Resurrection (74 page)

“Fair enough,” Tommy said. “Just remember, we’re letting you sleep here. We’re trusting you.”

“And you can. You saved my life.” He laughed then. “Even women don’t excite a guy like me the way a nice vehicle does. Like that truck of yours, Tommy. We were in Milwaukee? I’d jack that sonofabitch in about three minutes tops. Within an hour, she’s stripped.”

“You leave my truck alone.”

So, whether they wanted him or not, Harry was part of them. Mitch thought he seemed all right. He looked like he could be rough if you cornered him, but he seemed like a good guy, as good as a guy could be after living in a state cage for the past few years. Mitch had a funny feeling that Harry was now part of what they were, whatever that was. But he believed it. For some way, somehow he was going to be instrumental down the road. He needed them and they needed him.

Before they closed their eyes, Mitch pulled Tommy aside and laid it out for him: “Listen, buddy, we don’t find Chrissy by sundown, I want you to take Wanda, Deke, and the girls and get the hell out. Goddamn city is sinking. No, no, don’t give me any of that hero shit. I want you to get them out of here. You wanna come back, I’d appreciate your help. But they have to get out of here.”

And with that logic, even Tommy Kastle could not argue.

5

At Slayhoke Penitentiary, the dead outnumbered the living. The 1
^st
Air Cavalry, bolstered by National Guardsmen, spent the night throwing a serious volume of fire against anything that tried to leave the prison walls. During the process, many of them died and quite a few more had nervous breakdowns. By dawn, they huddled outside the wire in the mud, the rain falling and the mist rising, wide-eyed and trembling from the amphetamines that kept them going and the horrors they had seen and would never forget. They had surrounded the prison on all sides, established a No-Man’s-Land between themselves and the walls, gunning down anything that tried to cross it. Using grenades, anti-personnel mines, and flame throwers when bullets couldn’t do the job. And out there now, in that cratered, misty dead zone, there were the remains of dozens and dozens of bodies. Bullet-ridden, blown to fragments, incinerated…what was left, continued to move.

6

In the Procton House, Russel and Margaret Boyne and Lou Darin waited for the sun to come up. They did not sleep. They did not relax their vigil. They knew the dead were out there and they waited for them. They kept busy. Russel and his mother collected up knives and hammers and golf clubs, anything they thought could be used as a weapon. The entire time recounting the plots of dozens of low-budget horror films. Darin listened, but did not hear. They were mad. They were both mad. And he told them so quite often. Although Russel ignored him, Margaret argued their point continually.

“This is not about who’s crazy and who’s not, Mr. Darin. This is about the survival of the human race,” she told him. “This is a battle to save humanity.”

“And you’re going to wage it with kitchen knives and a couple nine irons?”

“We have to start somewhere.”

Towards dawn, Russel said, “I wonder what happens if one of us gets infected? Will we come back from the dead, too?”

7

All in all, it was a mad sort of night.

Which was to be expected now that Witcham had gone completely insane. Lots of things that had happened in the city were witnessed by many. Some people lost their minds at what they saw, screaming themselves into a happier, carefree world of lunacy. Others ran and still others just let themselves be taken by what knocked on their doors that long, listening night. Still others found neither of these paths acceptable. They refused to live in a world that had been turned upside down and shaken out. So they put guns in their mouths or drew knives across their wrists or swung from nooses before the sun rose. Better that than live in a world where all the dark things were given breath, where the dead could rise from their graves to torment the living.

Here are a few things of a more personal nature that were witnessed by no one but those who suffered through them:

Chuck Bittner, after his run-in with Mrs. Crowley and then the walking corpse of his own mother, spent the night in a dumpster of all things. Hearing things moving in the water around him, but simply afraid to look and see what they were. Selfish, arrogant, uppity little brat that he had been, Chuck was no more. He had aged a decade that night. And he did not doubt that he would never again be a kid. So he waited through the long night, curled up, wet and shaking, the rain falling and the rising water smelling of his mother and the wind sounding like her voice.

Dr. Charles Monroe, the county coroner, figured on a long night when he saw all the drowned bodies waiting in the morgue. Just after midnight, when they began to move, Monroe did nothing but sit and stare. He sat there while the cadaver of Jenny Compton, aged three, walked over to him, fixing him with black and soulless eyes. And it wasn’t until she sank her teeth into his throat that he managed a brittle, broken scream.

Douglas Perry of Perry Family Meats was woken rudely over in East Genessee when he heard movement in his shop below. He kept no money on the premises, but he did have some ten-thousand dollars worth of meat hanging in his refrigerator room and was hoping the power would come back on soon before he lost everything. When he went down there, flashlight in hand, he found the stainless steel door open. Inside, hanging from shanks of beef and carcasses of pork, were what he thought at first were babies. At least, at first glance they looked like babies…like fetuses really: bulbous-headed and round-eyed. But there the resemblance ended. For these babies

if babies they were

were malformed and grotesque, some with too many limbs and others joined together like Siamese twins. They paid him little mind, just continued to chew and suck at the hanging meat with the most obscene sounds. Perry left and promptly put a bullet through his left temple.

And Father Mackley of the Holy Covenant girl’s school not too far from Perry Family Meats, stepped out that night into the rain and wind, half out of his mind over the girls missing from his school. He looked up in the sky and the clouds parted. He saw the moon clearly enough. Except it looked like a bright orange skull grinning down at him. Mackley suffered a fatal heart attack on the spot.

And that was the night in Witcham.

When the sun finally rose, it revealed the devastation. Which was considerable. Nobody had to erect a gravestone to Witcham, the buildings and houses rising from the water were a cemetery all their own.

8

Dawn.

The sun came up, but little of it was seen or felt. It hid behind an angry film of gray and black clouds, hinting at its presence, but refusing to show itself completely, wearing its veils like a stripper and refusing to disrobe. That’s how morning came, with a seduction and a tease of daylight, but nothing more.

The city drooped under the rain that fell in buckets and then blew in fine mists, but never, ever stopped coming. It was a hard rain and a soft rain, a needle-fine rain and a downpour that drenched you to the skin. It stung your face and got in your eyes and soaked through your pants and boots and after awhile, it seemed that your soul was drowning, filling up like a bucket and everything inside your head and out was gray and wet and steaming. That was life in Witcham these days, an existence of abyssal depths and muddy ponds and pale green swamps. There was no chance to ever dry off, just the water dripping and dropping, that accursed dampness that made you want to scratch your skin off after a time.

So, the water continued to rise, the Black River continued to swell, and Witcham continued to sink and sink. A gray mist came off the slopping, eternal sea, obscuring everything and turning what daylight there was to a leaden gloom.

People came out of houses, wading through the black, oily water. In less-flooded areas, they used trucks. In submerged areas, they boated or clung to drifting refuse.

What you noticed first when you stepped out into the overcast, damp world of Witcham was the smell. No,
smell
didn’t cut it. This was definitely a
stink.
It was an ugly black odor, organic and meaty and warm. You could not only smell it, you could taste it on your tongue and feel it laying over your skin like a sour sweat. Maybe you could fool yourself for a time, as you tried to breathe that thick and rancid air, that what you were smelling was just that stagnant, polluted water backwashed with rotting garbage and dead animals and sewage, but you knew better. For this stench was simply too overpowering, too sweet and high and gagging. This stench was that of the unburied dead, of hundreds, if not thousands, of bloated, waterlogged corpses chewed by rats and veiled by flies and sweating maggots by the mitful. This was what maybe Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka smelled like after a good rain. Not exactly a country lane after a spring shower, but a sickening, steaming brew of decomposition, an odor so physical, so very palpable that you had all you could do not to drop to your knees and vomit at the first whiff.

And if Witcham had a perfume, a signature odor, this was it.

The streets were rivers of filth and garbage, excretia and carrion rushing towards some unseen and pestiferous dead sea. Things bobbed and things rolled. Some of those things were alive and some were dead and some were neither. Everywhere, there were corpses drifting about, in whole and in part. And that brought flies, storms and clouds and ravaging swarms of meatflies. And gulls and crows and buzzards and rats, thousands of rats.

Witcham was a bloated, sunwashed corpse breeding disease and vermin and horror. Over a third of the population had fled when the flooding began and of those remaining, nearly half were dead by dawn.

You could almost hear the clicking of a great death-watch beetle hanging over the town, the ticking of a clock, grains of sand sliding down the neck of an hourglass.

This wasn’t over yet.

Something was coming.

Something was about to happen.

And it wouldn’t be long in coming.

9

Mitch rolled out of bed at 12:30 the next afternoon. The sleep felt good, but he did not like the idea of all the daylight that had been wasted. Tommy and Harry came awake about the same time. Mitch sat up, working the sleep from his eyes with sleep-numb fingers. It was not like in a book or a movie where some character rolls out of bed and does not remember the awful plight he or she is in. No, there was no merciful moment of forgetfulness. Mitch came awake fully aware of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. It laid inside him in a cold, inorganic mass that made him physically ill.

“We better get going,” he said.

Harry was fully awake the moment he opened his eyes. You got like that when you did time. Just like a soldier in a war, you came out of sleep tense and ready to fight.

Tommy, however, took a few more moments. “Morning, sunshine,” he said to Harry.

Harry smiled.

Out in the kitchen, Wanda Sepperly was looking bright and perky and almost youthful. And why not? It had been years and years since she’d had so many fine young faces gathered around her table. The Zirblanksi twins were there, dark of eye and hair, but vibrant and taking to Wanda like seedlings to spring rain and sunshine. Deke Ericksen was there, too, his eyes little more than bloodshot holes. Those eyes had seen things, Mitch knew, things they would never forget. Despite the grayness pushing up against the windows, inside Wanda’s kitchen things were bright and homey.

Wanda was old school.

Unlike most, she had little use or faith in electric stoves or gas ranges. She hadn’t taken many things from her old farm in Bayfield County, but one of them, her most prized possession in fact, was her cast-iron wood-burning cookstove. Power or no power, you could count on it. Wanda was in her glory putting out the eats for the young gathered at her table: pancakes with maple syrup

“and it ain’t no Log Cabin nor Aunt Jemima, Mitch Barron, this is pure and sweet squeezed straight from my own trees”

and scrambled eggs and slab bacon. Rita and Rhonda, who lived mostly out of boxes and cans as was the curse of our modern age, were loving it like this was a trip to granny’s farm. Deke was mostly picking at his food. But Wanda kept scolding him and despite himself, despite what he’d seen and knew, his teenage belly was hungry. Hungry as only a teenage boy could be.

Wanda winked a sparkling blue eye at her recent arrivals. “Sit down and fill yourself. For this day will be no better than the last.”

Harry was pretty excited at the idea. After five years of state food, he was ready for some real eats. His eyes were wide and there was drool on his mouth.

“Not right now, Wanda,” Mitch said. “We’re gonna take a turn around the neighborhood, see what’s going on first.”

Harry looked disappointed, but he fell in step behind Tommy.

“Stay,” Mitch told him.

“No, I better go with you guys. You might need me.”

“Stay and eat for chrissake,” Tommy said. “Fill your tank. Look like you need it.”

He fell into a chair and Wanda set a plate of cakes and bacon and eggs down before him. Right away, he launched into it, oooing and ahhing and telling Wanda, between mouthfuls, that she was surely the finest cook in the world.

“Are you going to check at our house?” Rhonda asked.

“Yeah, we’ll take a look,” Mitch told her. “Maybe your mom and dad are home, girls.”

They both nodded. They’d been through hell like everyone else, but they were handling it much better. Mitch decided it was because they were young. The young were much tougher than anyone ever gave them credit for. They could switch gears and burn rubber in the blink of an eye before your average adult even got the keys in the ignition. That was youth. The girls were like dandelions that you mowed down one day and the next, they grew right back, flowering bright and yellow. You could not keep them down.