Resurrection (43 page)

But now he was in charge.

And he wanted it even less than he’d ever suspected. Because there was shit coming down in this city that he did not like. There were dead people in the water, only they were moving and seriously pissed at the living. Yeah, it almost sounded like a video game, when you thought about it. And Hopper loved video games almost as much as he loved Cathy Jo giving him a blowjob…but he sure as hell did not want to live in one.

As they trudged through the flooded streets, rifles in hand, the stink of the water up their noses, he kept telling himself that they were alive and they were armed and that was the important thing. He was glad for that. Or almost. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if Liss had bought it when the boat flipped, because he was just psycho and things were bad enough without a guy like that around.

Right then, Liss was saying, “I should call my mom, you guys. She gets really mad when I’m late. I don’t want to get grounded again. God, last time I couldn’t even watch TV. She had me doing laundry. You believe that? I had to do laundry. Your moms ever make you do laundry?”

“Can’t you shut him up?” Torrio said.

“No, I can’t,” Hopper said.

Jesus, he felt sorry for the guy. Almost. Maybe a combination of pity and contempt, you came right down to it. Liss had been funny ever since he’d opened fire in that ballpark, said he’d seen someone, and Oates had jumped up and down on his ass like it was a trampoline. He’d snapped or something. Had some kind of breakdown. Ever since then he’d just been out of it. Hopper kind of felt sorry for him. At any other time he would have
really
felt sorry for him. But they were in a bind here. They were in a potentially dangerous situation and the last thing he needed on his first run with command was guy who’d lost it.

Liss kept talking about shit that made no sense and Torrio kept bitching about it and there was Hopper, right in the middle, trying to keep things level. Was this why Oates was so belligerent all the time? Because he was playing babysitter for a bunch of wanna-be soldiers and the irony of the situation made him run down himself, them, and the Army in general?

And all this time I thought he was just an asshole,
Hopper thought.

The rain picked up a bit, stippling the stagnant water around them, beading their faces. Hopper was miserable and he figured that went for the other two as well…Torrio anyway, Liss probably thought he was at a Cub Scout meeting or something.

“So what’s our plan here?” Torrio said.

Hopper scanned the silent, sunken streets with his flashlight. Nothing but rain falling and debris floating, empty buildings to either side flowing with shadow. There were
things
in the water and they could have been just about anywhere. Waiting in the flooded darkness, ready to leap out at them with gnarled white fingers. Christ, it was ugly, it was tense. He figured maybe this is what it felt like being in a real war, people out there wanting to kill you. Or maybe being the survivor of a shipwreck and waiting for the sharks to show. He supposed the latter was more applicable.

“I said, what’s our plan here?” Torrio said again, raising his voice. It echoed off the silent buildings around them and that was more than a little disturbing.

Hopper sighed. Goddamn Torrio asked the same question every ten minutes or so. “Our plan is the same as it’s been since we went overboard, dumbass. We keep moving. We keep moving until we get to some dry ground. Until the water goes down.”

“Well, we just keep going. As long as the water doesn’t get deeper, we’re going in the right direction. It’s up to our waists, right? It starts going down, we’re getting there.”

Liss said, “This is like that time at Bear Lake. Remember that? It kept raining and raining and the river kept getting deeper and my dad said, it’s gonna flood, it’s gonna flood. God, we barely got out of there. Water was right up to the bottom of the bridge. It washed out an hour after we crossed it.”

“Oh, shut up,” Torrio said.

“Just ignore him already,” Hopper told him. “He’ll snap out of it. Right, Liss? You’ll snap out of it, won’t you?”

Liss nodded happily. “Yeah, sure I will. I’ll snap out of it.” He stopped, shrugged. “Snap out of
what?”

Hopper almost started laughing. Again, if it hadn’t have been so unbearably tragic, it would have been funny. But there was nothing funny about where they were and what was waiting in the water for them.

26

“Something brushed my leg,” Torrio said about fifteen minutes later. And the way he said it, you could be pretty sure it wasn’t a stick. “You hear me? Something brushed my fucking leg!”

Liss, who had lost his rifle somewhere now, just stood there with that glazed look in his eyes, perhaps trying to recall a similar experience at Bear Lake.

“So you bumped into something,” Hopper said. “What of it?”

That’s what he said, trying to be very cool and breezy about it all, but deep inside something turned over in his guts and went belly up. He’d been waiting for something to happen, something bad, and he wondered if this was it. Because this was how it would start, he knew, with a suggestion of something.

“
Don’t give me that,” Torrio said, scanning the stinking, oily water with his flashlight. “I didn’t bump into it, it bumped into
me.”

Hopper sighed. He scanned the water with his light, too. A stick passed by in the turgid, almost nonexistent current. A few leaves. Then a fairly large dead bass from the river itself.

“One time at Bear Lake,” Liss said, “a painted turtle brushed against my sister’s leg when she was swimming and she screamed.”

This time it was Hopper’s turn: “Shut the fuck up.”

They stood there, watching that water like maybe they were expecting to see a dorsal fin emerge. The surface was greasy-looking and steaming like the seam of fat over a kettle of chicken soup. The lights would not penetrate it anymore than five or six inches. It was just a drainage of dirty water, sewage, debris, and numerous dead things. That was offensive enough on its own, but there were other things in it and they all knew it.

“
I’m not seeing anything,” Hopper said,
whispered
actually, like something down there might hear him and decide to prove him wrong.

The lights moved about, the beams filled with an opaque mist, reflecting off that oily surface. Each of them was feeling something now. Not just the possibility that something was near, but the certainty of it. Hopper himself was feeling like every muscle in his body was tensing, every nerve end jangling with a sudden eruption of electricity. He was pretty much numb from the waist down from being in that cold water, but he felt suddenly warm all over. The rain fell on his beret, dripped off the rim and ran down his face like tears. But even with that, he could feel himself begin to sweat.

“Maybe we should get out of the water for a bit,” he said. “Take a break.”

“Yeah,” Liss said, caught up in it, too, now.

Torrio nodded, but never spoke. There was a ripple in the water just ahead of him as if something large had just passed beneath the surface. It could have been a big carp out feeding, but nobody thought that for a moment.

Hopper played his light on the houses nearest them. Some were two-story jobs. At least, they could go upstairs and get out of the water for a bit. It was better than this, anyway. He chose one at random.

“Come on,” he said.

The other two fell in behind him. They moved as quickly as they could towards the house, water splashing around them. The house came out of the rain and mist slowly, a tall narrow structure that looked impossibly dark and forbidding. But a haunted house beat the stinking, flooded streets any day.

They were a good thirty feet from the house. If there was anything in the water with them and it didn’t want them getting inside, it had plenty of time to show itself.

Hopper was not only warm now, but shivering at the same time. It felt like somebody had tied his guts into a square knot. He felt his breath in his lungs, the water running down his face. A cold chill swept up his back and he felt a sharp pain in his bowels like he might shit himself.

He pointed his light in that direction, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. The beam flickered with the shaking of his hand.

And Liss cried out. “Ouch. Shit. Something…I think something bit me.”

Oh, Jesus, not good, not good at all, Hopper was thinking. It was like crossing a tributary of the Amazon or something, piranhas circling them, coming in for the kill. He wondered if they could smell blood…whatever was out there.

“
All right,” he said, “let’s get to that fucking house.
Now.”

They started to move, going as fast as they could and the water was sloshing around them, waves cast in every direction. But they all knew that it wasn’t just their movement stirring up the water, it was something else.

The house was closer.

But not close enough.

Something bumped into Hopper’s leg and he let out a little muted cry, but nobody paid attention. What was going to happen, he knew, was going to happen very soon now. And before they reached the house. Right then he started doing something he hadn’t done in years: he began to pray.

“Hurry up!” Torrio said, taking the lead. “They’re in the water! Something’s in the fucking water with us!”

They charged forward and then Liss made a strange almost yelping sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. They turned and put their lights on him. He was just standing there, his face contorted with horror. Something hit him from below and he went one way and then it hit him again, and he went the other way. And then he screamed into the night and fell backwards, going completely under. He fought to the surface, choking and gasping, and then he went under again.

Neither Hopper or Torrio moved.

They both knew that Liss needed help, but they honestly didn’t know
how
to help him. They felt powerless. Just locked down with abject terror. And maybe Hopper’s comparison of shipwrecked sailors was right on the money…for what did you do and what
could
you really do when the sharks took the first member of your party?

Liss came to the surface again and there was blood streaming down his face. And there was no doubt as to why: a great strip of flesh had been ripped from his left eye socket to his lip and it hung there in a grisly flap. Water was spraying around as he thrashed this way and that and nobody could tell what was going on. He called out their names, spitting water and blood. Then he turned around, trying to pull something off his back and they saw.

They saw what had him.

At first Hopper thought, crazily, that there was a baby on his back and then maybe a dwarf. But it was neither. It was roughly the shape of an infant, but bloated to twice the size. Just a fish belly-white thing that was lumpy and grotesque, set with a series of irregular fleshly mounds like great tumors rising from its back and erupting from its bulbous head. Liss went down on his knees in the water and the thing clung to him like some monstrous, evil twin growing out of his back. But it wasn’t growing out of him, it was clinging to him with claws that were sunk in his back.

“Oh my God,” Torrio said.

And that summed it up, more or less. They had the lights right on it and it didn’t seem to care for that much. Its face was a semi-human distortion, bulb-shaped and made out of a white, oozing flesh that looked like it had been worked from clay. One side sliding down in the process so that the right side of its face rode up much higher than the left. Its left eye was little more than a slit webbed shut by filaments of skin; its right huge and black and shining. Its mouth drawn downward like a rut.

It looked right at them with a mindless hatred, its rubbery lips drawn away from nubby teeth. It made a low mewling sound.

Torrio couldn’t take it.

He opened up on it. Rounds drilled into Liss and the thing, scattering bits of them into the water. Liss went under, taking that horror with him. Liss did not come back up, but the thing did. A great section of its cranium had been blasted away, something with the texture and color of dirty motor oil running down its face.

It was enough.