Resurrection (76 page)

Mitch felt like he was going to swoon. He steadied himself against the chest of drawers. “She was here. Last night or early this morning.”

Tommy swallowed. “Who?”

“Lily.”

“Mitch, you don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

And he did.

They come back that quickly. They die and rise that quickly.

Tommy was looking at the bed. There was a gray stain on the quilt. Somebody had been laying there, somebody that was wet and dirty.

Sure, Mitch,
he thought.
She came back here looking for you. She went to her mirror and smashed things around looking for the lotion. When she found it, she smeared it all over her cold white flesh. Perhaps grinning like a skull the whole time. Then she laid in the bed and waited for you. As she had waited for you other nights…

“She was here,” Mitch said. “She might still be. You got that salt on you?”

Tommy pulled the waterproof bag out from under his raincoat.

“All right. If she’s here, let’s find her.”

Tommy didn’t argue.

They went from room to room, looked in closets and behind furniture and under beds. They could not find her. Finally, they opened the cellar door and looked down there into the black rising water. It was at least four feet deep and rising, coming right up to the seventh or eighth step. Cardboard boxes and plastic bottles of detergent bobbed on
the surface.

“She’s down
there,” Mitch said. “I know she is.”

“In the water?”

“Where else. She’s sleeping on the bottom, waiting for dark to come again.”

“You’re…you’re not going down there, Mitch.”

“No.”

He shut the door and locked it from the outside. If she planned on walking around tonight, he wasn’t going to make it easy on her. Is that what they were all doing, though? he wondered. Laying down beneath the water, sleeping, dormant? And when night came, they’d all rise back up. Five times as many as there were last night.

Christ.

Outside, in the falling rain, Mitch just stood there, making himself breathe in that moist, tainted air. Purging the smell of lilacs from his head. The worse smells coming from the cellar.

“I think we should take a drive out to the Army base like Wanda said,” Tommy suggested.

“All right. But first there’s something we have to do.”

“Which is?”

Mitch looked down the street to where Miriam’s house rose from the pale mist. “There’s someone in that house and I want to know who it is.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because when we left, I left the front door open. Now it’s closed.”

11

Mitch took hold of the door at the Blake house and gave it a pull and it nearly fell on top of him. Only one hinge stopped it from doing so. He set his rifle aside and leaned it up against the frame like it had been when they’d first looked for Miriam and the others. Once he did that, he gathered up his rifle and stood there, thinking. While Tommy and he had been checking out the other houses, somebody had set the door back in place.

“I wonder why,” he said out loud.

“Why what?” Tommy said.

“Why somebody put the door back up.”

Tommy pulled off his baseball cap and shook rain from it. “Why else? They put it up so the light wouldn’t get in. Maybe whoever’s in there, don’t care much for the light.”

Mitch had been thinking the same thing, more or less. When they’d came here before, he’d done little more than stick his head in the door and call out for Miriam. But he had smelled something in there. Death. Not an unusual smell in Witcham these days, but inside a house it was much stronger than out in the flooded streets. It was contained and heightened, purified.

“What you say we go get some pancakes?” Tommy said.

Mitch ignored him and walked through
the doorway. It was just
a mess in there. Not just the broken furniture he’d seen before and the askew pictures, but things much worse. The carpeting was covered with muddy prints and gray water squished out of it when you walked on it. Miriam’s guncases had been overturned, the doors torn off and weapons scattered about. A mirror was shattered. Everything had been swept off the mantel and crushed underfoot with the remains of the broken window.

“Looks like a really pissed off Avon lady called last night,” Tommy said.

Mitch saw muddy handprints on the walls leading to the kitchen. Most of them were badly smudged, as if especially grimy hands were slapped against the walls and dragged along. Some were very distinct, though. Adults, even children lower down. A few had bits of tissue stuck to them.

Mitch smelled the stink of death and looked at the wreckage, thinking,
this would have been us last night. If Wanda hadn’t been burning that shit to keep the dead away, they would have stormed her house and killed us all.

They looked around in the rooms downstairs, saw nothing of much interest. The dead had rampaged through here, but apparently they’d come and gone quickly, left little evidence of their passing.

Mitch walked over to the stairs.

“More stairs,” Tommy said. “This is over, I never climb stairs again in my life.”

Mitch was feeling it the same way he was. Stairs. Stairs always led somewhere bad these days. Whatever was in the house was up there and he could smell it, something just beginning to decay with a sharp green smell. It was up there and he could feel it. It had a heavy, almost ominous physical presence that dried the spit up in his mouth. He tried to tell himself it was just the stairs, the memory of other things they had led to, but he knew better. Something was up there and whatever it was, it had raised the fine hairs at the back of his neck.

He cleared his throat. “Miriam? You up there?”

“She’s dead, Mitch. She ain’t about to answer you even if she’s here.”

Mitch waited a moment. Two, three. He felt a bead of perspiration slide down his spine to his beltline. He was holding onto the Remington so tightly, he thought his fingers would leave grooves in the stock.

“Miriam,” he called out, his voice echoing through the emptiness up there. “We’re here. We’re here to see you.”

Tommy looked at him like he was mad. Looked like he was about to say something smart and cutting. But he didn’t. Because a voice came from up there and the sound of it made them both want to run.

“Who’s down there?”
it said, bubbling and mucky-sounding.
“Who’s that? Who has come into my house uninvited?”

“Shit,” Tommy said.

It was Miriam’s voice, all right. The way she would have sounded if her lungs were full of gray water and sediment and rot.

“Is that you, Mitch Barron? You get out of my house or I’ll come down and you won’t like that, Mr. Union Man, you won’t like that at all.”

“Come down,” Mitch told her, his voice full of steel.

There was a slurping sound that he knew was her drawing in a breath.
“Here I come.”

There was a squishing sound of her walking down the hallway accompanied by that clotted breathing and then she was coming. They thought she would amble down the stairs like one of the dead, but she did not amble. She
drifted.
Wearing an old ratty dressing gown, she floated slowly down the stairs like some ghoulish hot air balloon. She was white and swollen and mottled, lots of bumps and humps on her face where none had been before. She floated on down with arms out to either side like she was crucified, her head slumped to one shoulder like her neck was broken. There was black goo all over her mouth. A great oily quantity of it was washed down the front of her gown, globby and sticky looking like she’d thrown it all up.

Tommy and Mitch had their rifles on her, but she didn’t seem to care. She floated near the top, just hovering there like some great predatory insect, making a low hissing sound in her throat.

“Don’t you move,” Tommy told her, ready to pull the trigger.

She grinned at him with yellow teeth, making a snarling noise. Her eyes were black and greasy, like fat skimmed over a pot of brine. They shone darkly. So very black and deep they were like windows looking into some fathomless, haunted dead-end of space.

“Come into my house, have you? Trespassing like hobos and bums and hippies crawling with disease! Come to visit old Miriam Blake, eh, Mitch Barron? Well, well, well. Are you happy with what you’ve found?”
she said, her voice now high-pitched and wavering like it was coming from a great distance over a weak radio signal. You could almost hear the static crackling under her words.
“You’ve brought your friend with you. Tommy Kastle. He would be the one that has deceived you, Mitch. All the while you thought he was your good friend, he was fucking your wife. What a fine state of affairs! Do what’s right, Mitch, turn that gun on him and kill him! Kill him for what he’s done to you! Do you hear me? Kill him!”

Tommy was taken off guard just as he was. He kept shaking his head side to side. “Mitch…Jesus Christ, no, I wouldn’t do that…I’d never do that…”

Mitch felt her getting into his head, spreading filth through his thoughts, gumming up everything in there and he just wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure of anything.

Miriam floated up there, malevolent and dripping with evil. As she spoke more of that black juice ran from her mouth. Her robe was open now showing not just the gray marble of her flesh and her drooping, blue-veined breasts, but something much worse. Worms. Hundreds of red worms were coming out of her belly and chest, wiggling in the air from their holes, making her look like some kind of repulsive sea anemone bursting with red tentacles.

“Kill him, Mitch! Do you hear me, you little gutless shit! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him! KILL THE MOTHERFUCKER! KILL HIM THAT HAS BEEN FUCKING YOUR WIFE! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER! FUCKING HER!”

And for one insane moment there, Mitch almost did. God help him, but he almost put the gun on his best friend and murdered him. A man he would never have raised a hand against in a sane moment. But he knew better. For light broke through the darkness that webbed his thoughts. Broke through with a stunning clarity and he saw Miriam for what she was…a thing, a wraith, a corruption that lived on filth and lies and hatred.

“Fuck…you,” he said and pulled the trigger of the Remington.

Twenty-gauge buckshot hit her and a split second later, Tommy fired. Then they were both shooting, buckshot biting into Miriam, knocking her back and forth, smashing her into the walls as she tried to launch herself down at them. She rose and descended like a diving bell, spraying fluid and tissue, screaming in a dozen waterlogged voices. And then, as if the helium had been bled from her, she came down. And came down hard, thudding into the steps. Then she was tumbling down and they could hear her fragile bones snapping and snapping. She landed at their feet in a fleshy, broken heap, bones thrusting out from her, worms coming out her throat and scalp like the snakes of Medusa.

They jumped back.

“Dead,” Tommy said, like he didn’t believe it.

She lay there a moment, bleeding that black goo and slithering with worms. Then her head craned up at them and she was grinning, more worms in her mouth. Black juice ran from her lips, looking like dirty transmission fluid.
“Think you’ve won a great battle, do you? Think you effing sonsofbitches have put old Miriam Blake down and there’ll she’ll stay! Wrong! You’ve not won nor stilled me! You can stop me, but you won’t stop the other! The other that has come through to eat the guts out of this fucking city bite by bite!”

They kept backing away and Miriam started coming after them.

It was revolting to see. She was broken-up, shattered, infested by those looping red worms, but she was coming. Maybe her spine had broken because she could not stand. Instead, she wriggled, she crept. Like a slug she came forward with a lurching motion, raising up her ass like an angleworm and lowering it, pushing herself forward, making moist popping sounds. Her jaws opened and closed like they wanted to bite something. She left a slimy, bloody trail in her wake.

They both opened up on her again until what was left was ripped and torn and perforated, her neck broken and head twisted off to the side.

“Salt her,” Mitch said.

Tommy took out the bag and threw handful after handful at her.

It worked right away. Miriam thumped on the floor, screaming and screaming. Steam and moisture boiled out of her. She vomited a gout of that black blood onto the stairs. Her flesh yellowed, threaded out with fingers of dry rot, went brown and flaking. Her eyes filmed over and sank into her skull. She hissed and steamed and shuddered and then went still. All those worms twisting and writhing, trying to get free, then blackening and sinking into the desiccated, smoking mass that looked like a winter-dead tree.

That was it.

Mitch took Tommy by the arm and they staggered out of the door together into the rain. They both went down on their knees in the wet grass, water puddling around them.

After a time, Tommy found his voice. “They ain’t just zombies, Mitch. I been thinking on this awhile. They got power or something. They get in your head and hypnotize you or something. Like they know what scares you.”

“You saying she wasn’t floating down the stairs in there?”

Tommy shook his head. “She was. Oh, shit yes, she sure was.” He swallowed. “But in general, I mean. They can play head games with you, you know? Get in your mind and make you feel things and think things that aren’t true.”