Resurrection (44 page)

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.