Husk (30 page)

“Oh, it is only a matter of time, they assure me. The scientific method cannot be rushed, particularly when the stakes are so high. They just need better equipment, some high-powered electron microscopes, maybe a nuclear restabilizer or some such shit like that. We just need patience, and time.

“But patience is a game for the young. And I am out of time. The doctors tell me I have only weeks left. My pitiful little shell cannot withstand another transplant. The only reason I am alive is because of all these tubes flowing blood in and out.

“So we need to accelerate. At this point, I no longer care about how you are still here. I only care about results, and my doctors have assured me that their plan will work. Most likely.”

He stopped wheeling about and parked next to my head. I had to crank my head as far as I could to the right to get him in view. “We're going to have you bite me, Sheldon.” He reached out and stroked my mouth. Damned gloves. His chain-linked finger probed between my lips, caressed my incisors and bicuspids. “Just once. Here, on my neck, at the external carotid artery, will allow for maximum infection in the least amount of time. It will hurt, they tell me, but not much. They have offered to numb the area, but I have refused. Like you, I don't have much sensation anymore, and if this is to be my last perception of true pain, I'd like to enjoy it.” His finger stopped its examination. He withdrew it and patted my cheek, tenderly. “Think of me now as your last meal. Eat of my flesh.”

I shook my head. “You're insane. It won't work. It can't.”

“I assure it, it will.”

“I assure
you
, it won't. You'll be like my mother. You'll be a monster, brainless, rotting. You'll be a corpse with delusions of life.”

“Yes, your mother. About that.” He leaned in, giving me a conspiratorial wink. “I rather liked her. For a ghoul, she had real spunk. It pained me to let her go; I thought we could use her to our advantage should you prove intransigent, but I understood.” He patted my knee in sympathy. “We all need closure.”

I didn't know how to take that. My face betrayed my confusion.

Dixon delighted in my befuddlement, waggling his bare eyebrows. “You didn't honestly think you were unique now, did you? Simon!” Dixon's beast-servant bounced forward to attention from where he was leaning against a deconstructed airplane. “Simon, prepare Sheldon for a trip, will you? It's time he visited the Chapel.”

Simon's nose wrinkled up. “Should I get the masks as well, sir?”

“For yourself, if you feel it's necessary. I think I'll go in barefaced. I find myself wanting to experience everything as fully as I can.” He looked at me. “Today, even the Chapel holds an allure.” He took a deep breath through his nostrils and held it, smiling all the while.

g

I didn't know Lambertus Dixon long, but the time we spent together led to a belief that he was a man without a genuine sense of humor. The bleakest cynicism, yes,
that
he possessed, a fathomless pit of negativity locked in the coal-black recesses of what I, for lack of a better term, will call his soul. But as Simon whisked me into what Dixon labeled “the Chapel,” I grew an appreciation of Dixon's wit.

“It's something, isn't it?” Dixon muttered. He appeared to be regretting his decision to enter
sans
mask. He stomach released a mighty
urp
that ballooned in his throat and forced everything it could up and out. Dixon no longer had the ability to consume solid food, but judging from the grimace, whatever was brought up didn't taste good.

Even
I
recoiled at the reek.

After Simon had sliced free the tape and released my arms, my revenge-fueled pipe dreams took root and I flexed my abdominal muscles to lunge forward and take down Simon for a quick nosh. With my body cupboard bare, it was all I could do to flop my upper half forward and let gravity carry me on. I succeeded only in shifting my weight enough to slide my mass ungracefully off the chair and plant my face onto the concrete. The rotten cartilage that kept my nose erect gave way and shoots of skeletal shrapnel plunged up into the great gray meat of my forebrain.

Simon laughed and let me flap about while the two soldiers pushed an un-ergonomic monstrosity of a chair out of the dark. Small wheels had been affixed to its legs for mobility. After unlocking my legs, the two gathered me off the floor and shoved me down into the seat, ignoring my wails and unperturbed as my teeth sought flaws in their body armor. They held me down while Simon unleashed his inner Bob Vila on my skeleton. My legs and waist were locked into place with steel cuffs. Simon kept me upright in the seat by fitting two metal clamps around my lower and upper spine and driving rivets directly through my skin and into the back of the chair. My torso trench was left open, my stomach drooping, the gaping end of my diminished intestines coiled in my lap. Satisfied, Simon took hold of the backrest and wheeled me out of the warehouse and down a lengthy hallway, the two soldiers taking point, Lambertus speeding his merry way along behind us.

We snaked our way through hallway after hallway, passing workers, soldiers, scientists, all halting their labors to take a gander at the galloping gay golem. After scraping our way through miles of corridors we arrived at a waiting freight elevator. Simon allowed Dixon to speed in ahead and then shoved me inside, mashing the top button with his massive index finger. The numbers descended down the ladder, from one to thirty-five, and we were all the way at the bottom.

It took fully five minutes for the lift to arrive at floor 1, during which we took turns not looking or speaking to one another.

The doors opened to a bustle of activity, people frittering about in what looked to be the emergency ward of a hospital. Gurneys lined the walls that stretched out before us, each makeshift bed holding a strapped-down inhabitant who plainly did not want to be there, each hooked through electrodes and tubes to the finest in computerized medical devices, each attended to by studious doctor types from central casting.
Boops
,
pings
, and
buzz
es filled the air, but from the patients themselves there emitted not a sound, their manic struggles against their bindings mute save for the clacking of teeth, muffled slightly by mouth gags.

Ghouls.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty. None smart enough to exercise their lungs. Each nothing but cannibalistic appetite clad in fetid flesh that sloughed off their bones.

“Confused yet?” Dixon spat in my good ear. “I can see it in your eyes, boy, even past all that damnable white. You're doing the math. You're asking yourself, how in blazes is this possible? Who are all these people?” I kept my face impassive, cursing his smug enjoyment of my bewilderment while figures churned in my head. Even if
all
my victims had somehow survived their mealtime encounters, it wouldn't account for even a quarter of what I was seeing.

“You are hardly an only child.” Dixon clapped me on the arm, almost tenderly. “Your brothers and sisters, Sheldon. All of them. Siblings in death. I just thought you should know.”

“This is the Chapel?” I ventured.

“Almost,” Dixon replied, and guided his wheelchair between the beds, pointedly ignoring the kowtowing nods of doctors. Simon grunted and pulled me slowly along behind him, tugging me backward through the room, giving me ample opportunity to inspect the convalescents. Each was in a state of fleshly disrobing; epidermis peeled away in whole swatches, various limbs hacked off, crowns of skulls exposed, juicy segments of brain removed and placed jiggling in metal bowls. I saw Rhodes standing next to one bed, inserting thin rods of steel deep within the open cerebrum of his subject. He looked up as I rolled past, fear streaking over his face. He forced a weak, quivering smile and gave me an apologetic wave. I roared loudly and Rhodes explosively vomited over the head of his patient, who didn't seem to mind. The entire room was promptly saturated with sick. Quite a few medicos fainted, drooping over open orifices and slimy muscle. I giggled and guffawed as Simon pulled me quickly the rest of the way, hearing Lambertus curse his staff for forgetting to wear their mandatory hearing guards. As he heaved me into the hallway beyond, I saw those doctors smart enough to wear aural protection rushing to help the unconscious, pulling them away from piranhic jaws.

Dixon whispered an order to Simon. He re-entered the room, emerging moments later with the good doctor in tow, dabbing at the vomit that coated his chin. Complaining, Rhodes fished around in his pockets until he found his plugs and shoved them deep into his ears.

“We need you, Doctor,” said Dixon. “I want you along for this part.” We continued on, Rhodes bringing up the rear, well out of biting range. I bared my teeth at him anyway.

The next doorway led to an open hangar bay, vacant except for a few jeeps and cars, a small jet, and two technicians looking it over. They both saluted as Dixon trundled past. The hangar entrance was open; beyond, blurred even with the glasses, I glimpsed sunlight, azure skies, a mountain range of majestic heights. From down the paved road (a runway, I realized), a breeze wafted in and caressed my ravaged body, my few near-exhausted nerve endings perking up at the chill, and I allowed myself pleasure in the sensation, conceivably the last such I'd ever experience.

“Here we are!” Dixon announced, wheeling up to a nondescript set of double doors and thumping the automatic door opener with his fist.

“The Chapel!”

The aroma smacked into me, ruffling my few remaining hairs, and I knew what it was, but I couldn't comprehend the how of it. It was redolent of fast-food restaurant dumpsters, of happy maggots full to bursting, of overflowing diapers and cheese gone sickly-sweet. Simon and the others hastily fumbled for gasmasks hanging next to the doors, holding their breath until each had slipped one over his head and secured the rubber seal about his face. Behind us, I heard the plane techs gagging, complaining about the lack of warning. Dixon sped inside, sniffing, coughing with mirth. Simon rushed me in the few remaining feet, swearing at the exertion but plainly considering haste a virtue. He planted me next to a waist-high barrier, giving me an unobstructed view of my family tree.

Dixon belched as he leered, a gastrointestinal rebellion against the aroma of living dead, thick yellow drool escaping through the gaps in his grin, holding his own for several moments until he capitulated to the noxious miasma that filled his lungs and motioned for a gasmask. Simon speedily grabbed another and fit it snugly about Dixon's head, overwhelming his tiny skull, transforming him into a rubberized aardvark.

“Behold, Sheldon,” Dixon's voice echoed through the exhalation valve. “Your heritage.”

It was a living death pit. An animated charnel house.

We sat on a walkway suspended a few meters above a sunken rectangular storage chamber fully 200 feet long and half as wide. Access to the floor was only possible through open lifts controlled from the walkway. Down in the bay, beneath the squirming, I discerned workout equipment, weight bars, a leg press. Doubtless the room was once a recreation and exercise area for the many soldiers who would inhabit the structure should the end times approach.

The current dwellers had no such need for physical fitness.

I estimated five hundred, likely more, of every subset of humanity, a true melting pot, a multi-cultural glory of undead savagery. Males, females, whites, blacks, Arabs, Asians. All were clad in whatever garb they had died in; business suits mixed with turbans, yarmulkes and dashikis wandered beside boxer shorts and bikinis. Their flesh was black with putrescence, gray with mold. They shuffled and bumped into each other, turning around and performing the same action with another, and then back again, caught in an eternal loop.

Goldfish in a bowl, always forgetting where they'd been.

They trod over the bodies of fallen comrades, elder ghouls that had surrendered to rot and fallen to pieces. Beneath their feet I watched limbless torsos flop, brains still toiling, driven by perpetual starvation to seek sustenance. The ones nearest us diverted themselves from their routines, raising arms toward us and groaning, actually groaning. Some had figured out the rudimentary task of oxygen exchange, rewarded for their genius with the gift of song. They clambered at the wall beneath our feet, eyes scored pale, some altogether absent, with gaping hollows stringed with mucus, drawn to our voices, or Dixon's scent. The concrete walls were crusted with gore, inches thick. One of the guards fired a few rounds into the horde, chortling as bullets sliced through skulls. Simon cuffed him on the back of the head.

“We've been kept very busy,” Dixon's voice echoed through his mask. “No lack of subjects for the good sawbones here. We keep the room ventilated, which helps reduce the fly population, but as you can plainly tell, it's impossible to dampen the smell.”

“How . . .” I could not finish the thought. It was beyond comprehension.

“You vere hardly zee firzt zombie vee've found, Sheldon.” Doctor Rhodes took a position beside me. “Vee haff been working on ziz for much longer zan you realize.”

Dixon looked out over his undead preserve. “I have been scanning the whole of this planet for the better part of a century, looking for the key. I would hear tales, stories of friends thought dead walking through backyards. Buried fathers digging themselves free. Cancer-riddled children rising from deathbeds. All reported as myths, or foolish superstitions, or paranoid delusions, but I followed every lead. It was simply a question of having the money and the willpower to go beyond the story and find the truth. And I had so much money, and so much will.

“I traveled the length and breadth of this world a hundred times. I bribed officials in every country. I walked through swamps, I hiked up mountains, I slept in teepees and igloos. When I grew too old, I paid men to do it for me. It got so that I didn't even need the stories, I could simply
sense
when one of you was about. Something in the air, you could say.