So Wheeler ran. He ran and ran and ran until his legs burned and his lungs screamed. He fell into a ditch and covered himself with dirt and prayed that he'd never wake up.
Now, in the shelter, he did wake up.
To the realization that Addison had been right.
21.
Mike
After getting Wheeler on his feet, Mike returned to the front entrance, where Palmer was throwing anything not nailed to the floor onto the barricade. Undead hands came through the hole in the door to sweep the obstructions away. Now would be a good time to use his gun.
He emptied the clip through the hole and went into his jeans for his backup. This was the last of his ammo. He shouted for Voorhees.
Outside, Aidan pointed to the smoldering clown; it had stopped moving. Harry lifted the mass into his arms.
The corpse crashed through the upper half of the door and clipped the light overhead, throwing the room into a tumult of shadows. Flames from the clown's ruptured gut lapped at the surrounding debris and cast an eerie new glow.
Voorhees grabbed Mike's arm. "Kitchen! The fridge!"
Palmer stomped the clown, choking on smoke; Mike pulled her off and gave her his gun. The others came running from the community room with boards in their hands. "Keep the rotters back!" Mike said, and followed Voorhees.
They wrenched the refrigerator away from the kitchen wall and lugged it across the floor with an earsplitting screech. Gunshots were heard, and the pounding of Mike's heart drove the other sounds away.
As they passed through the community room, he saw Shipley cuffed to the radiator.
"Voorhees--"
"Forget him! Move!"
Palmer tried to keep her hands steady as she held Mike's gun through a thickening haze of smoke. The evening sun backlit the undead as they tried to get in; they were a mass of writhing silhouettes, heads barely distinguishable. She whispered a prayer and pulled the trigger.
One of the dead flew back into the street. A second later Palmer was jostled aside by the cops with the fridge. Slamming it into place, Mike grabbed the gun from Palmer's hands and gasped a quick "thank you" before turning away.
Jenna and London pulled the clown into the community room and smothered it with blankets. The stench was nauseating. Blackened fingers on one hand curled into a fist; Jenna nearly fainted, but London shook her roughly. "Stay with it now!"
In the street, Harry raised his arms and studied them. His sleeves had caught aflame when he picked up the clown.
Aidan nudged him toward the broken door, even as the living blocked it off. Harry, his flesh being rapidly devoured by the heat, threw himself at the door. The refrigerator, with the survivors behind it, held fast.
Sawbones appeared with the axe; he pushed the other undead back and attacked the fridge.
Harry shuffled around the corner of the building by himself.
Mike looked from the entryway to Shipley. "We need him," he told Voorhees. The bald man shook his head. "He's the last damn thing we need."
"Give me the handcuff key."
"Weisman..."
"I won't ask again!" There was the slightest tremor in Mike's voice as he realized he had no idea what to do, if not ask. Voorhees leaned against the fridge and once again shook his head. "No."
Harry's flaming arms plunged through the window over the radiator. Shipley screamed.
Harry fought to get his shoulders through the window before the living reached him; bones snapped and flames swept up over his face. He could no longer see. There was no feeling in his upper body. Still he thrashed and thrashed and then felt himself hitting the floor, inside the shelter, bathed in fire.
Shipley kicked madly at the zombie. Mike ran up and beat at it with a board. The blanket on the nearby cot went up in seconds. "Voorhees!" He hollered. "THE KEY!!"
Voorhees entered the room. He pulled the widowmaker from his trench coat. Shipley cowered at the sight.
But the P.O. lopped the zombie's burning head off and kicked the body across the floor. He tossed the key to Mike. "Cut him loose if you want." Voorhees upended the flaming cot.
Mike knelt by Shipley. The handcuffed man kicked his legs and cried "Look...!"
The decapitated body had rolled underneath another cot and set it ablaze. "Fuck, Voorhees, fire over there!" Mike turned back and unlocked the cuffs.
Another cot was burning - dirty clothing piled beneath it sent a foul-smelling smoke into the air to join the clown's putrid odor. The whole place was going to go up. Palmer entered the room. "We've got to get out of here!"
"That's what they want!" Yelled Mike. "They're smoking us out! They're all around us!"
"If we can't--" Throwing her arms into the air, Palmer screamed "SHIT!" and ran to the chapel door. "Wendy? Kipp? You've got to open up!"
"Didn't you hear what I said?" Mike snapped. "YES I fucking heard it!" Palmer shot back. "We can get onto the roof from inside the chapel!"
"Then what?!" Voorhees coughed violently, swatted at the smoke around him. "The auto shop next door," Palmer said, trying to calm herself, to think. "Their roof's lower. We can make it over there, I'm sure of it."
Voorhees looked at Mike, who returned his hapless expression. "We're surrounded. They've got weapons. They've got a PLAN."
"Then we've got the roof." Voorhees muttered. "All right, everyone c'mon!!"
Through all this Shipley was silent, rubbing his tender wrists, watching the cops through the smoke.
22.
Tetch
Lily knocked on the study door and Tetch bade her enter. "Where is everyone?" She asked.
"Come over here, and I'll tell you." He motioned to a chair on the other side of the desk. Atop the desk, where stacks of books had been pushed aside, he had a shoebox filled with dirt. Lily eyed it with interest.
"I know how you've been wanting to go outside the gates," Tetch said, "and the truth of the matter is, I've been laying plans to make that possible. I'm tiring of the house myself, large as it is, and I don't want you to grow up and live your entire life inside these walls."
He emptied something into his palm from a paper bag. It was a dead frog, hard and black. Lily grimaced at the sight.
Tetch dropped it into the shoebox.
"You know your brothers and sisters aren't like the other rotters." He said. She nodded. "Here's why." He gestured to the box of dirt, and she craned her neck to peer inside, and the frog's frail little legs were kicking.
"It's earth from around the estate." Tetch explained. He loved the way her eyes shone as they followed the tiny movements of the born-again amphibian, the way she looked up at him, he who had done the miracle. "Harry and Prudence and all the others were brought back this same way."
"How did they die?" Lily asked boldly.
Clearing his throat, Tetch placed the frog on the back of his hand. "It was Doctor Addison - Father." He was lying, of course, but she was still too young to fully understand. And they had died peacefully besides, slowly poisoned by the exotic toxins Tetch had used to flavor their meals. None of them had ever suspected him of foul play; after all, he was the one who'd saved them from Addison.
The memory was clear as day, one he often replayed. Addison strapping the fifteen-year-old boy to a chair and presenting an instrument tray, upon it a mallet and steel spike. "You're stubborn." Addison was saying while he jotted notes. "Your soul simply isn't pliant enough - yet - to accept the Old Ones." These Old Ones, Addison was always rambling about them but refused to explain who they were. He refused to explain how feeding the children dirt and pricking their arms a hundred times a day did anything to find a cure for the plague.
Addison raised the spike; Tetch's arms tensed, but found resistance in the leather straps binding him. "This will be painless. Soon you'll be a more agreeable subject - they'll be pleased with you, I think."
"T-they who?" Tetch demanded, trying to sound strong. "The Old Ones?"
"The Old Ones." Addison set the tip of the spike just below Tetch's eye
and reached with his other hand for the mallet. Tetch, unable to look directly at the spike, glanced down at Addison's notebook. He saw FRONTAL LOBOTOMY in a haphazard script.
"Living tissue, living bodies for them. Much better than the rotting animals out there, so much better." Addison leaned forward and moved the spike slightly. It was huge and cold in Tetch's tear duct. He was terrified. His arms strained and he felt the buckle give on one of the straps.
"Oh, no." Addison lowered the mallet and grabbed Tetch's arm. "I told you this won't hurt, Baron. I need you to relax. I've brought you out of Hell, son, in more ways than one, and I need you to trust me."
Son.
Something about that, at that moment, in that precise tone of voice, caused Tetch to snap.
He yanked his arm free and snatched the spike from Addison's hand. Tetch said something then, though he could never recall what it had been; nor could he recall planting the spike in Addison's throat. He only remembered the doctor flailing across the room with gouts of crimson erupting from him, then suddenly it was over.
Under cover of darkness, Tetch had taken Addison into the swamp to dispose of him. There, as he saw the body resurrect in the bog, saw it stagger about and then look questioningly at him...he'd begun to understand.
Killing the doctor's Great Dane was done out of necessity more than anything else. Tetch did take exquisite pleasure, however, in wiring the skull to Addison's head.
"Father" had been going about it all wrong: groveling to the Old Ones, thinking that they wanted these fragile human bodies, living or dead - it was all utterly beneath them. Tetch had completed Addison's research and realized his own gifts. Now, it was he who had pliant, undying servants. It was he who had mastered necrophagy, feeding his body on dormant energies - but unlike his siblings, retaining his soul.
Lily was captivated by the frog. Tetch extended his arm and allowed her to scoop it up.
"Gifts such as these weren't meant to be squandered in some rotten old house hidden from the rest of the world. I want to go outside the gates as much as you do."
"When?"
"When we've secured the city. When everyone within its walls - living or dead - belongs to me. It's about trust, Lily."
Later she took the frog outside and let it go. The man in black was standing at the fence.
"Why do you keep coming here?" She asked.
"I wanted to see if you were still all right."
"Yeah. Soon I can go out there too, but Baron says everybody has to belong to him." Casting a downward glance, Lily continued, "I think you'll probably have to leave."
"I won't be doing that." The man crouched, his smooth black eyes drawing her in. "Baron is wrong. These things he wants, they won't happen. I think you know that."
"H-he's always right."
The man pointed to the fence. "In there. Not out here."
She didn't respond. She was mulling it over, but as a child she couldn't avoid some truths, even those that made no sense, like the frog in the shoebox coming back alive. It was just...just so...
"It's sad." Said the man. He said it like he didn't know what sad was. Lily nodded though.
"I have to go back into the city," he told her. "Be safe." Then he was gone.
Lily turned and froze. Her blood ran cold at the sight of Tetch in the yard. He'd seen the man.
23.
Palmer
The reverend was the first onto the roof. She turned to help Voorhees, but he was already hauling himself through the open vent cover, then reaching down through the chapel ceiling for Kipp.
Mark Duncan and Mike Weisman lifted the teen up to Voorhees. They had decided they would go up after all the others; a ladder leaned against the wall for whoever was last.
When Kipp got onto the roof, he immediately started shouting for his mother. Palmer took him in her arms and assured him, "She's coming right up! She's next!" In an urgent whisper. The rotters on the ground must have heard him...
After Wendy, Wheeler elbowed his way forward. "Ladies first," Duncan said. Wheeler opened his mouth to start a tirade, but Mike shoved him back into one of the pews blocking the door.
Dead hands exploded through and grabbed Wheeler's coat.
Mike whipped out his pistol and pushed the hands aside. They clawed at him; he dropped the gun. Wheeler fell to the floor in hysterics.
"Help me out!" Mike yelled, sweeping the floor. He couldn't see shit. The gun might be under one of the pews. "Fuck fuck fuck--"
The head of an axe split the door near the top, and the rotters' hands began prying, trying to tear the whole thing apart.
Palmer watched from over Voorhees' shoulder. How could the damn things be so smart...how could they be working together like that?
"Found it!" London cried. She reached between two of the barricade's pews to grab the gun. A rotter snatched her long hair and yanked her into the door with a crash. Mike leapt atop her and struggled with the hand. "GET THE GUN!!!" Wheeler hollered.
London's head smashed into the door a second time. It left behind a bloody stamp matted with hair. Her body sagged in Mike's arms.
"The GUN, man!!" Wheeler wouldn't dare approach the barricade but he didn't hesitate to scream orders. Yeats got on the floor to reach underneath the pews. Brushing the pistol with his fingertips, he wedged his shoulder deeper.
Suddenly he screamed. As the door was ripped away, piece by piece, he felt his arm seized and wrenched from its socket, then flesh tore and muscle snapped and he was soaked in blood.
Mike rolled him away from the pews. The arm was gone. Yeats stared dumbly at the spurting stump, already half-dead. Jenna O'Connell mashed her fist into her mouth with a cry.
Shipley waved at Duncan. Together, they lifted a pew off the floor and turned it toward the crumbling door like a battering ram. "Everyone out of the way!!"
The axe burst through again, and behind it was a skull-faced monster that surveyed the chapel's inhabitants with empty eyes.
The pew plowed straight into the rotter, sending it careening into the fiery community room.
Yeats was gone. Mike and Duncan immediately returned to the spot below the vent. "Let's get outta here!" Duncan grabbed Jenna and lifted her foot into his hands, boosting her into Voorhees' grasp.
Lauren was next, then Wheeler got his turn. After Shipley went up, Duncan and Mike were alone. The undead were clambering through the doorway. Mike knelt and cupped his hands. "No, you first!" The other man argued. Mike shook his head grimly. Duncan stepped up and was thrust skyward.
Voorhees dumped Duncan roughly on the tarpaper and dropped his arms again through the ceiling. "Weisman!"
Mike started toward the ladder, then stepped back; he'd never get around the rotters if he went for it. Standing atop the nearby pews couldn't help him reach his escape route either. The dead lurched into the room, one after the next, and fixed their eyes on him; the gun was still under the barricade, it was hopeless...
He remembered Cheryl, sitting alone in his apartment. And no one knew. Voorhees didn't even know which unit he lived in.
The zombie with the rifle lifted it to its shoulder. Lunging forth, Mike grabbed the barrel, twisting the weapon from the undead's hands. He smashed the butt into the zombie's teeth and spun the rifle around to point it at the others. Smoke poured into the chapel, hungry flames close behind.
He fired. He fired and fired and fired until his hands were numb and the rifle was empty, and all the dead were flailing on the floor with chunks of flesh and bone scattered around them.
Mike hurled the rifle through the door and grabbed the ladder. A female swiped at his ankle. He stomped her face into a pulpy ruin. Staggering up the rungs, Mike linked his arms with Voorhees'. He felt himself rising into the fresh evening air.
Palmer pointed to the auto shop at their rear. "It's an easy jump." The last syllable had scarcely left her lips when Shipley leapt across the gap, dropping into a roll as he hit the steel roof on the other side.
"The kid!" He called, op
ening his arms.
Voorhees placed a firm hand on Kipp's shoulder. "Weisman, you go next."
Palmer knew that Voorhees had Shipley pegged as the Midtown Rapist, but what did that have to do with the boy? Maybe he thought Shipley wanted Kipp as a hostage, to secure his freedom? Hell, he could just run right now if he wanted to. The fact was, there was as much "freedom" out here as there was law.
The reverend watched Mike jump across, and he motioned for Kipp to come over. "You can make it!"
Shipley stepped aside with a look of resentment.
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