Resurrection

by Curran, Tim

  They had left Tommy’s four-ten, some shells, one of the lanterns, a bag of salt, and all the blankets.

  It was a sign of trust, that’s what it was.

  They trusted him enough, apparently, to leave him in charge of two girls, a young boy, and an old lady, a feisty one, but an old lady all the same. Jesus, if Harry had been in their shoes, he wasn’t sure he would have made the same choice, him being a convict and all. But they seemed to trust him, seemed to know he was no danger whatsoever.

  And they were right.

  He would not betray their trust.

  He kept hearing helicopters from time to time. Probably the National Guard out plucking people from wreckage and rooftops. He hoped they’d come for them soon. For it would be dark in less than two hours.

  Christ, he hoped they’d hurry.

  “Harry?” Rita Zirblanski said. “Are we going to be all right?”

  He went over there, put an arm around her. “Of course we’re going to be all right. I wouldn’t have it any other way, honey.”

  Wanda looked over at him and winked.

  Mr. Cheese, Deke’s cat, meowed.

  Chuck Bittner just nodded. “Don’t worry, girls, they won’t show up…unless they want to die again.”

  23

  “Those look like bodies,” Deke said in a very nervous voice.

  “Goddamn, I think you’re right,” Tommy said. “Give the man a big cigar.”

  “I’m just saying is all,” Deke said, water running down his face.

  Ahead, there were lots of things floating. Pieces of wood and siding, a Rubbermaid bin and a garbage can lid, the wishing well from somebody’s front yard. Lots of unknown rubbish coated in yellow leaves and, yes, bodies. About a dozen of them caught in some kind of crazy daisy-chain like paper dolls. Only these dolls were swollen with gas and gray as rainy concrete. Some kind of weird magnetism had welded them together and maybe it was just decomposition.

  Mitch had his Remington Auto-loader balanced across his knees, the bag of salt held on the seat between his legs. Sure, those looked like just your average dead bodies, waterlogged and bloated up, a veil of flies over them…but you could never tell in Witcham these days, you just couldn’t tell.

  Deke and Tommy were rowing with slats of wood that had drifted by. Mitch was in the bow. They were making progress, but this was not a good development. In order to keep going, they’d have to try and row around the corpses or cut right through them.

  Mitch knew it was his call.

  He wrinkled his nose against the stink, said, “Keep rowing, we’ll just have to slice our way through.”

  “Through…through that?” Deke said.

  “You heard the man,” Tommy said. “Jesus Christ.”

  For some reason, Tommy had been at Deke ever since they hopped into the rowboat. He didn’t even know the kid…yet he had taken a dislike to him or maybe it was just that he had had enough and he needed someone to strike out at.

  Deke licked his lips. “I was just thinking maybe we should go around. The way the dead are these days, you know.”

  “Nobody told you to think,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Deke said.

  Tommy scowled. “You mouth off to me again, punk, and you go overboard.”

  “Go ahead, you think you’re up to it.”

  “All right,” Mitch said. “Take it easy, the both of you.”

  This was the last thing he needed. Tommy just couldn’t stop picking at the kid. Maybe it was his shaven head or the red braided King Tut beard he wore. But that was fashion, that was window-trimming, inside, Deke was okay. Mitch knew that or he wouldn’t be with Chrissy. Tommy couldn’t stop, though. He was acting like some redneck who found himself a hippie to torment. It was not like Tommy. He might have been a lot of things, but he wasn’t some intolerant redneck.

  “Listen, Mr. Barron,” Deke said. “I just came to help. I know this guy is your friend, but this is getting old, man.”

  “You’re right, it is,” Mitch said.

  Tommy looked like he’d been slapped. “Christ, Mitch, you’re siding with this fucking punk against me?”

  “I’m not siding with anyone.”

  But Tommy didn’t seem to believe that. “Lookit this guy, Mitch! Fucking head shaved like one of faggot gangbangers, that silly-ass beard…damn. You think he’s up to what we have to do? What might be waiting for us? He’s wet behind the ears. He don’t have the balls for this.”

  “I think he does.”

  “I do,” Deke said. “You think I haven’t seen the same shit you have, dude? You think you’re the only one whose seen dead people walking around or had them try to kill you? Well, guess again. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I know it. So don’t you judge me, because you don’t know shit.”

  Tommy looked like he was ready to swing.

  Just great.

  Out in a rowboat in a flooded city full of dead people that wanted nothing better than to yank out your guts and eat them raw and they were going to fight. Oh, it was about as ludicrous as ludicrous got. Tommy was an old toughie; no doubt about that. He knew how to handle himself, he had the experience. But Deke had fifty pounds on him, muscle and stamina. He played football, was a defensive tackle, and had a black belt in karate. The odds didn’t sound too good and what sounded even worse, in Mitch’s opinion, was that if they started any of that happy horseshit, the boat would tip and back into the water they’d all go.

  “So are you our resident zombie-killer?” Tommy said. “Is that what you’re selling, kid?”

  “I’m not selling anything, you fucking hayseed. I’ve seen shit you couldn’t handle.”

  Tommy laughed, swatting flies away from his face. “No shit? This I gotta hear.”

  “Knock it off,” Mitch said to the both of them. “I won’t have it. I won’t have any of this. Both of you, act your fucking ages or I’ll throw both of you overboard. You hearing me on this?”

  They both fell silent, so he figured they got it, all right.

  Mitch didn’t have time for it. None of it. Lily was dead and maybe Chrissy, too, and he wasn’t going on much here, his batteries were dry and his heart was split wide open and bleeding, and he did not have time for anything that did not get them to that fucking orphanage.

  “Row,” he told them. “Row.”

  They did.

  The boat surged forward through that oily, leaf-congested water and the bow sliced right into those bodies and the stink was instantaneous and sickening, enough to make you vomit your stomach out. A week ago, Mitch would have done just that. But now…well, he was almost used to it and wasn’t that a horrible thing to realize? That you could really get used to something like that?

  Deke was gagging.

  Tommy was, too, but he was holding it in. “Just don’t puke on me,” he said.

  “If I did,” Deke gasped, “it would be purely out of respect.”

  Tommy stared at him and burst out laughing. Then Mitch followed suit and Deke, too, letting out a blast of air. It was insane. Insane that anything could be funny in such a situation, yet it was. And maybe the laughter was a necessary thing. Maybe they needed it. Needed to let out some steam.

  But the humor died pretty quickly.

  As the boat nosed through the daisy-chain, Deke said, “That one…that one just moved.”

  And Mitch was going to say, sure, we’re knocking ‘em aside, son…but this was something else. The bodies were all moving. They were gyrating, trembling, then thrashing. It looked like maybe they were all going to wake up, but that wasn’t it at all. For the bodies were just camouflage of a sort for what lived beneath them.

  Children.

  Six of seven them, boys and girls, white and pulpy, their faces the color of newly-risen moons. They slid out of the water, scrambling atop their corpse-floats. Their eyes were black and translucent, windows looking into some dead-end cellar of nonexistence and non-entity. Several of them pointed at the men in the boat, hissing and screaming,
vomiting out clods of river mud. Gray water ran from their puckered, fish-like mouths and sunken nostrils.

  What came next was almost obscene.

  Using their host corpses like inflatable floats in a swimming pool, they began kicking their way at the boat, circling in like sharks looking for fresh meat. Tommy hit one square in the face with an oar, a little girl with swelling nodules on her face that bled a discolored slime. He hit her with his board and her head imploded like a water balloon stuffed with gray meat and black filth.

  Deke let out a cry and followed suit.

  A little boy reached up at the boat and he swung his board, those outstretched fingers exploding in a spray of bile and tissue.

  And by then, Mitch was at it.

  He didn’t even bother with the gun. He grabbed his bag of salt and let fly with what was inside, digging out handfuls and scattering them at those loathsome children like he was salting the icy steps in mid-winter. The first one that tasted the salt screamed in rage and possibly pain. Her filmed eyeballs rolled back in her head and she twisted and turned in the water, black ooze pouring out of her. The others didn’t like it much better. The salt ate right into them, making them steam and sputter and shrivel. Their skins yellowed and tightened and they squirmed like snakes, looping and wriggling, mouths pulled back from the slats of their teeth. Eyes popped like dirty soap bubbles and faces went spongy like rotting humus.

  And they sank from view, plumes of smoke rising from the water, bits of flesh and fat sizzling on the surface. Then there was just a greasy wake and nothing else.

  “Row,” Mitch said.

  They did. They dug their oars into that slopping water and propelled the boat away from the floating corpses with renewed zeal. After about ten minutes of that, their arms aching, they stopped.

  “Look,” Deke said.

  At first, Mitch just saw that fog rising from the water, the mist of rain falling, rows of houses that had been smashed into one another by the tidal wave. But then he saw it.

  Coming out of the murky distance.

  The orphanage.

  24

  The breakout.

  Albert had both boards off now. A light that was grainy and filled with suspended motes of dust was coming in, illuminating the pit and those that languished in it. They were a ragged bunch. Most were injured and some injured so badly they were in shock or feverish and half out of their heads. The others were just terrified into silence. Chrissy had tried to bring a lot of them out of it ever since she woke up down there, but they weren’t having it. Albert had told her it was a waste of time and Alona agreed.

  But then, with the light coming in, it was like they all woke up.

  Or those that could. The ones in bad shape didn’t seem to notice and others, like Ed Watts, for example, were dead. No, Alona hadn’t meant to kill him. She admitted that much and Chrissy believed her. All that pent-up rage…when Watts tried to call out to the clown, well, he brought it on himself.

  “I never killed anyone before,” Alona admitted. “But one of these other SOB’s tries something, I’ll do it again.”

  Desperate times called for desperate measures, as they said.

  Now it wasn’t just Albert and Chrissy and Alona over near the window, it was ten other people who wanted out. They hadn’t had the balls to help, but they weren’t too ashamed to reap the benefits.

  Alona said, “We’re going to do this orderly, people. You and you and you,” she said, picking out three people at random. “Get over to that door. If you hear Pervo the Clown coming back, give us a holler.”

  They did what she said. Maybe it was that she was hot-headed and dangerous with a board in her hands or maybe it was just that somebody had to take charge and there was a sort of military efficiency to the woman.

  “I’ll go first,” Albert said to Chrissy. “If something’s waiting out there, better me than you, kid.”

  Alona and another man gave him a boost and he put his head through into the gray daylight. He looked both ways and saw nothing that concerned him. He pulled himself out and dragged himself through the grass. He saw where they were, just like he could see what had had happened to Witcham through the drizzle and mist. The sight of the destruction made him swallow and then swallow again.

  “Christ,” he said.

  “What?” Chrissy asked. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing…it’s nothing.”

  He reached a hand down and she took it and he pulled her up with amazing strength. She barked her back on the top of the window and then she, too, was up. She crawled through the wet grass, shielding her eyes. After being in that damn pit so long, even the dirty overcast afternoon seemed bright. But then her eyes adjusted and through the trees that dotted Crooked Hill, she saw the devastation of her home town, how high the water had risen. She just stood there in awe, a sinking feeling in her belly. Down there, somewhere, were her mother, Mitch, Deke…oh dear God.

  She stumbled back, knowing where she was, knowing that she was on top of Crooked Hill, the highest point in the city, but a sudden wave of unreality passed through her. Her head spun with vertigo and her breath didn’t want to come. She went down on her ass and then found herself looking up at the Bleeding Heart Orphanage rising above her. It was tall and sagging, shuttered and weathered gray. Windows were broken and siding hanging loose. A rain gutter creaked high above and the bricks were crumbling away up near the roof.

  More people were coming out now.

  While Chrissy was taking it all in, Albert was pulling them out. Three women, two men, another guy wiggling his way out. Albert pulled him up and the guya middle-aged man in dirty suitstarted crying and actually kissed the grass, not caring that wet leaves got stuck to his face.

  A woman named Gail had her arm around Chrissy. She was crying, trying to tell her something that made absolutely no sense.

  Alona came next, having to do a bit of wiggling to get through, but she made it, all right. “Praise the goddamn Lord,” she said.

  And a voice in Chrissy’s head chose that moment to say: This is all going a little too smoothly, don’t you think? Grimshanks might be a lot of things in this world and mostly out of it, but he’s not stupid. Whatever crawling pestilence has invaded his corpse, it’s surely not stupid

  “Come on,” Albert called through the window.

  There were still a few left that could make it under their own power, but they weren’t coming.

  “Screw ‘em,” Alona said.

  But that wasn’t Albert’s way. “Come on in there, you people.”

  But nobody was coming. From where Chrissy was standing, she could not see anything. Just that square of blackness and nothing else. Not so much as a face. Chrissy felt herself tensing inside. This was not good, this was not good at all.

  Then a voice, weak and rasping said, “Gimme a hand, will ya?”

  And Chrissy almost told Albert not to, because there was something wrong with that voice and everybody suddenly seemed to sense that. They all took a few steps back from the window. One woman let out a muffled cry and ran off. But Albert, good old Albert, he stuck his hand down there and then jerked as it was seized. He tried to pull it back, but it would not let go.

  Chrissy saw an oversized white hand gripping his wrist.

  “Well, well, well,” Grimshanks said, “when the cat’s away, my how the mice will play.”

  Then she caught a glimpse of his face down there…white and swollen and undulant on the bone beneath, a series of pink scars spreading out across his nose in a fine threading like that face had shattered and been stitched back together. His eyes were huge and yellow, lacking pupils. And his teeth, like skinning knives.

  Albert screamed. “Help me! Help me! Get that fucking thing offa me! Get it offa me! Oh Jesus Christ…”

  He was not the sort of guy who would have ever screamed in the normal course of events, but this was certainly not normal. He was thrashing and pulling, that huge, rubbery white hand tightening down like a vise.
It would never let go and you could see that. Grimshanks was giggling and squeezing that arm and then the flesh of his hand did not look like flesh, it was not smooth and riddled with dripping sores as before. Now it was lumpy and blistering and bubbling. What had been porous white flesh was now thousands of plump grave maggots, glistening and squirming…they surged right up Albert’s arm in a crawling mass. And then they weren’t maggots, but just a stringy and spreading mat of skin that slowly slid back down Albert’s arm and formed itself into that bulbous, sausage-fingered hand.

  Albert was screaming hysterically by then.

  Alona took hold of him. “Let him go, you fucking queer boy! Let him fucking go!”

  Chrissy grabbed Albert around the waist and pulled with Alona. But it was no good. As she strained and sobbed and wailed, Grimshanks just laughed that much louder.

  Finally, Chrissy fell away.

  “Motherfucker,” Alona said, falling away, too.

  Black juice dripped from Albert’s arm and smoke rose from it. And there was a good reason for that: where that white and worming clown-flesh had touched his own, there was no skin. Just raw quilts of bleeding muscle and straining pink tendon. His arm had been eaten right down to basal anatomy.

  And then as Grimshanks cackled with a sound of shattering glass, that hand of his tightened over Albert’s forearm, actually seeming to loop around it in an unbroken ring of white. Then Grimshanks started jerking on Albert’s arm. Each time driving his head into the brick façade of the building. The first two impacts left Albert stunned, the third and fourth, senseless. By the sixth and seventh, there was a bloody stain on the bricks. And Grimshanks kept doing it until Albert’s skull was smashed and his scalp slopped bonelessly like there was nothing but jelly beneath his hair. Then there was a violent, wet snapping noise and Albert fell dead into the grass, rolling away from the window, nothing but a bloody knob of bone left where his arm had been.