around her legs like heavy cables. The dark man towered over her, staring and staring until her bladder let go with a hot rush and her teeth chattered and something in her belly went loose like an uncoiled spring.

She dropped the flare.

The dark man’s face was covered in beetles as were his hands, they came out of his leathers and nostrils and mouth and then fell away one by one and there was a sudden spray of grume and mucus and vile blood and that face split asunder. In fact, it opened like a flower unfurling its petals so that the buds and blossoms could be marveled over. Hot Tamale saw something like a profusion of tendrils nested together and then they, too, stretched and writhed and opened and there were tentacles…three tentacles, smooth and scummed with jelly and just a bright, vibrant red like fresh spilled blood.

Hot Tamale began to understand then.

This was the Devil. This was Satan. This was what had taken command of the legions of the dead.

“The Devil,” she said, shivering and mad at the sight of him.

She began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but the dark man just laughed.

“No, not the Devil,” he said. “My name…say it.”

“I…I don’t…”

“Say it.”

She told herself she did not know his name, but she did. Just like she understood that what he was, what lived in his flesh was not the memory of a man, but something else.

“Say it,” the dark man demanded.

Hot Tamale gasped, images and ideas and arcane philosophies raging through her brain in hot bolts as her willpower and individuality went to a white, bubbling sauce.

“You…you are Weerden,” she said almost mechanically. “You are Alardus Weerden and you died in 1627.”

“Yes, until my grave was desecrated.”

One of those bloated ruby-red tentacles had her around the throat now and another kissed her eyes shut and the third forced itself down her throat, expanding like the stinging tendril of a jellyfish until she gagged and asphyxiated and went still, sliding limp and dead into the black waters.

The lantern on the peg went out with a hiss.

34

Something was going on.

Chrissy heard the sound of gunfire and voices and smelled fire. Flashes of light and booming sounds. A stench of death and burning flesh wafted up the stairs. It had been getting dark, but now there was light coming up from below.

She raced over to the stairs and almost made it made it.

Except that Grimshanks came drifting up the stairs to meet her, grinning with those gnarled yellow teeth that pushed past his blubbery lips. His face was white and oily, set with a multitude of tiny scars where he had knitted himself back together again. His eyes were huge, bulging from those black harlequin diamonds that contained them. They were glistening pale eggs set with a tracery of purple veins, eggs that were pulsing and ready to hatch. His orange-and-yellow checked suit was filthy with dried blood and black goo and streaks of grime, bits of things that might have been tissue. The bells twinkled on his cap and tiny red beetles swarmed out of his mouth and skittered over his bloated face.

He held his white puffy hands out to her. “Chrissy-pissy pudding pie! Where do you think you’re going? That’s not for you down there…not for you.”

Chrissy wanted to run, but the strength just bled from her. There was nothing left to run with or fight with. There was only a bitter acceptance of what the clown would do which would be horrible to the extreme. He stared at her with those awful veined, slimy eyes. Tiny pustules were set in them and they began to break open one by one, running with a foul-smelling pus. Yes, he looked at her and in her and she saw graveyards in her mind, gallows…the places Grimshanks knew and knew very well. More, she saw little boys screaming. Little boys chained to cobwebbed basement walls and hanging by hooks, cut and slit and worked by knives. Hanging from ropes and being shoveled into shallow graves.

Yes, those eyes had her and they would not let her go.

They were the eyes of wolves that waited for little girls in dark forests, hungry and malevolent and ruthlessly vulpine. The eyes of wolves that devoured grandmothers and waited in their beds with slavering jaws and perverse dark minds. The eyes of slimy, deranged little men that seduced little boys into fields and lonely thickets with the promise of sweets. And mostly, they were the eyes of something born in the depths of hell. The eyes of a dead and obscene thing that had been born in the drainage and corpse-slime of the grave.

Chrissy opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out.

Grimshanks jetted forward with a blast of fetid, hot wind. He hit her and knocked her onto her back and then he fell on her, his jaws opening wider and wider until they were wide enough, it seemed, to swallow the world. They closed over her throat gently but firmly. Not with enough strength to even break the skin. He picked her up like a wolf picks up a pup and drifted off, bringing her into another dark room and dropping her on the floor.

“Chrissy-pissy, alone at last and with no interruptions,” he said and his breath in her face smelled like tombs.

Stretched out beneath him, her mind swam in and out of focus. She felt those bloated hands running up and down her, walking over her like spiders, pausing to squeeze her breasts and poke at her belly, stroke down between her legs. Several candles set in holders atop a table suddenly lit up, filling the room with a guttering yellow-orange glare. And this is what the clown wanted, not some fumbling violation in the dark, but an illuminated and precise defilement that she would have to look upon as her mind went to a soup of ruin.

He opened her shirt with his fingers and the feel of his flesh against hers is what jerked her fully awake. It was like cold, wet meat, a slime of jelly coming from his fingertips. His face was right above her own, huge and bulbous and grotesque like some fleshy Halloween pumpkin. Up close, she could see not just the pink threading of scars in that porous white flesh, but the numerous tiny holes made by parasites and worms. His entire face, up close like that, was covered in fine, minute webbing of silk like caterpillars or spiders had spun a fine cocoon over it. Things squirmed and wriggled just under the flesh. His tongue came out and it was black and horribly swollen, too fat, it seemed, for his mouth. Her drew it along her neck and its touch burned like lye.

She screamed.

Screamed with everything she had and all that did was made him grin. Make vile secretions run from his face and red beetles run out of his nostrils. Yes, and it made his cock thicken and lengthen under his suit, pressing against her belly.

“You will beg for death, you sweet little cunt,” Grimshanks whispered in her contorted face. “You will beg for old Grimshanks to slit your throat! But he won’t! Not until he’s done! Not until you’ve tasted his seed and felt him pushing inside your hot sweetness and filling your ass, splitting it wide and bloody! You will scream and scream, Chrissy-pissy, just as I screamed when the clowns took me in that cold, dripping cellar! You’ll know what I knew! You’ll know every awful, breathless minute of it! And how you’ll cry for your mommy and daddy, but they can’t help you! They’ll never hear you! Because your mine, every luscious inch of you is mine to toy with and soil and torment! Mine, mine, mine!”

She felt those hands on her, felt his cock against her, the stink and gelid feel of him, the absolute depravity and degeneration of his worm-holed mind, that seething pit of child bones and smoldering innocence where the boogeyman lived and where little boys and girls died a foul, perverted death.

Her shirt open, her breasts laid bare, Grimshanks planted a line of stinging kisses from her sternum to her belly. Each one was a separate agony. And she could just image what it would feel like to have that engorged and rancid penis inside her, how it would burn and tear.

“Now, Chrissy-pissy pudding pie, you’ll taste me before I taste you…”

He rose up before her and she knew he was going to expose himself. Make her touch it and feel it and put it in her mouth, cackling all the while with the sound of screaming children roasted on spits. Those very un-funny distended hands of his worked his cock through the suit and it rose up, filling and swelling, becoming much larger than any such organ had a right to be.

Now he would take it out.

Now he would make her do things.

Make her do things just as he’d made those boys do things.

No, no, it was too much. Simply too much. With every last bit of strength in her, Chrissy let out a piercing scream that could be heard throughout the orphanage.

Grimshanks boomed with fragmented laughter.

Maggots filled his mouth and emerged from holes in his tongue.

His eyes blazed with nefarious, carnal delight.

Here was the violation, the groping and pumping and penetration, the defilement of flesh and soul. The seeding that came before the cutting and the chewing and dismembering. He would make her suck on him and then he would take her sex in his mouth, piercing it with his yellow and decayed teeth, feeling that hot cunt virgin’s blood washing down his throat. And then he would slide into her, pushing deeper and deeper, shooting into her, filling her with acid and worms?

“That’s a fucking clown,” a voice said and then. “It’s got Chrissy!”

Chrissy was certain that her mind had run now like maple sap. For she was hearing the voice of Deke and another voice which sounded suspiciously like that of Tommy Kastle, her stepdad’s old drinking and bowling partner. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

But there they were.

Dressed in wet raincoats, looking haggard and tired and angry, very angry. They stormed into the room and Grimshanks shrank away, because he knew that what was in them was even worse than what had been in the mob that had beaten him earlier that day down into the grass.

Deke was on his knees, holding Chrissy against him.

Tommy stood there with a shotgun in his hands.

Grimshanks looked afraid, trapped, cornered, in dire straits.

“Hello, Pervo,” Tommy said and his voice was flat and deadly. “I heard all about you. Fruitpie the fucking Magician. I bet fruit pies aren’t the only thing that disappear when you’re around, are they? I bet a lot of kids go missing…don’t they, suck-nut?”

Grimshanks hunched over. His hands came up, his face contorted into a mask of raw animal rage, teeth sharp and bared, eyes fixed and hating. “I’ll tear your guts out, Tommy-boy, and I’ll make your friend eat them! Eat them! DO YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKING COCKLESS GUTLESS SQUIRT

OF SHIT? I’LL MAKE HIM EAT THEMMMMMM?”

He charged at Tommy.

It was a good bluff and pretty damn frightening to see, but Tommy was not impressed. He cracked a little smile and pulled the trigger. Grimshanks took it right in the belly. He did not fold up or go down like the others, he went absolutely manic and demented. He leaped into the air, bounced off the walls. He flew up and attached himself to the ceiling like a spider. He slid down the walls and wormed over the floors, the whole time steam churning from that hole in his guts. He rushed at Tommy and Tommy fired again, this time catching him with a glancing shot that ripped most of the meat from his upper arm, the flesh there singing and blackening.

Finally, Grimshanks let out a freight train wail of noise, howling and shrieking and everyone had to cover their ears. The clown took advantage of that and hit the boards over the windows like a projectile from a cannon. Some of the boards snapped, but others held.

He hit them and went instantly liquid.

He became a blob that ran and gushed and forced its gelatinous mass between the boards and out into the night where he escaped into the wet darkness. But everyone in that room could hear him wailing and screeching. Because for the first time, Grimshanks was really hurt. He was damaged beyond repair and that screaming of his was part agony and part absolute fear.

Deke was rocking Chrissy back and forth in his arms. She was crying and so was he. Tommy brushed them both with his hands, making contact with them.

“Deke, you take care of her,” he said, heading for the door.

“Where you going?”

Tommy looked back at him, grabbing the lantern, and winked. “I’m going to kill me a motherfucking clown.”

35

There wasn’t much time.

It was full dark and the dead were coming.

Where before they had been content to wait just under the water, staring up with hollow eyes at the people on the rooftop, now their patience had worn thin. They were coming up out of the water. Coming in numbers. And by the looks of it, there would be no stopping them.

“Get ready,” Harry told Chuck. “Stand by with that salt.”

“Look how many there are!” Rita Zirblanski said.

Harry almost told her that he would not let them get her…but could he really promise that? Promise anything that seemed so utterly impossible under the circumstances? Wanda and the twins had the lantern up near the chimney. Harry moved around carefully on the wet shingles with their sole flashlight. Everywhere he played the light, nothing but dead and leering faces.

Jesus, they were everywhere.

To all sides of the house, the zombies were gathered. The water came almost up to the lip of the roof itself and it was thick with the living dead. They crowded up to the roof, five and six and sometimes seven deep, looking almost like concert-goers pressed up to the edge of a stage. White arms were resting on the shingles, faces that were distorted peering up at Harry and the others, those eyes filled with an infinite and unholy blackness. Black tears ran from huge, gelatinous eyes; black blood from the corners of grinning mouths. So many of them, so damn many. There wasn’t enough salt to turn back more than ten or fifteen at best and out there…good God, a seething, hungering graveyard of them.

Mr. Cheese, Chuck’s cat, was mewling wildly now.

“Listen!” Chuck said. “Listen!”

Harry was not listening, though. He was studying the living corpses down below, knowing that essentially only himself and a bag of salt stood in-between them and the people left in his charge. Sure, Chuck would fight hard, but he was just a boy. Just like the Zirblanksi’s were really just kids and Wanda was an old, old lady. No, he was their protector.

And he didn’t stand a chance.

You could have ran. You could have gotten away anytime.

True. True enough. And that was the really crazy, fucked-up part of it all. He, Harry Teal, felon and escaped convict and all-around bad guy, did not want to leave. He was a guy who’d ran with a pretty tough cut-throat crew in Milwaukee. He’d boosted cars to order. He made his living in the streets. He’d spent the past five years in a maximum security hellhole. In the streets, he’d beat guys bloody, he’d even shot a guy once. In Slayhoke, he’d busted metal pipes over men’s heads, he’d stabbed them and beaten them nearly to death when they got in his way or gave him trouble or just failed to show him respect. He had become an animal just like all the others animals out in the yard there. He wasn’t the sort of guy who gave a rat’s ass about anyone. With him it had always been one thing, same as any other criminal: greed. He wanted that folding green and God help you if you got in the way of him getting it.

And now? Now he was playing good Samaritan?

Yes. Yes, that was it exactly. He could have ran off anytime after they’d gotten out from behind those walls. He could have run off on Jacky Kripp. He could have run off after Jacky was killed. But he hadn’t. He’d hooked up with Tommy and Mitch and stayed…stayed when he knew things were bad. More than bad. Just plain awful. A flooding city. The living dead. He got through that gauntlet, the cops would either shoot him down on sight or throw him back in a cage. Regardless, he’d stayed and stayed because Tommy and Mitch had treated him okay. Not like a con, but like a man. Like a friend. They accepted him and gave him something he’d never had before: a good feeling inside. So he stayed to help, because he figured a guy like him was particularly suited to surviving in a clusterfuck like Witcham. Tommy and Mitch were good boys, but neither of them were like Harry. They were not natural-born predators.

And they needed somebody who was.

Somebody who would watch their back and bring hell down on anyone who gave them trouble. But it was more than that even. He liked Wanda. She was like the grandmother you never had. The Zirblanski twins were like your favorite nieces. And Chuck? Goddamn, he could have been Harry’s kid in a different world where he hadn’t come up hard in the wrong neighborhood.

In twenty-four hours, less than that, he felt like the bunch of them were family to him.

That’s some sweet shit you’re reeling off there, bro, Harry told himself. But look where it’s gotten you. You don’t have to worry about going back to Slayhoke, because it ends for you tonight on this fucking rooftop, this fucking oasis in this stinking, rancid sea of the hungry dead.

But it didn’t bother him, it really didn’t?

“Harry!” Chuck said. “They’re coming! Listen, they’re coming!”

Listen?

Sure, sure, he was hearing it now. The thunk-thunk-thunk of helicopter rotors. It was getting louder. Louder by the moment. Excited, Harry panned his light over the dead. They were getting restless down there. There was no doubt of it. Something like an extended shiver was passing through them.

“Give me that salt, Chuck,” he said to the kid.

“I’ll fight them off with you, Harry.”

God, what a kid. Harry put an arm around him. “I got a better job for you, Chuck. A more important one. When that chopper gets here, I’ll need you to get the women aboard it. Okay? I need you to do that for me.”

Chuck sighed. “Okay. I guess.”

“Good man. Get up there by the chimney with them. Get ready.”

Chuck didn’t really like the idea, but he did it. That’s the kind of kid he was. And truth be told, Harry would not have recognized the old Chuck Bittner had he seen him. That selfish, arrogant little beast had died now and what rose from the ashes was about as fine of a boy as you could imagine.

“There!” Rhonda said. “Look! I can see it!”

So could Harry. “Thank God,” he said.

Coming through the mist and the falling rain it looked like some alien craft approaching, lit up, search lights scanning the waters, raindrops suspended in its sweeping beams.

“Get ready!” he shouted to the others.

“We’re ready and willing,” Wanda said.

The girls let out a cheer.

Harry waved the flashlight over his head.

The chopper was getting closer now. It had seen their lights and it was coming. It was on a direct route to them. Nothing could stay it now.

Below, the dead were moving.

“Shit,” Harry said under his breath.

He’d used up all the shells. All he had now was that bag of salt.

The dead were massing, crawling up out of the oily waters like fish. Not rising up on their hands and knees like men and women, but crawling on their bellies like mutant worms, slinking and slithering. From all sides of the roof, they were coming, pulling themselves from the water and wriggling their way up the wet shingles.

The helicopter had made Kneale Street now. It was very loud. Some guy on a loudspeaker was calling out to them.

“Harry…” Chuck said.

“I see them. Just get ready.”

The dead surged forth. So many in the lantern light that Harry knew that he and the others would not just be overwhelmed, they would literally be buried alive. His flashlight beam glimmered off their eyes which were glistening and gelid like the eggs of frogs. They looked like they would pop in a surge of filth if you poked them.

The helicopter was nearly to the roof now.

It was so loud that Harry could not hear what the others were saying. Not really. Though he could sense the panic in their voices. The chopper wouldn’t make it in time, not unless something happened.

And Harry was that something.

He started throwing the salt. Racing around the inclines of the roof, tossing salt. Much of it washed away in the rain, but enough found its intended targets that they pulled back, burning and steaming and crying out.

The helicopter was overhead.

The basket was coming down. Both of the Zirblanski twins were in it with the cat, crowding into it while Chuck held it steady in the rotor wash that was kicking up water and mist and a foul, moldering stink. Harry waved to the twins and they just looked back at him with horror in their eyes, knowing he was sacrificing himself so that they might escape.

The basket was coming back down now.

Chuck was shouting to Harry.

Harry waved him off and tossed what salt he had left at the advancing army of the dead. They were coming from all sides now, swarming like ants, hissing and scratching the shingles and gnashing their rotten teeth.

Wanda almost lost control of the basket.

She didn’t weigh much more than it did. Harry raced over there on his hands and knees, slipping once and sliding precious inches down towards those clutching white hands. He got up and got hold of the basket just as it would have tossed Wanda airborne.

“Harry!” Chuck shouted.

“Just get in for chrissake!”

He got Chuck in there and the basket started up and the dead were almost on them. Wanda would not make it either. But she didn’t seem to be too alarmed about that.

The dead were close now.

So many it was almost impossible to differentiate between them. Just a raging, compressed graveyard machine of skullish faces and bloated faces and wormy faces, scraping fingers and clutching fingers and fingers that were skeletal hooks. Moving, advancing, eyes like wet cinders and faces that were cold and white like new moons.

“Caught up with me at last, have you?” Wanda said, clinging to the chimney. “Crawled out of your slimy graves and dark pest-holes to put your teeth and claws to this old woman, eh? Well, you don’t frighten me! Not a one of you! Filth and disease and canker and pestilence! That’s all you are! Things to be salted and staked and burned out like infection!”

One of the dead came up over the apex of the roof, making for Wanda. She didn’t see it and she didn’t seem to care. Its face was little more than withered, flapping leather that looked stitched and pulled into the general appearance of a face, but missing the mark by miles. It had no eyes. And its flesh…it crawled over the bone, fluttering with a wriggling motion. Another came up behind it and its own face was nothing but a nest of creeping worms, burrowing in and out of the flesh.

Harry knocked two zombies away from him and made it to Wanda just as the dead things took hold of her. He hit old worm-face with a bunched fist and that face simply sprayed and fell apart. Wanda screamed once as the thing that had her broke her over its knee with a wet snapping. She died right then.

Harry went wild.

As they came at him, he punched and kicked and clawed, tearing faces from the skulls beneath and breaking off limbs and burying his fists into moist, swollen bellies.

The helicopter was still hovering up there, the basket swinging beneath it. The backwash of the rotors threw rain in Harry’s face, almost plucked him off the roof. A gunner up there was firing rounds into the dead, drilling holes through them, but it did little good.

Last stand.

This was it.

“Come on, you fuckers!” Harry shouted at them. “Come and get me!”

There was an old antenna pole bolted to the chimney. Harry yanked and pulled on it until it popped free. A weapon. He smashed heads and impaled bodies and made one hell of a show of himself, swinging and bashing and gutting his attackers. But by then there were hundreds closing on him, a flurry of reaching white hands and pallid faces crowding in on him.

They buried him alive.

But to his credit, he fought like a maniac right to his last breath.

36

“Hey, Pervo!” Tommy shouted up the narrow attic stairwell. “I’m coming to get your ass!”

Grimshanks was up there hiding and Tommy knew it. He’d hunted and tracked enough game in his time and followed enough blood trails to know that he was getting close. It was nothing you needed to be told. You could feel it. You could sense it with some primal mechanism of the hunt. And right then, Tommy was feeling it right up his spine. In his belly. In his balls.

I got that slimy fuck and he knows it.

Grimshanks must have come in another window after squeezing out the one on the second floor. Tommy had gone up to the third, moving on gut instinct and nothing more. It wasn’t long before he found that smear of black juice on the wall, the drops that led here to the attic stairs. The stench of Grimshanks’ burning flesh was acrid and pungent, nauseating. There was no mistaking the smell of a zombie that had tasted the salt.

Smiling, Tommy mounted the stairs, the shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other.

“Hey, sucknut!” he called out. “What you gonna do when I come for you?”

Nothing but silence.

Tommy was not dismayed, only all the more vigilant. That goddamn clown was up here and the drops of black blood on the steps were evidence of that. Tommy followed them step by step, ready for action. Ready for old Fruitpie to come barreling down at him at any moment.

“Hey, Puddles? Come out and play…”

He made it to the top of the stairs, holding up the lantern, casting a wide swath of light in every direction. Hunched shadows slid around him. The attic was huge and dusty and mildewed-smelling. About what you’d expect. Ancient rafters overhead, shuttered gales on the sloping walls. Crates and boxes and old rolled-up rugs rotting away in the warm darkness. It stank musty up there. Cobwebs were draped above Tommy’s head, lots of rodent droppings everywhere.

A few stray rats skittered away at his approach.

“Hey, fuckface!” Tommy called out. “I’m gonna do to you what you do to kids: I’m gonna fuck you real bad! You hear me? Huh? You hear me, Giggles?”

There was a roaring like that of some primeval beast and something came rushing out of the darkness and hit Tommy. Hit him hard enough to knock him over and almost down the stairs. But he managed to hang onto the 12 gauge. The lantern went sailing. It thudded into a beam and crashed to the floor, shattering, all that lantern fuel spilling out. The fire tasted the old wood and a wall of flame lit up.

No problem seeing now.

Grimshanks was clinging to the rafters above like some grotesque albino spider. He was not even a clown now. He was a great white insect with a dozen legs and a dozen glittering eyes. Venom dripped from his mouth and had it not been for the lantern exploding, he would have dropped right on Tommy.

But he hesitated, not liking fire.

Tommy fired without even taking aim. That was the beauty of a shotgun. The round peppered the clown-thing with rock salt and Grimshanks screamed. Screamed the way he must have screamed when those two pervert clowns, Bobo and Ripples, had taken him in that dank cellar for the first time. For just as he had been violated then, he was violated now.

That scream was hysterical and bleating.

The rocksalt caught him across the chest and burned right into him, creating dozens of separate blackened caverns as it ate through him. He jerked and crisped and fell to the floor trailing plumes of smoke.

Quickly, making some nonsensical gurgling sound, he hobbled away, trying to get out of reach of the flames and Tommy’s gun.

Tommy came right after him, sensing victory.

“Be a good little clown, eh? Just lay there and fucking take it,” Tommy told him.

“Take it? Take it? TAKE IT?” Grimshanks howled. “FROM YOU? FROM

YOU? YOU SILLY SCABBY LITTLE BOY THAT PISSED THE BED UNTIL HE WAS

EIGHT FUCKING YEARS OLD! WHOSE MOTHER WAS NOTHING BUT A DRUNKEN

USELESS WHORE CUNT COCKSUCKER?”

Tommy shot again.

And again caught the retreating bulk of the clown.

More sputtering as of sizzling bacon fat, more boiling smoke, and more screeching from Grimshanks. But he was not beaten yet. Not just yet.

As Tommy moved in for the kill, a droning black cloud rose from the clown and came squalling in his direction like a typhoon. A black cloud of clicking, snapping, whirring noise. A tornado of flying insects that found and enveloped him, biting and tearing and stinging. In his hair and his face, down his shirt and up his pantlegs.

But Tommy stumbled forward and put another round into the clown.

Grimshanks screamed so loud that dust rained from the rafters overhead. The floor rumbled and the attic shook. A great wind surged, spreading the fire, letting it taste those old rugs and stirring it up into a conflagration.

Grimshanks was dying.

He rose up, burning and steaming, clots of flesh dropping off him, flames erupting from his guts. That last round had ripped the left side of his face away, leaving a smoldering skull in its wake. A single pale and luminous eye darted madly around and then popped like a ripe grape, spewing yellow fluid. Grimshanks was not screaming or threatening now. He was mewling like a cat. He climbed up the walls as the rock salt boiled him from the inside out. He was melting. Literally melting. His flesh oozed and liquefied like hot tallow, streamers and ropes of it hanging from him like wax bubbling from a burning candle. He tried to climb and slid down the wall, a writhing mass of worms and beetles and decay, sizzling and steaming and blackening.

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.

The third zombie reached down for him and he gave it a round dead in the face that pulverized its head in splatter of tissue. It waltzed around, blind and thrashing and fell into a couple others.

And then he noticed something incredible.

Some of the dead had grown together. Two and three of them were sometimes stuck together in a central mass. At least, that’s what it looked like. But he soon saw that was not entirely the case. They were dividing. A huge and fleshy mass was actually dividing and becoming two or three separate entities.

He reloaded and kept shooting.

There was nothing else to do.

40

Tommy fired his last rounds and then grabbed a board and started swinging with everything he had, smashing heads that sometimes just collapsed and others that exploded in sprays of meat and tissue and black blood. Blood that was acidic and stinging when it struck him.

He saw more things come through the windows, but these were not men or women or children exactly, but something else. They looked like infants or fetuses, crawling things with too many coiling white limbs and huge bulbous heads. Some were conjoined like Siamese twins. Connected at the head or neck or waist. One of them had a face on both sides of its head and another had three faces stacked up on top of each other. Some were eyeless and some had but a single black, serous eye. Others had just too many. They hopped and skittered and slithered. One of them with no less than two heads and what might have been a dormant third, dragged itself in his direction. It had the requisite number of limbs. Though while those on the left side of its body were withered sticks, those on the right were massive and muscular, the globular white flesh set with thick purple veins.

When it got close, it tried to leap at him, but he swung his board and smashed one of the heads open. Worms and filth bubbled out. He smashed the second head the same way and that morbid thing still lived, hopping about in a crazy circle and spewing black fluid from its wounds.

Another of the freak babies came at him.

Its head was huge and misshapen, eyes the size of golf balls, a yawning mouth filled with overlapping serrated teeth that were blackened and rotting.

Tommy grabbed another board that was sharp as a stake and ran the thing through as it lunged at him. It vomited out black bile and shook like a fish out of water. Its flesh was bloodless and pulsing. Letting out a shrill, piping cry, it did not try and pull itself free from Tommy’s sharpened board…it did just the opposite. Possessed by a stupid, maniacal hate, it began to push itself up the shaft of the board, impaling itself further, but only concerned with getting at the man that had speared it.

Tommy tossed the board with a cry and the thing tried to move still.

More freak babies were coming through the windows, some of them attached together like paper dolls. Others crawled up the walls and some just wriggled about like squids or worms.

Tommy kicked at one that made for his legs, felt another creep up his back. He tossed it to the floor and it actually splattered into a convulsive stew of flesh and black fluid.

And then one grabbed his arms with wiry white fingers. Its bloated, waxy face grinned up at him and then its black teeth sank right into his forearm. He let out a cry and tried to grab the top of its head to toss it free. Its skull was not bone, but some rubbery and gelid material that came apart in his hand. His fingers plunged right through the crown of its skull and pierced the wormy gray matter within.

It let out a wild, whooping cry and fell off him.

And as if answering some unknown call, the freak babies retreated.

41

Hubb kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.

He made a pretty good show of himself for a man who’d already suffered two minor heart attacks and was on the verge of a third. His left arm was burning, his chest tight and corded. Sweat ran down his face and he could not seem to breathe. But true to form, he wailed out a string of profanities and fired his last rounds until a burst of pain in his chest made him nearly black out.

He dropped his gun.

His eyes fluttered closed and when he opened them, there was a little girl standing there with a hatchet in her hands. Her hair was black and lustrous, stuck to her white face with blood and snot.

“I brought you something, mister,” she said.

Hubb just shook his head.

The hatchet came down again and again and Hubb was beyond defending himself. It split his head open, severed his left hand at the wrist, dug into his throat, chopping and cutting and slicing until he fell over dead.

The zombie girl kept hacking at him until she was splashed red with his blood. Then giggling, she picked up his hand and went back out into the night.

42

Chrissy and Deke worked in unison with road flares in each hand, jabbing them into faces and clawing hands, driving the dead away. But for everyone that fell back, three more took their place.

A dozen of them surrounded the couple, then at some unspoken moment, lunged. The first few got flares jammed into their faces, but the others got what they wanted. Two of them dragged Deke to the ground and he fought like a wild cat, punching and kicking and slashing until he worked himself free.

Several others took Chrissy and tried to drag her to the windows. She fought in their grip. Her nails dug into eyeballs and her fingers slid into pulpy faces. Others joined in, fighting for possession of her. One of them had a face of trailing flesh that looked like a squashed jellyfish, another had a tiny set of mutant arms coming out of its chest. She screamed and fought and then Mitch was there.

He put his last two round into the lot of them.

Several died, smoking and shuddering. Two others made for the window.

What was left behind was a woman who was hideous beyond words. She looked like the others, save that she had been pregnant. Instead of being born, the child had simply been absorbed by its mother’s flesh. It had now erupted from her belly, a thing with flesh like grease, heads thrashing and limbs rising out of the mass like it was trying to escape the bondage of its mother.

Tommy came up and tossed a flare into her lap and she crept away, burning and making a snorting, guttural sound like a suckling pig.

And that’s when they all noticed one thing.

The dead had now retreated.

They were outside the windows, hundreds of them, but they were not coming in.

43

And then it started raining again.

Raining damn hard.

But this was not water falling from the sky. It was something solid. Something that came down in a violent, lashing crimson torrent. Mitch and the others stood there, not knowing what to think or what to make of it. This was a red rain. It struck the walls of the orphanage with thudding, splatting sounds that were disgusting and meaty. Then that red, liquid rain poured right through the windows.

It was filled with falling, ropy shapes.

Not rain.

But worms.

A rain of red worms.

The first deluge of them were squashed by the fall, breaking open on impact. But they kept coming and coming and coming until the floor near the windows was a foot deep in thousands of looping and twining red worms. They were tangled together in a single mass of brilliant red undulant motion that began to break apart.

The worms were coming for Mitch and the others.

They uncoiled themselves from that squirming mass and began dropping to the floor. The first few just laid there, almost sluggishly like grass snakes waking up after a long winter’s hibernation. Almost like they were dazed. But others followed and they were very active. Some of them were easily a foot in length, segmented and violently red, obscenely thick and excreting a transparent jelly. A few of them rose up and tasted the air with tiny puckering mouths.

There was no getting beyond the absolute revulsion they inspired.

Mitch and Tommy, Deke and Chrissy…they were all feeling it. Some macabre and self-destructive part of their brains wondering bleakly what it might feel like to have one of those things slide up your pant leg or get under your shirt. Maybe slide across your belly or put that puckering mouth against your lips. You could not look at things like that without being offended almost atavistically. The human mind recoiled at the idea of worms in general and when they were profuse like this, it was appalled to great depths. For mankind had a long association with squirming, serpentine shapes and hated them on sight. For Mitch and the others, they were seized by a primal instinct which told them to stomp those things, to crush them under their boots. To exterminate them. Because if you didn’t, they’d breed and infest and you just couldn’t have that, now could you?

Mitch didn’t know about the others, but to him worms were just worms. Until they gathered in numbers like this. And especially since he had seen these very same worms slithering in and out of the walking dead, infesting and feeding upon them. And now they had come down in a rain. An actual rain.

Not good.

Not good at all.

“They’re coming across the floor,” Chrissy said. She was a long-time detractor of anything crawly or slinking and these things filled her with horror.

More worms unknotted themselves from the central mass. No less than fifty or sixty of them were moving at Mitch’s group.

“What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Deke wanted to know. “They’re worms. Worms don’t hunt people.”

“It’s that fucking Weerden, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is one of his little tricks, you know? A funny little game to him.”

“Grab the last of those flares,” Mitch said.

Chrissy refused to do anything but press herself up against the wall. She knew that fear of such things like these was a cliched female thing, but she honestly did not care. Let the men handle it. She just didn’t do worms.

Tommy, Mitch, and Deke popped the flares and guttering red flames shot out, spraying sparks and lazy clouds of smoke.

“Come on, wormy. Got something for you,” Tommy said.

Maybe the worms were driven by Weerden, but they were still essentially worms, regardless of their apparent mutation. And worms did not understand fire. They did not understand what it was like to burn. Not until they got too close. Then they understood, all right.

Tommy gave them the first taste.

Not that Mitch was surprised. Even as a kid, Tommy had been practically fearless. The first kid to step on an especially large and ugly spider. The first guy to shoot some growling, strange dog with his slingshot. The first one to pick up a snake or swing a dead rat around by the tail. The first guy into a fistfight and the last one out. He was in his element here. Maybe it was not especially smart under the circumstances, but he figured that if clowns from hell didn’t scare him, worms weren’t about to.

Two or three got within range of his boot and he put the flame to them. The flare burned especially hot and it sliced them right in half. Their severed bodies writhed on the floor.

“Just fucking worms,” Tommy said.

Mitch and Deke were at it, too, by then. On their knees, they passed the flares before them in wide arcs and the heat drove most of the worms back. Those that didn’t retreat, were fried. Within five minutes, there had to be a hundred smoking, blazing worm carcasses.

“God, that stinks,” Chrissy said.

Mitch laughed almost automatically.

“This works good,” Deke said, seeming to enjoy himself.

“Sure, until you guys run out of flares.”

Then what? Then what happened? The worms kept coming and Mitch and his little crew tap-danced around, trying to squash as many as they could before the little buggers got up their pants and started biting, started tunneling like borer worms? Because if those things got them down, they’d be buried in their numbers.

“Hey!” Tommy called out into the night. “This ain’t working, Weerden, you fucking scab! Try something else!”

Mitch was going to tell him that you didn’t challenge something like Alardus Weerden, something dead yet alive, something that was practically immortal if you believed the regeneration stories they’d heard at the Army base. You didn’t go and piss off something like him that had been on both sides of the grave and many times. Jesus Christ, he was a warlock for chrissake. What if he could call up a storm or raise a demon or something like that?

But he didn’t do any of those things.

And maybe Weerden had nothing to do with what came next, but nobody believed that for a moment.

The dead were still out there, but there was something with them now. Some huge, amorphous shape that crept up to the windows like a spreading hood of shadow. Maybe crept wasn’t the right word, for this moved like a wave, a great dark wave heading ashore and when it hit the building, the classroom shook.

And Mitch thought: Oh good God, what is that coming at us? What is that?

His first sensation was the stink it brought with it: a high, almost yeasty smell of fermentation like apples that had gone bad, gone to a soft decaying pulp. That was the smell. Only amplified a thousand times into a low, black stench that got down in his belly and tried to yank his guts out. His second sensation was its size. How it seemed to literally absorb the dead that waited in its path. And his third was when it struck the building: everything shook like a train had just tried to bash through the wall.

Chrissy was actually pitched onto her ass.

“What is it? What is it? What is it?” she kept saying.

But they all saw soon enough. It was a great wave of gray-white jelly, an immense creeping mass that filled the windows, pulsating and oozing and horribly alive. It struck the building, great blobs of itself pressing through the windows like moist, greasy dough forced through holes with incredible pressure. It spilled into the room, fleshy and convulsing, its outer skin transparent so that you could see things like coiling roots and thick red and green arteries that throbbed beneath. Its surface was set with great pustules and trembling mounds, a ropy cobwebbing of white and undulant fibers growing over it like a net.

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.

“Mitch…” Chrissy said with absolute desperation.

And then something happened.

Something incredible.

Something that they would not have believed if they had not been there to witness it.

It started to rain.

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.

Deke moved in with his aunt who lived ten miles away.

Mitch and Chrissy moved in with Tommy out at his cabin on Pullman Lake, which was situated outside of the Black River Valley and suffered no damage. Mitch and Chrissy had a lot of good cries, did a lot of bonding. But they came through it. And Tommy was always there with a smart remark or to say the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.

But they went on.

They lived off of Mitch and Tommy’s savings, neither of them were quite ready to go back into the blue collar world even six weeks later. But that would come. In time.

One afternoon as Mitch laid on Tommy’s couch, he said, “You know, it’s just damn funny that there’s no mention of the walking dead, no mention of the shit that caused it: that goddamn army base and their experiments.”

“Perception management,” Tommy told him, pulling off a cigarette. “They got spin doctors at work out there, Mitch, that could make you believe you’re my maiden aunt.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

Chrissy who had been sitting there with them, threw back her long lustrous dark hair and just laughed. “Oh, there’s been mention of it, guys.”

They both looked at her.

On the coffee table were some of Tommy’s favorite periodicals, the kind that specialized in bigfoot rape stories and UFO abductions. There were three copies of the Weekly World Examiner sitting there, well-thumbed. On their covers were photos that might have been taken in Witcham or maybe on a soundstage for that matter. One showed a rain-swept, flooded street and blurry, out-of-focus people rising from the murk. Another showed a shadowy figure standing amongst some graves. And still another showed hands rising from the water. Hands that looked a little familiar for Mitch to simply shrug off. Too white, too bloated, too set with sores. WISCONSIN CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, one headline proclaimed. THE WITCH-AM HORROR, said another. THE RISING DEAD OF WISCONSIN, said yet another. Inside, were more blurry photos. Some which had actually been taken in Witcham. The stories were lurid to the extreme and that was pretty fitting, because what had happened in Witcham was certainly lurid. And certainly extreme by all standards of normalcy.

Mitch just sighed, forcing memories from his head. “I guess…I guess it makes you wonder how much of that stuff is true, you know?”

Tommy and Chrissy looked at each other, laughed.

“Yeah, here’s one that’s got me thinking,” Tommy said. “’Face of Jesus seen on Mars.’ I mean, that’s food for thought.”

“How about this one,” Chrissy said. “’Rabid Grandmother feeds grandchildren to giant Rats.’ I don’t think I’ll sleep again.”

“All right, all right.” Mitch just shook his head. “And where are you off to?”

Chrissy shrugged. “Deke’s picking me up.”

“Well, tell him he better come in this time,” Tommy said. “No daughter of mine is dating some hoodlum who pulls up in the yard and revs his engine. I won’t have it. Me or your father.”

Chrissy ignored him, came over to Mitch and gave him a kiss. “Love you, dad.”

“Love you, kid. Be careful, will ya?”

“Always.”

Tommy put his hands on his hips. “Where’s mine? Didn’t I raise you better than that?”

Chrissy pecked him on the cheek.

Mitch watched her go to the door and wait. He found that he could spend hours just staring at her. She was her own person, tough and individualistic, but now and again, he could see Lily in her eyes or hear her in Chrissy’s staccato laugh.

“See you, boys,” she said when Deke pulled up.

“What should we do tonight, father?” Tommy said.

Mitch sighed. “Would you knock it off.”

“We could watch TV or play cards…unless you feel like fooling around a little.”

Mitch sighed. “You are an asshole, Tommy Kastle.”

“You know what my mom said. Go with your strengths.”

Mitch shut his eyes. He missed Lily, but they had a life again, Chrissy and he. And in the greater scheme of things, that would have to be enough. The sky was still blue. And the sun still rose. The birds still sang and Tommy was still a dick.

There was peace in that, now wasn’t there?

Content

Resurrection

Tim Curran EXHUMATION 1

2

3

4

5

6

FLOATERS 1

2

3

4

STRIPPERS.

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

NOBODY’S HOME

19

20

21

22

23

24

WORMS 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

THAT MOTHERFUCKING WEAPON?”

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

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25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

DECAY 1

2

3

YOU CAN’T MAKE ME LISTEN!”

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

DESERT ME! YOU CANNOT ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD! YOU CANNOT LOCK UP ON

BREACH THE TRENCH!”

14

15

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20

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22

23

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25

26

27

PESTILENCE 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

FUCKING YOUR WIFE! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER!”

12

13

ADMITTANCE! USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED!

14

EXTREME DANGER?CONTAINMENT AREA.

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

CUNT! I’LL KILL YOU! KILL YOU! KILLLLL YOOOOUUUUU!”

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

OF SHIT? I’LL MAKE HIM EAT THEMMMMMM?”

35

36

YOU? YOU SILLY SCABBY LITTLE BOY THAT PISSED THE BED UNTIL HE WAS

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

RESURRECTION 1

2