Resurrection (28 page)

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 & 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.