Resurrection (70 page)

“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.

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.

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
what
ever 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.”