Resurrection (59 page)

“Who the hell was that?” Waterman said. “Why was he saying those things? He had a British accent.”

Simmons licked his lips again. “That was the remains of Private Charles Ardansky from Youngstown, Ohio. He was not a British natural. Nor had he ever been out of this country. He died in the explosion…and then, woke up in that state, speaking that way. He was nineteen years old.”

“But that was the voice of a middle-aged British man,” Waterman said, still unable to wrap his brain around any of it. “That was no nineteen-year old boy from Ohio. And Holmes? He was one of the men in those suits? How could Ardansky know about his son?”

Simmon said, “The newly-risen know things they did not know in life. They often speak in voices other than their own.”

“
But that’s…that’s like demonic poss

”

“Hold your tongue, Bob,” Pearle warned him. “It’s not our job to figure the hows and whys. So zip it up, by God.”

Even when the video was in good condition, it was sometimes scratchy-looking like an old movie. Next they saw a couple men dressed in desert camouflage fatigues that were very dirty and burned-looking. They were standing in the middle of the road outside a nondescript building in the rain. Simmons said they were both members of an Army Ranger battalion that had been KIA in Afghanistan.

And Pearle didn’t say it, but he was thinking,
Sure, killed over in that hellhole serving God and country, so you boys shipped their bodies home and brought them back to life at Providence.
He did not know the precise mechanism of resurrection and Simmons was avoiding the subject just as he was avoiding discussing the research program that had brought all this into being. But that was the Army. Simmons probably didn’t even know himself.

The two dead men were in pretty rough shape. The one on the left was very bloated and white and there were clearly maggots nesting in his face. The one on the right was missing his left arm…though when the camera zoomed, Pearle saw that was not the case at all. Something was growing from the stump like a vestigial limb, but thin and rawboned, fingers snaking around at the end of a spadelike hand. Not five of them, but seven.

The team moved in. They carried tanks on their backs connected to hoses in their hands. They sprayed the two dead men down with a yellowish mist and the effects were immediate: they melted. There was no other word for it. They began to steam and sizzle and went down. By the time they hit the ground, most of their flesh had slid right off the bones beneath like liquid plastic. They continued to flop about for a time, but soon enough they stopped moving.

“What was that stuff?” Waterman asked. “What was that? Acid?”

“An experimental toxin,” was all Simmons would say.

Waterman opened his mouth to ask more questions, but Pearle gave him a look and he shut up. Pearle figured he was going to have to have a talk with his adjutant. Man had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Wouldn’t bode well for his career in this man’s army. Pearle’s other men weren’t saying a thing. Seemed that you couldn’t make them speak. What they were seeing had permanently sealed their lips.

“Appeared that that trooper had seven fingers,” Pearle said.

“
Yes, mutations are another problem,” Simmons said. “As you’ll soon see.”

The video cut away again and now the cameraman was descending down a flight of stone steps in what appeared to be a cellar. Cardboard boxes feathered with mildew, dusty beams, drooping cobwebs. A few members of the white-suited containment team were examining something in the corner…something incredible. It looked like a dog, a swollen hairless dog. Its jaws were wide, teeth barred. The canine anatomy was unmistakable…but it wasn’t a dog. Not anymore. It didn’t seem to have any limbs. Long, glistening white threads grew out of its hide. Some hung slack and others were taut, growing up out of the dog’s hide in nets where they were attached to the walls like spiderwebs.

It was bad. Plenty bad.

But what was worse was that the dog was
not
dead.

As the team members began poking it with metal probes, it began to move with a flabby motion, those white threads coiling and snapping like tentacles. They thrashed in the air like they were looking for something to grab. The team members gave them a wide berth. The dog’s body was just a fleshy, colorless protoplasmic mass that roiled and squirmed. Its head moved on its neck, jaws opening and closing, a tongue like a hollow tube slapping around. It was making a noise…a low, bestial screeching sound.

A few of Pearle’s men made noises like they wanted to be sick.

“
It’s bad the first time you see these things,” Simmons said, the understatement of the year.

Back on the screen, the dog was sick or dying, barely moving now and Simmons explained that they’d shot it full of poison. It lay there, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling from its mouth. Its flesh was quilted with protrusions and rolls of fat. The threads coming out of its hide were hanging from it like dead worms. The team had rolled the beast over and were examining its underside. What at first looked to be a double row of teats were not teats at all…but
eyes.
There were no less than ten eyes that were moist and yellow staring up at the camera. It was like something from a sideshow this side of hell. And then one of those eyes blinked and Waterman nearly fell out of his seat.

“
What the fuck is this?” he said, standing up now. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“
It’s as Major Simmons said,” Pearle explained. “A mutation. Now sit down. I will not repeat myself and, Bob, you don’t want to make me do that.”

Waterman sat down.

The video cut again and the team had opened up the dog. Wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, autopsy gloves, one of them was digging into the dog’s carcass. He began removing a series of dripping, squirming little things. Pearl knew they were pups, but the full impact of that didn’t hit him until the camera zoomed in on one being held up by those gloved hands. Yes, it was a pup, a hairless and eyeless little thing whose flesh was entirely transparent. It did not have limbs as such, but looping things like feelers. It was an atrocity. Not just some mutation born of radioactive fallout, perhaps, but something that seemed to be evolving into a form very un-dog like.

After that, Simmons killed the video.

Nobody said anything for a time. They just sat around in shocked silence. Pearle kept his eyes on Simmons. His eyes were angry, they were accusing. There were things he wanted to say and questions he wanted answered, but that’s not how it worked and he knew it. That was not protocol. And Pearle was nothing if not an obedient soldier.

Simmons finally said, “So, gentlemen, that’s why we’re sending you to Fort Providence. What is happening there must not only be contained, but eradicated. I’m sure you can image what might happen if this was allowed to spread…”

12

So that was the briefing that prepared them for Fort Providence and the ugly pickle jar the Army had its hand caught in. But as it turned out, the 4/1 never made it to Fort Providence. For what was happening there had already spread out of control. And a particularly virulent source of infection was the Slayhoke Penitentiary.

13

As luck would have it, Pearle had everything in place before anything happened. In fact, he had things not only in place but buttoned up and snapped down. The perimeter was strengthened and fortified. Anti-personnel devices were set, gun placements ready to rock. Flamethrowers stood ready. And the trench had been dug. The trench was a little trick that Pearle had picked up in Vietnam. Many firebases were protected thus. If the machine guns, mortars, minefields, and airstrikes failed, you lit the trench. It took one hell of a motivated enemy to wade through a trench of burning gasoline or diesel fuel.

Thing was, Pearle’s boys were starting to feel a little foolish standing around and waiting. They had prepared for a siege and no siege was coming. The NCOs told them to look alive. Lights were concentrated on the outer wall of Slayhoke. Men scanned the few pockets of darkness with night-vision devices. Other than that, there was little to do but listen to the rain falling or to sneak a quick smoke under a tarp, drink a cup of coffee or bitch about the Army in general. And there was plenty of that going on. Now and again, there might be a shriek from inside the prison, but little else.

Pearle had nearly a thousand of his men surrounding Slayhoke and all of them were itching for a fight. Just ready for the mother of all turkey-shoots when those convicts tried to break free. It was really gonna be something. Of course, none of the enlisted men had been privy to what went on at the briefing and Pearle decided to keep it that way.

Van Thal, an ambitious young corporal from 3
^rd
Platoon, Bravo Company, came right out and said it to Pearle. “Sir, if you don’t mind me saying, I think we’re overdoing this. These are convicts, sir. They are not soldiers. Shouldn’t we just saturate the prison with tear gas and take them as they come stumbling out?”

Pearle was not angry with the question. “You would think that would be sufficient, wouldn’t you, Corporal? But here’s something to live by: don’t ask, don’t wonder why. We do things as we’re told to do them. And when that ragtag bunch of…
individuals
shows, son? Again, don’t ask and don’t wonder why. Just open up on them like they’re the Hun coming to sack your town and rape your women. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pearle was more than a little concerned as to what might happen when zero hour approached. He told his NCOs to keep an eye on their men, keep them motivated and trigger-happy. But don’t let them ask questions.

Exactly ninety minutes after everything was set, it started.

Later, Pearle would remember it as more than a feeling than any noise or sight. Just a bad feeling that withered his short and curlies and filled his guts with something toxic. Shortly thereafter, there came a distinct moaning sound from behind the walls and then a wailing that rose in pitch. At first maybe just one or two voices, but like a choir, dozens more joined in until there was a screeching wall of noise. The sort of noise that made everyone sit up and pay attention. Because whatever could make a mournful wailing like that, was not going to be anything you wanted to meet up with on a dark, rainy night.

Pearle himself waited there next to one of the gun emplacements

a big life-eating .50 caliber machine gun, the sort of overkill hardware that commonly cut men right in half

and saw the first walkers come through the gates at a most leisurely pace. Only a blind man wouldn’t have noticed something very funny about this first individual. The walk was all wrong. It was more of a limping shamble than anything else as if locomotion was not coming easily. The walker kept coming, a threadbare and withered thing, its flesh and what remained of it clothing hanging in rags and streamers.

“What…what the hell’s all over his face?” somebody with a spotting scope cried out.

Pearle had his own scope and saw it, too. That face was covered in what could only have been moss. A green, slimy moss that hung off what was beneath like a beard, spreading down over the chest and torso like a pelt. It swayed on the flesh and bone beneath from side-to-side as the thing walked. A single eyeball was exposed, shining like an oily marble.

There was an easy forty-feet from the perimeter to the gas trench and another thirty to the wall itself. Pearle had told his NCOs to make sure that the flamethrowers were not used unless the unfriendlies breached the trench. And he was not lighting that up unless absolutely necessary. He was going to try everything else first.

The walker kept coming and now a half dozen others were coming through the gates and the lights were picking out the shadowy forms of many more still within the compound. Nobody was even thinking of engaging this particular enemy until Pearle gave them his blessing.

“Okay,” he finally said to a sniper sitting nearby. “Pop that boy’s cherry.”

The sniper, a tough little Hispanic from New York’s Spanish Harlem named Ramon Alguerro, looked from Pearle to his target. He pressed his eye to the scope of his M24 sniper rifle, sighted the walker in. He pulled the trigger. A 7.62mm slug blew a hole dead center of the walker’s chest, but he did not go down. He jerked with the impact, but that was about it.

Alguerro shook his head.

No, it didn’t make sense for that round was dead on. It should have blown his heart right out his back with a goodly portion of spine. But if it did, it sure as hell was not slowing this guy down.

“Holy shit,” somebody said.

Alguerro wasn’t having this. He worked the bolt on his rifle, inserted another round and popped the walker again. This time right in the forehead. The chest-shot had been an easy killshot, but so was this. Nobody kept walking after this. The slug landed right where Alguerro put it. Everyone saw it hit the walker. It was like planting a round in a watermelon: the top of his head exploded in a spray of tissue and bone. The walker went down. Fell over straight as a post.

“That’s more like it,” Alguerro said.

But Pearle was not quick to congratulate him on a fine shot. Because this was a test. That’s all it was. Pearle needed to honestly convince himself that what he was dealing with here was indeed a walking dead man.

The corpse sat up.

“
What the fuck?”
Alguerro said. “Is anybody seeing this?”