Resurrection (35 page)

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!”