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Authors: Tim Curran

Resurrection (9 page)

BOOK: Resurrection
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“Soon as that rain lifts,” Tommy said, “I’m making like the sheep and getting the flock out of here.”

“I’m with you,” Mitch said.

Tommy pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. Hubb right away started reprimanding him about smoking in the store and Tommy popped him a bird. “You leave these monkeys alone long enough,” he said, blowing out a column of smoke, “and real scary shit’s going to start happening, Mitch. That pig in red hots, she’s the rotten apple in the barrel. She’ll have these stupid bastards looking for a witch to burn, you give her time.”

Mitch nodded. “I can’t wait here much longer. Lily’s probably out of her head as it is.”

“I’ll go with you when you leave. About time I stopped and said hello. Besides, your Jeep ain’t going anywhere.”

Mitch felt better. And not because he had a ride, but because maybe like the others, he wasn’t fancying the idea of being alone out there…not that he believed any of that hoodoo bullshit, of course.

Tommy pulled off his cigarette and yanked aside the flap. “There’s more…
people
out there, Mitch.”

Mitch saw them standing in the rain, those same gray and dire forms. Except more now, maybe five or six total. And though he did not honesty believe all that Stephen King bullshit he’d been hearing today, he knew looking at those people that there was something definitely
off
about them. They were standing funny, the rain running right over them, like mannequins somebody had left out in the storm. Too intense, too fixated on the store and the two men watching them. That kind of patience was disturbing.

Tommy said, “Shit.”

Those people, they were crossing the street now.

The waiting was over.

 

9

Mitch smelled them before they arrived.

Their odor seemed to flood the store in a vaporous stench: a weird, heady smell of rotting garbage and dank sewers, something maybe worse. Something secret and dark and vile.


What the hell do they want?” Yellow Hat said.

“They want
us,”
Hot Tamale informed him.

And that was it. The floodgates of panic were opened, because even those that didn’t squeeze up to the sheet metal flap with Tommy and Mitch knew that what was about to happen was going to be really, really bad. Hardy started praying under his breath and Mindy let out a long, shrill scream. Yellow Hat ran to the back of the store and then ran right back. Hot Tamale stood there defiantly like she was enjoying it all and Herb stood there with her like he did not have a clue about any of it.

Hubb, who had gotten most of his left knee shattered in the Korean War, seemed to realize that battle was about to be joined. “Those cockfuckers want to break up this party? Well, fucking peachy, let’s tan their hides.”

He wasn’t worrying about his merchandise now. He had his baseball bat and although he did not sell firearms, he had just about everything else and with the help of Tommy and Jason and Gena Kramer, weapons were passed out: axes and hatchets, machetes and British Army police billyclubs. Mindy took the kid over behind the counter because he and she were in no shape to do anything.

But the others, they stood their ground—Mitch and Tommy, Hubb and his two elderly chums, Hot Tamale and her boyfriend, Jason and Gena Kramer, even Yellow Hat. They stood in a loose half-circle like some kind of savage gauntlet, scared but cohesive, ready to kill anyone or anything that made it through the rupture in the store’s front wall.

Mitch waited at the flap, watched those people come on.

They moved with a slow and deadly intensity, drenched and ragged things with hair hanging in their faces. Like Tamale’s boyfriend said, those faces were bleached white like floaters pulled from rivers. Even their lips were colorless. But their eyes, dear God, they were just black and glistening like glass eyes dipped in India Ink. They did not blink. They were glaring and set and merciless. You could not reason with eyes like that or the fathomless murky brains which compelled them.

“You come in my motherfucking store and you’re dead!” Hubb called out to them, not seeing them from his position, but no doubt
feeling
their odious presence. “You better stay out there, you cocksucking hippies!”

Mitch felt a manic laughter bubble in his throat.
Hippies.
Now that was rich. You could buy the whole bank with that.

Mitch pulled away from the flap when they were only feet
away.

He stood there
with the others, amazed at how perfectly the Intrepid had penetrated the front of the store. The sheet metal had been pushed in, bent, but it had not been torn apart really. It had just conformed itself to the intrusion of the car. And except for the piece Mitch had bent to get the door open, you could not see outside unless you yanked that flap back.

And was that a good thing or a bad thing?

There was a great thud as the things hit the front of the store. It was as if, in those last few feet, they’d decided to rush the building and see if they could simply burst through the front like the car had. They hit the outer sheet metal wall and just began to pound and scratch at it with an almost idiotic glee. Mitch had seen their eyes, had seen what was behind them, and although there was nothing in them remotely human, there was cunning and craft and a cold, almost mechanistic sort of intelligence. He had seen it there like sputtering candlelight in a dim, webby attic. The sense that while these
people
probably would never write a great sonnet or design a suspension bridge, they understood tactics just fine.

Of course, at that moment, they were not practicing any.

More like pissed-off children trying to force their way into the candy cupboard. To hell with subtlety and logic, let’s try brute strength here.

The sound of those fists hammering on the sheet metal exterior boomed like thunder and in combination with the rain pounding on the roof, the inside of the store was just a hive of echoing noise. But then as quickly as it had started, it stopped.

No more hammering.

No more scratching.

Just the rain and even that had lessened a bit. Somebody let out a gasp of air and somebody else cleared their throat. That silence from outside was not just loud, it was screaming. They could hear the rain dropping into puddles, an occasional finger of wind rattling the roof. Nothing else.

Tommy looked over at Mitch and Mitch just shrugged.

Had they gone? Mitch didn’t think so. They were out there, all right.
He could feel them somehow
and he thought he could hear one of them breathing with a gurgling sound like backed-up drainpipes. Sure, brute strength had failed, now came subtlety. They were waiting out there with an almost inhuman patience, just waiting for somebody inside to peel back that flap and then they’d grab whoever was fool enough to try it.

Tommy looked like he was considering it, but Mitch shook his head.

“Wait,” he said.

“Is there any other way in here?” Jason Kramer asked.

Hubb told him there was not. Only the locked back door and the front door where the car now had inserted itself. No windows. No nothing.

Mitch tried to swallow, but there was no spit left in his mouth. He was feeling that cold rain blowing in around the car and shivering, thinking about Lily at home and what she would do if some of these things came knocking like trick-or-treaters.

Nobody had relaxed, it was too soon for that, and that was a good thing because the things out there were trying again. A single bare arm pushed aside the flap and began searching around like a blind man looking for his cane. That arm was dripping wet and just as white as tombstone marble, set with tiny round perforations like somebody had been pounding nails into it. As white as it was—and it
was
white, a bloodless white lacking any pigment—it was also mottled gray in spots with tiny bumps like clusters of minute toadstools and you could clearly see a dark purple vein tracery beneath the skin.

“Shit,” somebody said.

Another arm joined it and another and another, until there were no less than six of those anemic-looking limbs pushing aside the flap, white fingers searching around like albino spiders for something to fasten on to. Mitch could just imagine them pressed up together out there like a bunch of kids reaching through a hole in the fence, trying to find their ball on the other side. Now and again, he caught a glimpse of the bodies they were attached to, saw a distorted blur of a face or the whipping, wet hair of a woman.

A couple more hands joined in the fun now, only these hooked around the flap of sheet metal and began trying to widen the hole. The metal began to groan. If these individuals just stopped and used their beans for a moment, they would have quickly realized that you could have indeed gotten into the store one at a time and very easily. But the hole just wasn’t big enough for seven or eight bodies at once. But there was greed at work here like piglets all trying to squeeze in on the same nipples at the same time.

One of the arms was slit open by the jagged edge of the flap and Mitch saw that no blood came out, just a trickle of something black and watery that the rain instantly washed away.

It was enough, by Christ, it surely was.

Mitch and Tommy in the lead, everyone waded in. People were grunting and swearing and shouting, swinging axes and machetes and clubs at those snaking arms. They recoiled with the impact, but kept coming back, flaying and clawing and scratching. Tommy brought down his axe, caught one of those hands between the car door and his axe-blade and severed three fingers. The hand pulled away, stumps spitting that black goo. The fingers themselves landed on the hood where they wriggled like white worms. Mitch laid open an arm from wrist to elbow and nothing came out but that inky sludge. A spray of it struck Jason Kramer in the face and he screamed like he’d been scalded by acid. He tripped and fell, red welts rising on his cheeks where that liquid had struck him.

Most everyone fell away as more of that blood flew and one grasping hand darted in and grabbed Tommy by the wrist. And with enough force that his own hand flexed open and he dropped his axe.

He tried to pull away, an almost hysterical cry coming from his mouth:
“Mitch! Mitch! Get that fucker off me!”

Mitch brought his axe down with an overhead swing as the arm tried to pull Tommy towards the opening. The blade caught the arm right at the bicep and cleanly severed it, the axe head traveling right through it and shattering the driver’s side window of the Intrepid. The arm let go and dropped to the floor and everyone jumped away from it because it was not at all dead.

Tommy fell back, rubbing his wrist and you could see the indentations of those fingermarks.

The arms retracted and then came in again. Mitch and Hubb kept pounding away at them and they were pulled away and then there was just silence out there. Mitch thought he heard those things running off through the puddles, but he could not be sure. The flap was bent wide open, though, and there was nothing out there but the falling rain.

Everyone was breathing hard and shaking their heads, but they did not speak.

Those fingers had finally stopped wriggling and just looked dead.

The arm was still thrashing, though, fingers waving and scraping, muscles and tendons standing taut beneath that horribly white flesh. It flopped and jumped in a pool of that black filth and then went still.

Hot Tamale looked about as pale as that arm and Gena Kramer looked ready to throw up. She held her husband as he held his face and then she turned and
did
throw up.

Hubb opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then just closed it again.

Everyone was pulling back into the store wordlessly, giving that arm a very wide berth. There was not a biologist among them, but they did not need any scientific training to tell them that a severed human limb could not live after being cut off. There might be few shudders as its nerve endings pissed the last of their electricity into the muscles, but that was about it. But this particular arm had been alive, very alive. Disconnected or not, if it had found a throat to strangle, it would have done just that.

Tommy lit a cigarette. “Think…think I saw that movie about the living arm,” he said in a dull monotone. “Except it was set in the Arctic.”

“And it was an alien arm,” Hot Tamale said.

“Got ripped off by dogs,” Herb added.

Mitch looked at them and burst out laughing. Not everyone joined him, but most were smiling at the very least. Hubb laughed so hard Mindy had to wheel his oxygen tank over so he could grab a few puffs.

But the good humor, which was really just some hysterical after-effect of the shock and horror, died out when Yellow Hat opened his yap and said, “What the hell is going on in this town?”

BOOK: Resurrection
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