by Curran, Tim
“Let’s go see Wanda again.”
7
“All I’m saying, Neiderhauser, is to give peace a chance,” Henry T. Oates said now that his command was decimated, his mission scrubbed, and his raft done sunk. “You gotta quit trying to cornhole every unfriendly you meet, son. Now, next worm-sucking zombie you find, try hearts and flowers first. Because, as the Lord is my witness, one-two-three-four, we don’t want your fucking war! Sing it with me, Neiderhumper: One-two-three-four, we don’t want your fucking war! Louder, you ass-fucking communist flag-burning red limp-wristed pinko, louder! With conviction, I say! ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR, WE DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR!”
Neiderhauser stood there, making a sound that was close to a whimper.
Oates spat into the water. “Why, you war-mongering, peace-hating, red neck right-wing mother-raper! I’m thinking you’re enjoying this, Neiderhumper. I’m beginning to think that you are one Grade A, Class One lifetaker with absolutely no respect for human life. And, to tell you the truth, you are scaring me, son. You are making my pink, un-probed asshole pucker tighter than a virgin’s first kiss.”
Neiderhauser continued to stand there, the water up above his knees, that dead expression on his face. After they made it out of All Saints Cemetery, where Hinks had been pulled into the drink by that rabid pack of dead things, the Zodiac raft was in rough shape. The flotation chambers up near the bow had all deflated and they had a bad list that made it real tough to get any speed out of the old girl. But she’d gotten them out of River Town and into the fringe of Crandon before she gasped her last breath. And that was something.
Now they were on foot, all that remained of the squad, Neiderhauser and Oates. At first the water was up to their waists, but now it was down near their knees and that was saying progress, in Oates way of thinking.
Neiderhauser was in shock or maybe just fucking crazy, Oates was thinking. Hinks had gotten like that, too, after the tango in the alley. Now Hinks was dead and Oates’ squad consisted of just Neiderhauser and him. And wasn’t that just sweet? Oates had marched through the shit before with bodies dropping quicker than panties at a frat party, but he’d never lost so many men so quickly. Sure, Witcham was a hellzone, but command wouldn’t understand that and would like it even less.
Tell you what, Angela, Oates thought, imagining his wife once again, they’re not gonna sink me on this one. Don’t recall the captain saying I was taking these boys into combat and surely not against dead people. No, I will not be hung out to dry on this one, for Henry T. Oates might be one foul-mouthed, ballbusting, intolerant sonofabitch, but he is not stupid. And he will not be taking the fall for this.
Oates was standing at the intersection of two streets, studying his pocket compass with the luminous dial, knowing he had to head east to make it back to whatever civilization still remained in Witcham. West was River Town and the swollen Black River and east would carry them out of this. But to go east meant heading down a very narrow street with lots of abandoned vehicles and crowded buildings, too many places for unfriendlies to be hiding. And it was dark, damn it was dark.
“Well, I tell you, Neiderhumper,” he said. “This is certainly a pickle we’re in. I’m not liking what lays just ahead, but I’m not seeing a choice either.”
Neiderhauser just stood there impassively.
“Are you with me, son?”
Yeah, Neiderhauser was in shock. Just too much death and insanity shoved down his throat at once. It had sunk his mind down somewhere south of bad. He was physically there, but that was about it. Oates had seen it before. He remembered when he was with the 101st over in Kuwait. They’d opened up on a Republican Guard unit with recoilless rifle fire and heavy machine guns, finished them off with a mortar barrage. They’d been driving old Russian trucks, those ragheads, and when the party was over with, there was nothing but a lot of mangled metal, burning bodies, and clouds of black smoke spiraling into the air. The stink of cremated flesh made quite a few of Oates’ platoon go to their knees and vomit. But there was a black guy named Robbins from Des Moines who was one tough boy, a real hard-charger. He went over to the trucks and caught sight of an Iraqi hanging from the wreckage of a truck, impaled by a shelf of twisted metal. He was on fire. In fact, his guts had been blown out and they were on fire, too, his bowels draped over the cab and on the ground, smoking and sputtering like those snakes you light up on the Fourth of July.
Robbins just lost it.
First he started crying, then screaming, then he fell to his knees and did the craziest thing Oates had ever seen: he yanked out his dick and started pulling on it. Poor thing was shriveled-up like a sun-scorched blacksnake on an Alabama turnpike, but Robbins kept pulling on it. And it did not seem to be out of any sexual need, for that dick would not grow, but maybe to assure himself that it was still there or maybe that he was.
The other men got real uncomfortable about it all. Oates walked over there and said, “Robbins? Daddy says no pee-pee pulling in mixed company, so put that little thing away.”
But Robbins kept at it. His eyes were glazed and he did not seem to aware of anything around him.
“I said, put that fucker away,” Oates told him. And when raising his voice an octave got no response, he went wild. He pulled Robbins to his feet and slapped him across the face and kept slapping him until that poor bastard fell down, sobbing. Afterwards there wasn’t a damn thing to do put shoot him up with some Demerol and medvac him out.
Combat and death got to men like that sometimes.
And that’s what had happened to Neiderhauser. Thing was, there was no medvac out here, wasn’t even a radio, and being that the squad was down to two, Oates needed Neiderhauser and needed him in command of his faculties.
“Listen, Neiderhumper, I’ll get you out of here, but you got to snap out of this shit because we just don’t have the time for a fucking touchie-feelie encounter session and a good cry. So I’m telling youno, fuck that, I’m ordering youto find your balls and act like a goddamn man. Now are you going to do that or am I gonna have to traumatize your ass with some of that world famous Sergeant Henry T. Oates cock-knocking therapy that’s known far and wide?”
Neiderhauser did not move.
“All right then,” Oates said, shouldering his rifle. “I am not gonna stand here playing fucking Statues with you like a couple kids in the park. No, sir.”
Oates walked over to him, slapped him across the face and then promptly kneed him in the belly. Neiderhauser doubled over with a gasp and Oates punched him in the back of the head with enough force to drive him down into the water. Neiderhauser came up swinging. He caught Oates on the side of the face and nearly flattened him. He swung a few more times and Oates just kept slapping him until he came out of it.
“What…the…fuck,” he kept saying as Oates put an armlock on him and held him pretty much immobile. “What…the fuck…did…you…do…that…for?”
“Because I had to, son, only because I had to.”
Neiderhauser stood there, panting, the rain running down his poncho. “I…I lost it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I’m okay now.”
“Sure, you are. Now let’s get out of here.”
They had powerful halogen flashlights taped to the barrels of their M-16s and they turned them on, heading down that winding street. With all the water, there was just no way to be quiet about it. They splashed along, all that racket echoing off the faces of the buildings, announcing their presence to anyone that might be listening.
Nothing but black water everywhere, rain falling into it and stirring up a mist that blew lazily over the surface. The lights created too many shadows and sometimes it was hard to tell if they were just shadows or something else entirely.
Oates heard a splashing just ahead.
“Oh, boy,” he said.
They came around a truck and three forms were standing there…a man, a woman, and a child. They were holding hands like they were waiting for the bu
s. But there was no way in hell they were normal, for they were pale and stinking, their eyes glittering like wet stones.
“Shit,” Neiderhauser said.
The little family let go of each other’s hands and started moving in Oates’ direction. There was something impossibly blank about those faces in the beams of the flashlights. Yes, they were decaying and bleached white, but they had a stupid, idiotic look about them as if they were doing things without knowing why, driven on by forces they could not comprehend.
“Take a walk,” Oates told them. “I hear there’s a Halloween party downtown.”
They did not even acknowledge that he had spoken or seem to understand. They just plodded forward, not stiff and shambling, but almost gracefully as if they had lived in deep water all their lives.
Oates sighted in on the child, a little boy. Swallowing, he gave the kid a three-round burst to the head. It blasted away lots of meat and skull, but that was about it. The kid kept coming. Neiderhauser opened up on the adults. The rounds chewed into them, but they kept coming, smoke boiling from the holes in them.
Oates and Neiderhauser backed-up.
The zombies kept coming.
And then behind them, a half a dozen others came out of the shadows, ruined faces appraising the men with guns and seeing absolutely no reason not to lunch on them. One of them, a woman in a bathrobe, pointed at them and hissed, black syrup running from her mouth.
“Retreat,” Oates heard himself say.
Neiderhauser and he struggled through the water to the buildings. Behind them, the zombies came forward, moving slowly like they had all the time in the world and they probably did. When it came to eating people, you had to savor the anticipation and the hunt. They just came on, pale and grinning, eyes black and wet. A few of them made hissing sounds and one of them might have been humming. It was hard to say. They came after Oates and Neiderhauser like a spider came after the prey caught in its web…no malice or hatred, just mindless instinctual imperatives guiding them.
There was a narrow three-story flophouse hotel wedged in-between a take-out rib counter and a dry cleaning outfit. Neiderhauser went up the steps and out of the water. The door was open. Oates followed him inside and they threw the deadbolt on the door.
“Christ, what now?” Neiderhauser said.
Outside, they could hear the splashing sounds as the dead moved out of the water and up the steps. They stood outside the door bringing their smell with themflat and toxic like stagnant ponds that had been poisoned out. Hands began to slap and knock at the door. Some of those hands made sounds like wet sponges.
“That’ll hold ‘em for awhile,” Oates said, trying to catch his breath.
It wasn’t the exertion, he knew that much. He stayed in shape and could outrun guys half his age. No, this was something else. Something that was taking him inch by inch and making him want to fold up. He was figuring it was fear, it was terror, and probably something beyond that, maybe hysteria wanting to set in. The dead walking. The dead walking. Oh my Christ, what the hell was this all about?
“Sarge?” Neiderhauser said.
Oates snapped out of it. No, he could not unravel. Not now. Not just yet. Maybe when he was safe in bed with Angela he could have a breakdown, but that was later. Much later. Now he had to get his feet under him. He had to think of Neiderhauser who would die quickly and horribly without him.
“I’m okay,” Oates said. “Just fucking age sneaking up on me.”
They panned their lights around, saw a sofa and a couple chairs, a TV set. A desk with keys hanging behind it. The place smelled old and mildewed. Much of that was the water, of course, but Oates was thinking this place hadn’t smelled real good to begin with. It was just a shitty little hole-in-the-wall hotel where they rented rooms by the hour, no doubt. The sort of place you took your secretary on your lunch hour to screw her or the neighbor’s wife, some eighteen-year old hooker you picked up. The place was dirty and smarmy and you could come here with your girl and violently fuck, do all those things you didn’t dare ask your wife to do.
“We should make for the roof,” Oates said. “It’s our best chance. We see a chopper come by, we can signal it with our lights.”
They moved past the desk, their lights bobbing, and to a little staircase around the corner. And that’s about as far as they got.
A girl was standing up on the fifth step.
Just a little ragged thing maybe six- or seven-years old with pigtails, dressed in the tattered remains of what almost looked like a party dress. But if it had been pink with a bow and sequins, now it was just drab and dirty. A shroud. Her face was swollen and gray, threaded with what might have been bits of lichen or fungi. Her eyes were colorless and gelid-looking, like they might pop if you poked them with a pin. She smiled down at them and black water ran from the corners of her mouth.
Neiderhauser made a gagging sound. The stink coming off of her was appalling, like dank river bottoms and rotting weeds.
“You better get the fuck out of my way,” Oates heard himself say, his voice sounding distant as if it belonged to someone else.
The girl’s smile deepened and she opened her mouth, dark clods of something like graveyard soil falling out and dropping to her feet. There was a black line of suturing at her throat and Oates figured she must have died violently, the coroner or undertaker having to sew her head back on. There was something in her hair, something busy and crawling. Ants. Large black ants were nesting in her hair and maybe in the skull beneath. They began to crawl down her face, eight or ten of them. A few more came up her neck out of her dress. She did not seem to notice.
Neiderhauser brought up his weapon, then brought it back down again. “I…I can’t do this shit, Sarge.” He turned away, sobbing. “I can’t do this.”
“Well, you better learn to.”
There was a pool of black water settling onto the fifth step where she stood, a little stream of it running like spilled ink down to the fourth and third. Though she was dead, she was breathing, her chest rising and falling, a clogged sound coming from her throat as if her lungs were full of fluid. And they probably were.
“Hey, mister,” she said in a bubbling, thick voice. “Have you seen my mommy? I’ve been looking for her, but she’s not anywhere.”
Oates felt the need to giggle neurotically. What the hell was this all about? Where the hell was it going to end? “Your mother’s dead, honey. Just like you. She’s dead.”
The smile faded some and was replaced by an almost confused look. That grayish pallor whitened, those eyes filled with a blackness. “That’s not very nice. Why don’t you be nice? Don’t you want to be nice?”
Oates was just staring at her, thinking that this little thing had died young and would never really, truly age another day. There was something infinitely horrifying about that. She would always be like this until the meat dropped from her bones. A little corpse-white thing filled with ants forever looking for her mother.
“You should be nice,” the girl said. “Angela is always nice.”
Oates felt something shatter inside him. He wanted to scream and rage or maybe just cry, drop to his knees and bawl like he hadn’t since he was twelve and found his dog crushed on the road, panting out its last pathetic breaths. He stared at that little girl and she stared back and it was funny…funny but she didn’t smell like a waterlogged corpse now and her skin was pink and her eyes clear and green. There was no morbid growth on her face. She was eight-years old. Just eight-years old. And that was disturbing because Angela had had a miscarriage eight years before and this could have been his daughter. She even looked like Angela around the jawline and mouth.
“Sarge…” Neiderhauser said.
Oates ignored him. He didn’t know and couldn’t know. The girl started coming down the steps and her dress was pretty and bright. She smelled of peaches and warm August fields. Her hands came out and she wanted Oates to hold her and he wanted that, too. He was going to go to her. He wanted nothing more.
And at the last possible moment, he saw she was drooling and that her teeth were gray and crumbling
Then Neiderhauser grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back. He’d actually been up on the second step and he did not remember doing so. He missed the landing and fell on his ass.
“Why don’t you be nice?” the girl said. “Angela’s always nice. She’s very nice to other men when you’re gone. She likes them to shove their dicks in her. She likes it when she has one in her cunt and one in her ass and one in her”
“Shut up!” Oates said. “You shut the hell up!”
And that little girl he’d almost touched started to laugh. As she did so, black water ran from her mouth. Ants crawled out of her hair and out of her nostrils and her laughter became booming and male in timber. “You stupid cockless little fuck,” that deep baritone said. “Don’t you think I know you? Don’t you think I know all about you?”
Oates was shaking his head violently side to side. “You don’t know me, you don’t know anything!”
That laughter again. The girl opened her mouth wide, wriggling things and black silt raining out. She put first her fingers and then her whole hand into her mouth, sliding it down into her throat. Then she withdrew it inch by inch and she had a crucifix in her fingers, a dirty chain coming out of her mouth link by link. “Your mother was buried with this!” the thing said to him. “I know all about you, Henry Oates! I know that your mother died giving birth to you and she was happy when death took her, because she was tired of that farm and tired of raising you little brats while your father beat on her! I know that your first handjob was from your older sister Lynn! But why not? For it ran in the family! Your grandfather got drunk every Thursday at the Legion Hall and when he got home, he raped your mother! He did it every week until she was fifteen! You didn’t know that? You didn’t know that she bore him two children that died at birth just as you should have? No, you didn’t know, just like you didn’t know that Angela is getting fucked right now! That she’s taking it up the ass and squealing and begging for more! Ask her about it! Ask her about the pictures of her and that other girl out on the internet! Ask her!”
