Resurrection (22 page)

Maybe if it had been taken, this all would have been a little easier to take.

They moved down the aisles, stepping over loafs of bread and boxes of donuts, checked out the beer coolers and the glass cases of deli items. All untouched for the most part. The store itself had not flooded as the floor was above the water level, but that wouldn’t last.

In the storeroom in the back, there was muddy water all over the floor right in front of a trapdoor with a pull ring.

“Cellar?” Mitch said.

“That’s it. Just storage mostly. But the kegs of beer are down there, too. I remember our graduation party,” he said. “Me and my old man wrestled a couple of half-barrels up those steps. We got half way up and—”

There was a splashing sound below and Tommy closed his mouth.

Mitch stood there, feeling somehow ineffectual with that Louisville Slugger in his hands. The trapdoor was somehow just too reminiscent of the one Grandpa always disappeared down in
The Munsters.
In his mind he could see it creaking open and plumes of stage fog rolling out…except it wasn’t fuddy
-
duddy old Grandpa coming out of there, it was something else.

“She’s down there,” Tommy whispered.

Mitch nodded.

Of course she was down there. The cellar had to be flooded. Mitch could just about imagine it down there…webby and dark and filled with rank water. You would have had to have been really stupid to be thinking about going down there. Question was: How stupid
was
Tommy?

“Help me,” he said.

Tommy maybe wasn’t so stupid after all. With Mitch’s help, he slid a floor freezer full of ice over the trapdoor. It took a lot of grunting and puffing, but they moved it all right and that thing had to weigh an easy five-hundred pounds. If it wasn’t for the casters it was set on, they would have needed a forklift to budge it. Tommy flipped the latches on the casters, locking it in place.

“That bitch comes up this way,” Tommy said, “she’s got to be one strong lady.”

Having that trapdoor sealed off made something finally loosen in Mitch’s chest. Jesus, this kind of hero crap, it was strictly for cops. Strictly for people that were trained and above all,
armed,
to get the job done. He helped himself to a carton of cigarettes behind the counter and Tommy didn’t try to stop him; he loaded up, too. Mitch tore open a pack and slid one between his lips. As that old, ugly monkey on his back finally woke up for good and took hold of him, Mitch knew this was how his three years smoke-free ground to a halt. Once an addict, always an addict.

Tommy began rummaging around the shelves beneath the cash register. Finally, he popped the cash drawer and pulled out a key ring.

“Bingo,” he said.

“Bingo?”

“Sure, this is the key to the other door,” Tommy said.

“What other door?”

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “In the alley there’s a cellar bulkhead the beer guys use to load the kegs. It’s the only other way in or out.”

Mitch felt his chest tighten up again. “You’re not thinking—”

“Oh, yes I am.”

After they’d finished their cigarettes, they went back out into the rain and answered the obligatory questions from the crowd out there. No, they had not seen the crazy woman. She was down in the cellar. And, yes, they were going in the back way to sort her shit out. Of course, everyone followed them around the corner and into the alley. And when they got there, standing in a loose circle staring at that bulkhead like mourners staring into a grave, nobody said much. The rain fell, ran down faces and dripped from raincoats. A steady torrent from a rusty rainspout emptied a short distance away with a sound like a rushing stream.

Tommy fumbled his keys to the big padlock securing the doors.

He almost dropped them twice, all those slack-jawed faces pressing in ever closer. He got the key in the lock and when he did, everyone stepped way back. It was like he was breaking the seal on an Egyptian tomb and they expected hell to come flying out on leathery wings. Mitch did not step back. He was holding the four-ten and willing his hands not to shake. This wasn’t exactly the same sort of shit they’d waded through at the Bell house. There’d been that gnawing sense of being watched at the house, that sense of the unknown…but down here in the cellar, there would be no cat-and-mouse, he was thinking, there would be a sudden explosion of water and then an amorphous, marble-skinned blur would reach out at them with white fingers.

As Tommy gripped the doors and prepared to throw them wide, Mitch felt an irrational, childlike terror settle into him. It made sweat run down his spine and nearly stole the breath from his lungs like a cat licking the milk from an infant’s lips. Going down there would be like descending into some crumbling vampire’s crypt at sundown with nothing but a flimsy stake in your hands. But the child in him was telling him it was worse than that: going down there was like entering the cannibal witch’s lair in some evil fairy tale…and doing so willingly.

Then Tommy threw the double doors open, first the right, then the left, and they clanged hollowly against the brick façade of the building. He jumped back a millisecond after he’d done so like maybe he was afraid some huge spider would rush out and snatch him.

But nothing rushed out.

In the dirty light, they could see the steps leading down into the water, lots of junk bobbing around down there. A rank and moldy odor wafted out at them with fingers of dirty mist.

“You boys…you boys ain’t really going down there,” the old man said. Not a question, just a statement. “You can’t do that.” He was like some village elder then trying to talk some heroes (fools) out of going into the dark forest and seeking the ogre’s cave.

And Mitch thought:
Oh yes, we’re going down there, my friend. Me and my stupid associate here. We’re going down into that dampness to fight the monster and nothing you can say will stay us.

Jesus, this was ridiculous. This was a job for the police.

But Tommy was going down and Mitch knew he had to go with him. That’s how it worked. Besides, look at these idiots gathered around them. They were expecting a show and you couldn’t let them down. They had ringed tightly around Tommy and he like a noose. And Mitch, well, he had this ugly feeling that if they didn’t go down there, the crowd would
push
them down.

“You’ve had better ideas,” he said to Tommy.

“So have you,” Tommy came back. “Like going into that fucking house.”

Touche´.

23

Tommy took his shotgun and started down the steps and Mitch was right behind him, that baseball bat in both hands like he was ready to knock one out of Wrigley Field in the bottom of the ninth. Tommy stepped into the water first and by the time he found the floor, it was sluicing around his waist. Light came in through the bulkhead and a single narrow window near the ceiling, but still the shadows were sliding around them like snakes. It was oddly warm down there and stank like a polluted tidal pool, dark and fusty. Cases of Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater’s, and Red Bull were stacked along the walls along with towers of beer. Some of the beer cases had broken open and cans of Budweiser and Old Style bobbed around them. In the rear he could see all those shiny aluminum kegs of beer and overhead, ancient rafters threaded with pipes and ductwork that looked like they’d been put in about the time of prohibition.

“You see her down there?” somebody called.

Mitch jumped, slopping forward in that filthy water. The baseball bat was so greasy in his hands he thought it would slide right out of his grip.

“Yeah,” Tommy called back. “She’s right here, holding my ding dong. Says you should come down and get a kiss.”

There were a few uneasy laughs up in the alley. And then, surprisingly, footsteps came down the stairs and somebody waded into the water with them. Not one of the men, but a woman with a fishing hat on. And when she was down there, she looked around for a weapon. Decided against the beer cans and then, comically, grabbed a sack of Gold Medal flour and then another of Kosher salt. They were heavy at least, five-pound bags.

“Come on sweetheart, show yourself,” Tommy said. “I think I love you.”

Mitch giggled and then giggled again as a couple boxes of Stay-Free Maxi Pads came floating by. It was all so entirely ridiculous.

Then there was movement in the water just ahead of Tommy. A ripple, then another as if somebody was swimming underwater. Mitch felt something go heavy inside him, heard the woman in the fishing hat begin to breathe very hard.

“Wait now,” Tommy said.

And then the water ahead of him began to swirl like a whirlpool and then a figure rose up from the murk. Yeah, it was a woman or had been a woman. Her hair was red and hung in foul loops over a face that was puckered obscenely white. Her lips were gray and seamed like an old lady without her teeth in, that mouth shriveled down to something like a blowhole. Her eyes were black and shiny like ebonite.

“Get back,” Tommy told his troops.

Mitch was having trouble moving at all. He kept seeing all that flowing red hair and thinking that Lily would look like that if she was dead…and had come back.

The woman came on, dripping and smelling of decay. Her face was fissured like old elm bark and set with dozens of ragged holes like somebody had been poking her with needles…or spikes. Water ran from them in steady rivulets. When she opened her mouth in something like a grin, her teeth were gray and broken.

“Stay the fuck back,” Tommy told her. “I mean it.”

But she wasn’t staying back. And you could see by looking into those eyes that there was nothing to reason with inside of her. She was just a mindless drone, a predatory thing like a hornet fixed on stinging you. She would not back off.

She brought her hands up and Mitch saw that there were no nails on her bloated fingers. There were fat green worms hanging from the undersides of her arms…they looped and squirmed, began to slide back into their holes with a sound like a child sucking up a strand of spaghetti.

Tommy uttered a little disgusted grunt and pulled the trigger of the four-ten. Maybe he had satisfied himself that this thing was no woman, that killing it was no more murder than killing a woodtick that was sucking the blood out of your balls. The sound of the four-ten was thunder in the cellar, rolling on and on. The dead woman had taken birdshot at close range. It had blown open her shirt in black tatters and opened up dozens of holes in her fish-white belly. And from them, not blood, but more of that inky black liquid and runnels of contaminated water that stank like fish rotting on a beach.

But the blast did not put her down.

She kept coming, those white hands looking for necks to snap and that gray, puckering mouth looking for wounds to leech of blood.

That did it.

They fled. The woman in the fishing hat went splashing towards the stairs and Mitch and Tommy were right behind her. They stumbled up into the light and the crowd was still there, mouths open and eyes asking questions that never made it past their lips.

“GET BACK!” Mitch hollered at them. “GET THE FUCK BACK!”

They did, almost falling over each other.

The dead woman came up the steps slowly, but not jerking and clownish like a zombie in a movie. There was nothing funny about her: there was a deadly concentration to her movements. She came up those steps with a squishing, oozing sound and stepped out into the light. In the daylight, her red hair was vibrant and orange, it hung down her white face in ropy mats. She stood there looking at everyone with those glistening black eyes, water and more of that dark fluid running from her with the sound of piss striking pavement.

Mitch figured she’d maybe been in her thirties when she died…and that was probably not days ago, but weeks.

She took a few slushy steps forward. Her shirt, which was hanging in tatters and strips from the shotgun blast, was open enough for one plump white breast to poke out. The nipple was colorless. What might have been inviting in a living woman was now merely profane.

She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something and more of that black filth ran out like crude oil.

And this is where what was nightmarish became positively surreal.

The woman in the fishing hat had clambered up out of the cellar with her bags of flour and salt. She still held them. With a cry, she tossed the bag of flour at the dead woman and it glanced off one shoulder in a ballooning cloud of white dust that dissipated quickly in the falling rain. Seeing that her first bomb had been ineffective, the fishing hat woman tossed the bag of Kosher salt with everything she had…and with the most amazing results.

It struck the dead woman straight on in the chest.

The bag was sodden to begin with and it completely ruptured with the impact. The dead woman screamed with a shrill wailing and began to writhe, her flesh steaming. Steaming and sputtering and popping like hot grease. She reacted like a salted slug. The Kosher salt burned right into her, absorbed the water she was distended with and as everyone watched, she shook and moaned, plumes of steam rolling from her, her body seeming to shrink, to collapse as she went down to her knees. That breast they all saw dried out like grape, became wizened and leathery. And that pretty much happened to her entire body. By the time she fell over into the puddles, she was dehydrated and blackened like a mummy pulled from a sandy tomb.