Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  There was torture in Bob’s accents, torment to match her own. “I’ve been calling for hours, Ann. Hours.” Sharp stones across which she crept cut her knees. Her hands were sticky with the blood oozing from their gashed palms. “Why is it so dark, darling? Where are the stars?”

  Ann’s arm reached out for another torturous advance, rasped against vertical stone. An iron band constricted about her temples, and a sudden fear tightened her scalp. Her other hand found the rock-face. She squatted, felt wildly to left and right, groped above her head. Apprehension firmed to certainty. This was a wall, a wall of stone right across her path. But Bob’s voice came from right ahead, from beyond that wall!

  “Are you coming, Ann?” It sounded clearly, apparently unmuffled by anything intervening!

  “Just a minute, dear. I’m resting.” Bob was hurt, weakened by the awful fever that had swamped his mind in delirium. On no account must he be frightened. “I must rest, I’m awfully tired.” It took indomitable courage, steel-nerved grit to keep out of her call the despair that knotted her stomach, the panic that twisted her breast.

  Ann found projections in the rock-face before her, gripped them and dragged herself erect while all her maltreated body screamed protest. Leaning against the stone, she groped above her head, high as she could reach. The barrier was still there, the barrier from beyond which Bob’s voice still sounded with uncanny clearness. “Ann!”

  From the unholy dark that clamped almost tangible oppression around her, madness once more gibbered its mopping threat at the tormented girl. This wasn’t real! It couldn’t be real! Her ears told her that Bob was right here, right in front of her, so near that she had only to reach out a hand to touch him—but that reaching hand found only cold, damp, immovable stone.

  But what was this? Her fingers, clawing sidewise, touched something cylindrical, greasy. A candle! Great God! A candle stuck in a niche. And a match next to it. A single match! Light!

  Ann clutched the candle, the match. She was shaking, trembling as with an ague. By striking this match, by touching its flame to the wick of this candle, she would be able to see again. To see what it was that barred her way to Bob! But there was only one match. One only. And her hands were ripped, bleeding, numb with cold and weakness. . . .

  THE UNIVERSE ITSELF stood by with bated breath as Ann licked a finger and held it up to discover if any draft wandered here to blow out the precious flame in the moment of its birth, as she felt with a quivering hand for a dry spot on the rock before her, as she placed the head of the match against one that she found and rubbed it slowly across the rough surface.

  Phosphorus spluttered, flared. The girl’s whole soul was in her eyes as she watched that tiny flare, as she watched the blue spark ignite the splinter of wood. Her heart missed a beat as the glow flickered, pounded wildly when it grew stronger again and became a robust flame she dared move the all-important inch to the charred fiber of the wick. And no detonation that meant the collapse of a city’s wall ever fired a besieger’s heart with greater exultation than the ignition of that candle-end did hers.

  Light guttered, steadied, drove back darkness. It revealed a chamber hollowed out of rock by human hands, human tools. It showed, some ten feet high in the farther wall, the aperture through which she had tumbled into this artificial cavern. Below this, and to one side, the growing illumination fell across a great mound of burlap bags, some of which had burst to spill forth jagged fragments of ore. The burlap of which the bags were fashioned was new and fresh! How could that be when the mine had not been worked for decades?

  “Ann! I can see your light.” Bob’s cry struck across the wild surmise springing to the girl’s consciousness. “Ann!”

  She turned. There was the rocky wall touch had told her about, unbroken. And always, as though he were right here in front of her, she could hear Bob. “Ann! You’re almost here. What are you waiting for?”

  It was nightmarish, fantastic. “Ann!” Then she saw where the voice was coming from. Above her, right above her, there was another break in the surface of the rock, an arched opening like the one through which she had so fortuitously entered, except that it was barely two feet high and not much more across. It gaped blackly at her, and the stone that edged it was slightly blacker for inches than the rest of the wall, and from it Bob’s whimper came as though out of an old-fashioned speaking tube. “Please come to me, dear. Please hurry.”

  A speaking tube. That’s what it was! A tube, the orifice of a small tunnel boring into rock! And somewhere within it, not far away, Bob lay, weak and sick, and in need of her! The thought sloughed exhaustion and pain from Ann like a discarded garment. She got a foot on an out-jutting knob of rock, lifted, slid her candle into the hole she could just reach, got her fingers onto its edge and was scrambling, was lifting herself up that sheer rock-face. She had one knee up, another, was squirming into the narrow tunnel.

  “Coming, Bob,” she said. “I’m coming now.” She had to snake through here on her stomach, for the roof of the passage was not high enough even for her to lift to hands and knees. But Bob was somewhere in there, and even had the tunnel been narrower still she would somehow have squeezed through.

  The flickering luminance of the candle Ann pushed ahead of her showed damp-blackened stone, slimy, scummed over by the blanched small fungi of the regions where the sun never reaches. Stalactites ripped long gashes in her clothing, tore her skin. Ahead there was the scutter of the eyeless creatures of the dark. But here and there Ann saw the mark of a pickaxe, a tooled groove, and knew she was not the first human to crawl through this tight gallery, knew that it was man-formed, man-driven through the bowels of the earth, knew that it was the old mine through which she crept. But . . .

  The ground slanted upward, beneath her, the tunnel opened out. “Ann!” Bob’s face was suddenly before her, pallid, bloodless, Bob’s body recumbent on the same auto cushions that so long ago—years, it seemed—she had dragged from the crumpled remains of their car.

  “Bob! My dear! My dearest!” She had her arms around him, was kissing him. “My sweet.”

  His hand came up, feebly, stroked her face. “Ann! I’ve been dreaming—the most horrible . . . Good Lord! . . . Where is this? What place is this. I thought . . .”

  “Don’t think, Bob. Don’t think. Things have happened, all kinds of things. But everything’s all right now. I have you back and everything must be all right.”

  “But, Ann—Holy Jumping Jehosaphat—what’s that?”

  ANN TWISTED IN the direction of his startled gaze, saw across the low, irregularly circular chamber where they were the orifices of a number of such tunnels as that through which she had come, saw a clawed, skeleton hand writhe from one of them, an emaciated arm. And it was followed by a face!

  The face looked at her, broke into a loathsome grin. That is, the livid gash that was its mouth widened to expose rotted, black teeth in a grimace that might have been intended for a grin. But there was no humor in the concave, grey countenance above it, no humor in the blank, imbecile eyes. There was only menace, lewd menace that brought back all the horror of that dreadful night and multiplied it a thousand-fold.

  Breath hissed from Bob’s lips, close against her face, and Ann felt his body stiffen to the rigidity of terror. That same terror ran molten through her own frame. . . .

  The Thing moved gruesomely, and a sound came from it, a chattering, mindless howl, hollow and horrible. It echoed— No! It was being repeated from the other openings into this low, flat chamber, and from them came the rustling dry rasp of fabric dragged along stone. Skeleton fingers clutched the edge of a second hole. . . .

  Realization burst like black flame in Ann’s skull. They were closing in! The loathsome crawlers were closing in on her and on Bob! On Bob!

  Breath gusted from her throat in a shriek the more poignant because it was soundless. Ann threw herself over the prostrate form of her husband to blanket him, to shield him from the obscene menace closing inexorably in. Her hand struck
the candle, struck the light from it. Blackness swept down, blanking out the monstrous faces peering in, blanking out the grotesque half-human masks and the reptilian, snaking arms that writhed out of the rock in a constricting circle of doom. But it did not quench the slithering noises of the crawlers’ coming, their voiceless husked cries, the pungent, fetid odor of their foul bodies.

  Bob’s cheek against hers was icy cold. Ann hitched to cover him more completely, to cover him with her own quivering flesh from the Things that came slowly nearer, nearer. . . . Perhaps they would be satisfied with her. Perhaps possession of her would sate them. Perhaps she yet might save him from them.

  It was feeling, not thought, that curdled in her brain with this last thread of hope, and reason gibbered to her how futile it was. They would take her, and they would take him, and there was utterly no hope for either.

  Something touched her outstretched, bare arm, slithered gruesomely down its length. Ann’s skin crawled to the bloodless, lusting touch. A fleshless hand fastened about her ankle. . . .

  Rock grated, thunderously. The darkness paled suddenly to the color-drained spectral luminance of moonlight. For one reason-devastating moment Ann was aware of a grotesque, leprous mask thrust close against her face, of lecherous eyes in which hell-fire glowed. Then an enormous, batlike shadow fell across the twisted, prone form behind it, fell across her. Shrill, horrible sound burst like a tornado in the confined space—the piercing, weird ululation that had answered her cry for help and banished the crawlers when first she had glimpsed them. It crescendoed to its blasphemous apex of soul-shattering threat, held that topmost note till Ann knew that in another instant it would blast reason from her brain and leave her forever mad. . . .

  Abruptly it ended. The nerve-racked girl was aware that the crawlers had pulled away, that they were writhing on ground-scraping bellies to their holes, that they were sliding into them like so many rats. Above her, someone chuckled.

  Ann rolled, thanksgiving bursting in her heart, trembling on her lips, rolled over to see who it was that twice had saved her from the fearful threat of the crawlers. Who was this unknown unseen friend that alone in the weltering horror of Deadhope had aided her?

  Gaunt, black and gigantic in the silting moonglow, Haldon Kane loomed above her. In his Luciferean countenance huge teeth showed, grinning with demonic triumph, and about that head of Satan his black whip whistled and writhed!

  “You,” Ann sobbed. “You!”

  THE WHIP-LASH WRITHED down, flicked her chin, lifted again. The dextrous play of Kane’s thin wrist kept it in hissing, ominous motion. “Of course,” he snarled. “You didn’t think you could get away from me, in this place whose every nook and cranny I know? After ten years one should be more familiar with even a maze like this than another who had known it for ten minutes.”

  “Ten years! But you haven’t been here that long! Bob hired you only last week.” Clutching at straws, Ann was trying to keep him in play, was desperately trying to stave off the final moment.

  A mocking hideous laugh mingled with the whir of the whip. “Travers didn’t lure me, I was here long ago, ever since it was deserted by fools who thought they must pay for labor to work it, who thought they must dig five times as much dirt as the thin vein occupied so that that labor might have a place to stand at its work . . . Who do you think I am?”

  “You said—Haldon Kane, the—”

  The circling whip-lash rippled in time to the chuckle that dripped from its wielder’s mouth. “Kane is miles away from here, still running from the one sight I allowed him and his men of my pets. How do you like them?”

  Ann shuddered, could not keep her eyes from the menace of the black thong snaking above her. “They—they’re horrible . . .” she whimpered. “They—”

  “They’re not pretty, but useful. I don’t have to pay them, you know, and their food costs little. They find it themselves. . . .”

  “They find food—in this desert? How . . .” A gruesome speculation formed in Ann’s mind, added a new horror to that which encompassed her, was answered by the grinning fiend.

  “There were more of them when I brought them here. Many more. And it was not disease that killed them. Do you understand?” Hell itself quivered in his sardonic smile. “Queer,” he mused. “How simply this State can be persuaded to farm out its convicts to anyone who will engage to board and clothe them. It saves the taxpayers money, you see, especially if the contractor engages also to guard them himself. And then—even guards are not necessary when a simple inoculation will make the prisoners amenable, very amenable to orders from one who has a brain. . . .”

  His voice trailed away, leaving behind it a slimy smear of horror, then came again. “But they’re hungry. My pets are hungry now.” Again that slow, Satanic smile and the whip’s hissing. “Shall I let them feed?” His slitted eyes flickered to Bob’s pallid figure, came back to her and seemed to strip the clothes from her in one lewd glance. “In the presence of such juicy morsels I have already had quite a little difficulty restraining them.”

  Nausea retched bitterness into Ann’s throat at the ultimate horror he implied. “No. Oh God, no!” she whimpered. “Kill us but don’t let—” Terror choked her.

  “Perhaps I may. Perhaps I may even let you—and Travers—live. . . . Your husband’s formulae—what did you do with them?”

  The man was no longer smiling, but his whip seemed to chuckle as somehow he managed to evoke a rattling sound from the snapper at its end. The choice he offered was clear.

  Ann’s lips twitched. Gelid fingers clutched her throat. She contrived to squeeze out speech. “I’ll show you. Promise to let us go and I’ll show you.”

  “Get up, and take me to where you have hidden them.” The whip stopped its eternal whir, floated down to his side, hung there, tense and ready. “Then, if you will sign this mine over to me I will—let you live.”

  “And Bob?”

  “And your husband. I swear it.”

  Ann had to drag herself up by his leg, had to hold onto his arm, while the nausea of repugnance retched her, or she could not have remained standing. Her head came above the roof of the chamber, and she saw that the desert stretched, away from it, shimmering in the moonlight. Something like a trapdoor fashioned of rock lay to one side. When that was in place there would be no sign of what lay below.

  “Come,” the man who was not Kane said. “I don’t know how long my pets can restrain themselves.”

  The skeleton town was to one side, silhouetted against a moon across whose face luminous clouds drifted. “Over there,” Ann husked.

  ANN STUMBLED OVER to the spot, with the man close behind her. Here were the beams in the form of an inverted cross, below them the other beneath which she had slid the envelope. Ann managed to stoop over, to slide her hand into the recess. . . .

  A cold chill took her. There was nothing there! Oh God! The envelope was not there, the envelope that was to ransom Bob from horror!

  “Well?”

  She turned haunted, lifeless eyes to her tormentor. Her lips moved soundlessly.

  He needed no words to understand. Livid fury leaped into his eyes. His lash surged up. Ann shrank against the stripped framework of timber, horror staring from her twisted face.

  “You’ve tricked me!” the man screamed. “You’ve dared to trick me!” The black thong spat at her, spat across her face. “I’ll flay you alive.”

  Agony seared through to Ann’s brain. Her body was a shell of ice enclosing agony, seething with terror. The whip hissed up, stopped.

  “No. That’s too good for you,” the man squealed. “They shall have you!” His chest swelled, and an ululation burst from between his colorless, writhing lips—a sound somehow like the warning cry she had heard twice before, but somehow different, somehow more horrible.

  They were coming! Past the quivering passion-shaken figure of the fiend she could see them squirming up out of the hole where Bob still was. Verminous grey shadows in the silver of the moon-b
athed desert, spectral shadows of uttermost horror from a living grave, they were crawling loathesomely toward her.

  “Take her!” their master shrieked. His long left hand jerked a pointing finger across his quivering body, his whip curled above his head, lashing air, hissing a song of doom. “Take her! Her flesh is sweet, her blood is warm.”

  They slithered along the sand, coming fast now, faster than ever before they had moved. Ann could see their drooling mouths now, their devastated faces, their mindless eyes in which glowed the fires of damnation. “Take her!” the maddened voice shrilled again, and grey talons writhed out, grey hands gripped the hem of her dress.

  She held onto the splintered timbers behind her, she kicked out at them with her small feet. But they were dragging her down. They were dragging her down to their seething, foul mouths.

  And most horrible of all was the silence with which they attacked her, and the spectral glow of the moon on their contorted forms, more horrible even than the crackling of the man’s whip, and the shrillness of his mad voice as he screamed, “Take her!”

  The grip of Ann’s hands on the beams behind her was torn away. She was on her knees. Twisting, she grabbed again at the shattered timbers, still frantically fighting, still desperately struggling against the inevitable horror that tore at her. A fanged tooth sank into her thigh, ripped. She jerked convulsively.

  Above her there was a grinding crash! Light was blotted out. Cataclysmic sound burst all about her. Behind her there was a thunderous crash, a high-pitched scream of agony. Dust was in her nostrils, her eyes. It choked and blinded her. Coughing, spluttering, she flailed out frenzied arms, struck wood close on either side, wood above her.

  Her knees, her legs were queerly wet. But hands no longer plucked at her, teeth no longer ripped her flesh. And there was no longer a shrill voice in her ears, keening, “Take her.”