Resurrection (39 page)

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.