by Curran, Tim
And slowly, Brian was pulled out of the cage.
The candle went out.
He screamed for maybe five minutes until there were wet, chopping sounds and then the noises that followed were grotesque and unspeakable.
25
An hour before dawn, the knocking came and went at Miriam Blake’s house on Kneale Street. Throughout the night which was long and shadowy and surreal, her guestsLou Darin, Margaret Boyne and her son, Russelhad dozed off and on in their chairs, but never for more than twenty or thirty minutes, always waking with terror in their eyes.
And Miriam was there, shotgun on her lap, to say, “Go back to sleep. I’m watching, I’m always watching.”
Miriam had undergone a transformation that night. Somehow, some way, she was different. Maybe it had been Rita Zirblanski’s punch that had rattled something loose or maybe the idea of her oncoming death had given her a peace and a serenity she had not known since childhood. Her radical views had softened. Because ultimately, she knew, none of that mattered anymore. None of it.
So when the knocking came at the door an hour before dawn, she just nodded. “Maybe it’s for the best.”
The others stared at her, thinking she was out of her mind.
“I think we’re the last ones,” she told her guests. “Those effing things have been knocking on doors all night, I’d reckon. Being invited in and breaking in when they weren’t. Now we’re all that’s left.”
“The last people?” Russel said.
“Yes, I’m afraid so, son.”
“That’s…that’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said. “It can’t be. There are 80,000 people in this city. 80,000!”
“Were, I’m afraid. Were.”
The knocking sounded again. Not just the front door now, but the back door, too.
“Maybe…maybe it’s the National Guard,” Margaret said, though she did not seem to believe it.
“No, dear, no,” Miriam told her.
This knocking was slow and monotonous. It wasn’t at all the way someone would knock that needed help or wanted to give it. That would be more of an insistent, quick rapping. And if it were a mere social calla laughable idea under the circumstancesthen it would have carried some sort of rhythm. But this…no this knocking was all wrong. It was a mindless banging. The sort of cadence a machine would produce or something with a mind like one.
“Why don’t they just stop?” Lou said.
And then they did.
Silence.
For a moment, two and then three.
The doorknob was turned this way and that. It was rattled violently. The door shook against the plank Miriam had secured over it after she’d blown the lock off. Somebody wanted in and they intended on getting in.
Russel grabbed his mother’s arm in a death-grip. “Look,” he muttered. “Look…”
Behind the curtains they could make out the silhouettes of several people trying to peer through the window. They rubbed the rain-beaded panes with their hands and pressed their faces up against the glass.
“I guess they’ve found us,” Russel said, reaching for a rifle on the table, a Winchester .30-30.
The door was struck by a flurry of pounding, shaking in its frame. The window took the same degree of force and shattered in its casement. With a sinking feeling, everyone in that room saw dozens of white hands tear through the curtains, lashing and clawing, dead faces peering in. And the handspuffy and rottingwere thrashing around mindlessly, looking for something to grab. By the light of the candles, they all saw the zombies waiting out there, massing, preparing to come in. Many faces were distended with gas, others stripped nearly down to bone, and still others with strips of flesh hanging from their cheeks and chins.
Lou Darin screamed.
It was a high, broken, womanish sound. He was the Superintendent of Schools. He cracked the whip in Witcham’s educational circles. He was the terror of the PTO and the school board itself. He was a man of position and power and influence. But all that was gone in a single moment of hysteria. All of it. Now he was just a frightened child and the scream that came out was the only course of action left to him as his mind came apart.
“Come on, you effing sonsofbitches,” Miriam told them. “I’m here! I’ve been here all along! Come and get me!”
So they did.
As they pressed through the shattered window, Miriam kept pulling the trigger on her Remington 12-gauge until she was out of shells. She blew them into fragments and slime, but they kept coming. They were faceless and dripping things, white and bloated, streaked with sediment and river mud, their faces veiled with grave fungi.
Miriam found her feet and went right after the first one to violate her house. It stared at her with steely eyes set in a face of running corruption. It smiled at her and she swung the shotgun at it, splitting open the crown of its skull. Black water spilled down its face. Then it took hold of her and she fought with as much life as was left in that old body. Scraping at that hideous face with her nails, gouging out strips of mucid flesh and white pulp. But it had her, crushing her against it, squeezing the life out of her.
“Run!” she told the others. “For God’s sake, run!”
They needed no more prompting. Russel in the lead, they dashed back through the house, making for the back door. And when the front door came apart, they had already slipped out the back.
The thing holding Miriam tossed her aside and the others moved past her, making for the backdoor. She lay on the floor, breathless and aching, her left wrist numb. She waited for them to come back. Five minutes. Then ten. But they did not return.
Good God, was this a respite?
Had some power above granted her a stay of execution?
It seemed impossible under the circumstances. But she did not look a gift horse in the mouth. She pulled herself to her feet, sickened by the smells those things had dragged into her house. Quickly then, she found her Remington and loaded it. The window was broken, the front door hanging by one hinge. Whatever she was going to do, she knew she had to do it now.
Think, old woman! You need a plan like you’ve never needed one before!
The best course of action, she decided, would be to lock herself in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Take a few guns and a lot of ammo. Hold out until dawn like they always did in those westerns when the Indians were besieging the fort. That was the ticket.
Miriam.
At first she thought she’d heard it, then she realized she hadn’t heard it with her ears, but with her mind. Just that single word and so clear, so precise that there was no way that she could have merely thought it. No, this had been placed in her head.
She looked around the living room, the shotgun in her hands.
It came again, but this time it was spoken: “Miriam.”
The voice was soft and fluid and not at all unpleasant. A voice like that could weave your brain in a downy cocoon and tuck you off to dreamland. You could listen to it while you fell asleep.
“Miriam.”
Maybe she should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Whether demon or angel or just one of those soulless monstrosities from the grave, this one was special. This one wasn’t bothering with any horror show theatrics. No scratching at windows and battering through doors. No vile, dripping voices describing the tortures of the damned or exposing the dirty little secrets of your life. The brain that directed this voice was above the fun and games. It was experienced and aged, smooth and effortless and somehow enchanting.
“Miriam,” it said through the open doorway. “I’ve come for you.”
Yes, there was an enchantment to it, something that made you dream of castles in the sky and fairy kingdoms and gentle afternoons spent at your mother’s knee as she read to you of lands far, far away in her voice which was always sunshine and honey, a voice you wanted to drink from and sleep on.
This voice was like that…almost. A man’s voice. A voice that was cool, almost chilly, maybe not friendly exactly, but soothing
and inviting. How could you not listen to a voice like that? Maybe those other things were all rape and violation, but this one was pure red velvet seduction and black satin romance.
“Come in,” Miriam said.
She said it and was instantly filled with horror and longing, more of one than the other. And a voice, a very tiny voice, in the back of her brain said, Are you goddamned crazy, old woman? Do you realize what you’re doing? What you’ve invited into your effing house? But she just ignored that. Her time had come and she wanted to look the Grim Reaper himself dead in the face and say, ha, thought I’d quiver in my boots, did you? That you’d scare the beejesus out of Miriam Blake? Well, wrong you are, boyo…
There was a swishing as of sheets and a form stepped through the doorway.
Miriam looked and looked again.
It was a man, very tall and very unpleasant to look upon. He wore some long, oily looking coat that might have been leather. A graying, dirty shift beneath it that might have been a shroud. His face was pale, blotched with gray, seamed and withered, barely containing the skull beneath. Red worms were feasting upon it. Beetles crawled over it, scurrying madly. But what caught her were those almost luminous yellow eyes set with just a tiny black pinprick of pupil. Those eyes did not just look at you, they owned you. They were filled with toxic mists and crawling, lunatic shadows, glimpses of places you would not want to go and things you would never want to see.
“So, you’re him, ain’t you?” Miriam said, her hands greasy on the Remington in her fists. “You’re Death…aren’t you?”
“Yes, Death and Life and all that lies before and beyond,” he said.
That voice was still liquid and enchanting, but what it came from was simply hideous.
“You don’t frighten me,” she said to him. “I knew you’d come one night. I’ve lived a long life and the grave doesn’t scare me.”
“Of course not.”
Miriam’s heart was palpitating, her palms sweating so badly that the Remington slid from her hands and thudded uselessly to the floor. Looking on him, she knew her death would be ugly. It would not be quick and it would not be clean. It would be an atrocity. He would squeeze every last drop of human suffering from her and drink of it, grow giddy and drunk at the taste. And when he was done, he would eat her flesh, gnaw her down to the bone.
But he’d get no satisfaction, she decided, because she was old and stringy and tough as a two-dollar steak. And she’d never beg and she’d never scream.
As he glided forward, perhaps expecting this old woman to piss her bloomers and make a run for it, she stepped towards him to meet him. “Got yourself a town, have you? A town all your own, eh, Mr. Death? Turned our Witcham into a great effing boneyard and now you’re here like a fat rat to lord over the refuse pile? Ha! Fool you are and fool you’ve always been! Go ahead, kill and maim and dismember and call your creeping shades from their graves! See what good it does you! Because low or high, rich or poor, they’ve all known the sunshine, they’ve all walked above the earth and known life! Not like a worming, skulking vermin like you! Feeding in coffins and squirming through the muddy earth…”
The dark man stepped forward and something under that gray, mildewed shift of his was moving, undulating. Something that wanted to get out. Something that needed desperately to reveal itself.
“On your knees,” he said.
“Ha! I’ll bow and scrape to no graveworm like you! I’ll not”
But those eyes would not have this defiance. And the mind that lit them would have even less. Miriam felt something give inside her with a wet snapping and she went down to her knees before him. Her bones were rubber and her muscles flaccid and useless. Her nerves idled with flat indifference and her blood became a cooling tar. There was an eruption of blinding pain in her head and she felt her bladder let go, then her bowels. Her left side went numb. Her eyes exploded with broken blood vessels, purple and livid. A trickle of dark arterial blood ran from her nostrils.
“Now,” said the dark man. “No tortures of the damned, Miriam. I won’t dismember you and eat you. It is you who will feed.”
He held out one white, bloated wrist and slit it open with a hooked thumbnail. Black, foul-smelling blood ran like sap.
“Drink,” he said.
The opened wrist was pressed to her parted lips and that black fluid filled her mouth until she wanted to gag. But there was no gagging, only the choking sounds of her throat swallowing.
“Now bite,” he said.
Her teeth did, sinking into that maggoty flesh and tearing free a moist chunk.
“Swallow,” he said.
And she did, the feel of the rancid flesh sliding down her throat making her stomach roll and her heart seize up, darkness taking her finally, thankfully.
That was how Miriam Blake died.
There was mindless, rabid death like that which had burst into her house. And then there was the kind that Miriam suffered, a violation that was bleak and godless and infinitely foul.
26
Crowded, damp, and dark like being buried in a box.
But maybe worse, maybe like being trapped in a black womb, lodged there like something dead, held fast until worms and rot came. This was how it was for Chrissy. She opened her eyes and felt others around her, some alive and some near-dead and most just simply mad. She was bruised and banged-up, but alive and she planned on staying that way.
She pushed a leg off her lap and elbowed a body from her side. She heard moans and groans, felt a warm wetness as someone bled on her. Wherever she was, it was black as pitch and cramped, confined. The air was heavy and saturated with a clinging damp that was hard to breathe. The floor was dirt, but dry dirt. Wherever she was, it was above the water line. A high place, yet one with a floor of earth.
Now what sense did that make?
What possible sense?
She tried to remember. The University, of course. The bio lab. Lisa and Harry and that asshole Jacky. Oh, God. Lisa was dead and so was the pervert Jacky Kripp. The clown. She remembered the clown. It had taken her. Jesus, it seemed impossible, but the clown had flown away with her.
No, no. That wasn’t it exactly, she told herself. You didn’t fly. It wasn’t like a bird snatched you up, this was more of a drifting. The clown took her and drifted away into the night with her, floating up above the water, floating and floating and floating…
After that, she could not remember.
She must have blacked out.
Well, wherever this awful, smelling pit of bodies was, she had to get out. She hadn’t been dumped here by accident, that was for sure. She was tucked away here with the others for a reason. She knew that much. Maybe they were to be left for days until they starved to death, so they would reawaken like the dead things, be like them, be one with them.
“Where is this place?” she said under her breath.
And a voice said, “I don’t know, but we’re never getting out alive.”
Chrissy felt tears roll from her eyes. This was it then. A pit with no escape. They would languish here until…until maybe that clown or something worse came to get them. It was unthinkable. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She couldn’t accept a death like that. Maybe it was her youth or her ego or just her innate stubborn streak, but she could not accept any of it. Not without a fight.
She was left alive.
Unlike Lisa, she was still alive and if she was still alive, then there was a chance.
She crawled over bodies, not knowing if they were dead or alive. She found a wall of damp, cobwebbed stone. She crawled in the other direction and found a like wall.
“What’re you doing?” a voice asked her.
“Trying to find a way out.”
“There is no way out?”
“Have you tried?” Chrissy said. “Have you even tried?”
Nobody bothered answering her and she did not care. The world was insane or maybe it was just Witcham and what did it really matter? This was the reality of everyone in t
hat stinking pit. Ugly, impossible, but this was it. You could roll up in a corner like a sick dog or you could go out fighting.
And Chrissy already knew what she was going to do.
Whatever had brought all this about had brought hell into the world and now it was time to repay the favor.
27
After their heroic…or not so heroic…breakout from Miriam Blake’s house that night, Russel Boyne, his mother Margaret, and Lou Darin, ran through the blowing wet blackness, planning on making it to the Russel House. But a horde of pale, dripping people waiting down the street changed their minds. They took the next available house which belonged to the Procton’s. God only knew where the Procton’s were and nobody really cared. Russel led the way and the other two followed. He stood by the door with the Winchester he’d taken from Miriam’s house while they filed in. Then he locked and bolted it.
“Now what?” Lou Darin said in the darkness. “What in the hell now?”
Russel didn’t bother answering that.
His mother in tow, he checked the house, making sure all windows and doors were secure. Upstairs, downstairs. Then he fell into a chair in the living room, Darin’s question echoing in his head. Now what? Yeah, that was a good one, all right. What did you do when you were locked in a house and dead people were outside and they wanted to kill you? Being unemployed mostly, Russel had seen a lot of horror flicks. Lots of ‘em had people trapped in houses with zombies outside. He was so dragged-out and worn thin that he couldn’t seem to remember what it was those people did about it.
Did they wait for dawn until the ghouls crawled back into their graves? Or was that strictly for vampires?
Darin had found a gas lantern on the mantel that the Procton’s had left behind. There was a can of fuel for it, too.
“You think it’s a good idea to light that, Mr. Darin?” Margaret said to him.
