Zombie Pulp (23 page)

The gravediggers were gone.

My throat and chest aching, I gulped in lungfuls of fresh air. When I could think again, I looked around. I was in a stand of trees out back of Varga’s Tudor. In the distance I saw retreating shadows and figured they were my gravediggers. From the way they walked I could see that they were zombies.

Pulling myself to my feet, I checked my watch.

Less than fifteen minutes until showtime.

15

When I’d brushed myself free of dirt, I made my way around front.

Varga was just climbing into his Mercedes and the others were getting into their respective vehicles. I dashed from shadow to shadow and came right up to Varga’s door. Before his driver even knew that the shit had hit or what it smelled like, I had his boss’s door open and I dragged that fat gob out onto the grass. A couple kicks to the ribs and the fight drained out of him like piss through a leaky drainpipe.

I threw him up against the car just as the troops moved in.

But I already had my knife against his soft, white throat. “Tell them to fade or I’ll slit your throat,” I ordered him.

He made a few pathetic wheezing sounds. I pressed the knife home until a trickle of blood ran over my fingers. “Do it,” I said. “Tell ‘em all to get back in the house. The dead ones, too. Everyone.”

“You stupid—”

I kneed him in the kidneys and he yelped. “INTO THE FUCKING HOUSE!” he cried out. “ALL OF YOU!”

I watched them file in. Marianne’s little club…what was left of it. Then all of Varga’s hoods, at least twenty of them. Finally Quigg and the zombies carrying the bodies of Marianne and her boyfriend. In they went. The door closed.

“Any of ‘em come out of there,” I hissed, “and you die, understand?”

He shook his head carefully. “They won’t. Not until I come for ‘em.”

“You sure?” I said, pushing that cutter against his pipes.

“Yeah, I’m sure, tough guy.”

I dragged him up the drive and over to the wall.

Maybe my timing was a little off, because we’d barely made the wall when the fireworks began. There was a huge, rending explosion that pitched us to the grass. And the Tudor came apart like a house built of Popsicle sticks. Great sections of it vaporized as gouts of fire and rolling clouds of flame blasted through the windows and engulfed the roof. The air was raining charred wood and missiles of glass and burning fragments. They showered down all around us.

Varga sat up and just stared at his house, slowly shaking his head. “You sonofabitch,” he said, sounding like he needed to cry. “You dirty sonofabitch.”

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. “It’s all over, asshole. All of it.”

But then I wasn’t so sure. A huge figure stumbled out of the burning wreckage, lit up like Roman candle. He made it a few feet and fell into a blazing heap. You could’ve roasted wieners off him.

I figured it was Big Tony.

A few minutes later the fire department arrived along with dozens of nosy neighbors. There wasn’t much to do but watch it burn to ashes. They asked me and Varga questions, but we had no answers.

Finally, Tommy arrived. “Jesus H. Christ, Vince,” he said. “What in hell’s name did you do this time?”

He dragged me away to his car after warning the mob boss not to move. He gave me a belt of bourbon from his pocket flask, stuck a cigarette in my mouth, and waited. Just waited. It was going to be good and he knew it.

“Well?” he said. “You wanna tell me about it?”

“Depends,” I said, blowing smoke.

“On what?”

“On whether you like horror stories or not.” I took another drag. “Because if you do, Tommy, boy, have I got a beaut for you.”

MORTUARY

Weston said his people were ready to kick ass and take names and Silva knew the moment had come. A lot was riding on what he did in the new few minutes. The decisions he made now—or didn’t make—could haunt him for years.

“We’re going to do this right, understand?” he said to Weston. “This operation is not going to become another Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m not about to become the subject of a Senate investigation.”

And now that it was time to break the standoff between the FBI and the religious crazies down in the compound, Silva was wondering for the first time in his career if he was the right man for the job.

Using a nightscope, he was looking across that open stretch of field, thinking the complex looked like something from an old prison movie. A sprawling, flat-roofed collection of rectangular buildings quarried from a dirty gray stone. The windows were tall and narrow, set with iron bars. The grounds were barren, the perimeter wrapped up in a high chain-link fence topped with coiled barbwire. A very utilitarian sort of place. About as cozy as a Victorian madhouse.

A helicopter buzzed overhead, a mounted searchlight scanning over the darkened, interconnected buildings.

Silva didn’t like it. Didn’t like the feeling twisting in his belly.

And he liked even less what was going to happen within the next ten minutes or so.

Things went well and nobody got hurt…well, careers were going to be made here tonight. But, if on the other hand, the whole thing went south…somebody’s ass was going to get hung out to dry. And Silva pretty much figured whose ass it would be.

Silva was an FBI Assistant Director for the Critical Incident Response Team, the CIRT. He was in direct charge of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. The HRT was a Tactical Support Branch of the CIRT, a highly-trained paramilitary force used in every delicate situation from hostage rescue and high-risk arrests to mobile assaults and the search for WMDs.

One of their specialties were raids against barricaded subjects.

Something they were going to be practicing real soon now.

Down in the compound were members of the Divine Church of the Resurrection, a shadowy cult led by a psychotic messiah name of Paul Henry Dade. Dade’s specialty was kidnapping new recruits, brainwashing them and putting them to work in his domestic terror network which he funded with everything from narcotics trafficking to the sale of illegal arms.

This guy was so fucked-up, Charles Manson had openly called him a
fanatic
in a taped interview two months before.

And for once, old Charlie was right.

Night had fallen now and the immediate area around the police blockade was a hive of bustling activity. Hostage negotiators on loudspeakers were trying to get Dade’s people to give themselves up. Floodlights were sweeping the compound. Armored trucks and support units were pulled up at the ready, ambulances and fire engines behind them. And to the immediate rear, the county sheriff and his people keeping the press and the curious at bay.

Jesus, it was like a circus, Silva thought.

He got on his walkie-talkie: “All right, Weston,” he said, his voice oddly shrill, “tell your teams to prepare to stage.”

A balding agent named Runyon came running up, leaping from the back of a tactical support van. He wore a midnight blue windbreaker like Silva with the letters FBI stenciled on the back in day-glo yellow.

“Sir,” he said, “thermal imaging still isn’t picking up a goddamn thing down there.”

“Dammit,” Silva said. “I knew we should have kicked the door in two days ago.”

But it wasn’t his decision. The timing of the raid was his, but the actual decision came down from the Attorney General. The standoff had been going on for nearly a week now and the administration was in no hurry to get anymore bureaucratic egg on their faces. So they’d held back. Until tonight. And that was just plain bullshit because thermal imaging had told them the worst possible thing since early that morning: no infrared signatures.

Meaning, if there was anything alive in the complex, it must have been hiding pretty damn deep.

Silva thumbed his walkie-talkie. “Weston. Deploy your teams. Repeat: It’s a go. Take it down…”

*

There were three HRT tactical teams: Red Team, Blue Team, and Green Team. Each had four operatives. Blue Team came in from the rear, cutting its way through the chain link fence and blowing the backdoor with a shaped charge of C-4. Green Team was helicoptered to the roof, put on standby. Red Team blew their way through the front entrance.

And waltzed right into the mouth of hell itself.

*

TAC unit Red Team was led by Weston himself, an ex-Delta Force commando. When the door was blown in, he charged through, LeClere, Becker, and Hookley right behind him. All the HRT TAC teams were dressed in black coveralls and Kevlar vests. They wore ballistic helmets with headsets and NV goggles, carried Colt M4 tactical carbines, assault shotguns, and H & K MP5 machine pistols.

They were loaded for bear.

The compound was blacker than the inside of a body bag, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and staircases leading up and down. Dead-ends and cul-de-sacs and storage closets. The place had originally been a U.S. Army military complex in World Wars I and II, then a government warehouse, and now?

Now it was a trap waiting to be sprung.

No electricity, no water. No nothing. Just the unknown waiting in the damp darkness.

“Keep your eyes open,” Weston told them over his headset, studying the corridor ahead through the green field of his NV goggles. “Not seeing any movement…not a damn thing…”

Becker said, “Not picking up shit on infrared.”

They probed farther, weapons held out at the ready. The corridor angled off to the left and Weston came around the corner fast, ducking down low in a firing stance. Immediately he scanned for unfriendlies. Found absolutely nothing.

“Clear,” he said.

The others came around the corner.

There were four doorways ahead, every one of them closed. The TAC unit took them down one by one. They were all vacant, nothing inside but some old packing crates, a few empty twenty-five gallon drums. Red Team moved to the end of the corridor. There was a heavy iron door blocking their progress and it was locked.

Becker slapped a charge on it, set it, and the TAC unit stepped back.

The charge went with a peal of thunder, nearly stripping the door from its hinges. Red Team moved in, taking up firing positions. It was a big room, dank and chill, about forty-feet in length, thirty in width. The air was rancid with a pall of moist bacterial decay.

And there was a very good reason for that.

Infrared told them there was nothing alive inside and, God, how true that was. The place was like a slaughterhouse. But instead of carcasses of beef, human bodies were hung from meat hooks chained to the ceiling, dozens and dozens of them. Naked and stark, they’d been skinned, disemboweled, carved and plucked. Men, women, children. Some had no limbs, others were lacking heads. They twisted in the air with a slow, dreadful motion, a dance macabre.

Their body cavities had been quite neatly hollowed out.

The TAC unit just stood there, the stink of death rubbed in their faces. All those sightless, staring eyes and empty sockets glaring down at them with an almost primal hunger.

“Jesus Christ,” LeClere finally said. “It’s like a morgue in here.”

“All right,” Weston managed. “It’s bad…but we’ve got work to do here.”

Red Team slid their NV goggles back up onto their helmets, slipped protective goggles over their eyes and clicked on the tactical flashlights bracketed to their weapons. They played the lights around, gigantic shadows jumping over the walls.

Weston reported what they found to AD Silva as the TAC unit moved through the carnage, their faces pale and corded. The bodies were hung in neat rows, the sweeping beams of the flashlights making them seem to move and creep, duck away and dart forward. Shadows crawled over those bloodless death masks, making them grin and leer with a macabre life.

Together, the troopers moved down the rows of bodies and saw there were not just bodies, but arms hanging from those chains as well. Hooks inserted at the meat of their elbows, they were colorless things spattered with dark spirals of old blood.

Nobody was saying anything now.

Only hard-edged discipline, unit integrity, and months of tough training kept the men from bolting out of there. Weston would not have blamed them if they had. Not really. Because he was examining the bodies much closer than they were and he knew what those gashed punctures he was seeing were.

Teeth marks.

These bodies had been gnawed on. Faces and wrists, legs and necks. Something had been at them. And from the arrangement of the bites, Weston had a pretty good idea it hadn’t been animals.

As they moved down the rows, Becker bumped into the corpse of a woman and she bumped into another who bumped into yet another, until that entire row was swinging and twisting and gyrating. It was a horrible thing to see. The shadows pooling and jumping, those bodies filled with a hideous animation, looking as if they were trying to pull themselves free.