Zombie Pulp (25 page)

“We ain’t here to figure that out,” Oliverez snapped at him. “Now lock and load, we’re moving out.”

They all had questions, yes, but they did not ask them. Maybe they didn’t dare to. Ten minutes into the compound and they’d already seen enough to give them cold sweats and nightmares for a lifetime.

And it didn’t get any better.

Two more zombies came out of a room to meet them. They were both large men with black boots and camouflage pants on. Shirtless, their bodies were of an almost phosphorescent whiteness and neither of them had a head, just frayed stumps. The one on the left was carrying the head of a woman by the hair. A living head. Her face was fissured and livid with purple blotches.

“There,”
she said with a grating, airless squeak of a voice.
“These are the ones, right ahead now…that’s it, straight on…bring me to them, bring me to them…yesssss…”

The TAC unit started shooting again, getting a little smarter this time around. They took the two men down at the knees, blowing their kneecaps to fragments. The woman’s head was dropped, rolling across the floor, hair whipping and voice grunting.

The headless men began crawling forward, dragging their shredded legs like bleeding confetti, but on they came. The TAC unit opened up with everything they had as the woman’s head shrieked and cackled and snapped its teeth.

Rice stuck the barrel of his shotgun in her mouth and she clamped down on it, biting and biting, trying to sink her teeth through the metal. He pulled the trigger and blew that hideous thing to slush. But still they could hear her voice…maybe in front of them or behind or maybe just echoing through the drums of their skulls…taunting them and telling them how they were going to die.

But there was no time to consider the madness of that or the two men who had been blasted to creeping slats of bone and tissue, for another zombie came down the corridor at them. It was a boy carrying a shoulder sack. He was giggling, digging into that sack and throwing things before him, like a girl tossing flower petals at a wedding. The TAC unit first thought they were spiders he was throwing…crawling albino spiders.

But then they saw they were
human hands.

Living human hands severed at the wrists.

By the time they put the boy down, there were dozens of hands hopping and skittering and jumping. And pretty soon they were on the TAC unit and men were screaming, trying to pull iron fingers from their legs and ankles.

Johnson lost his mind as one of them ran up the leg of his coveralls. Followed by third and fourth and a fifth that found his crotch and gripped it with a crushing strength. Another got up his pant leg and others under his Kevlar vest. He jumped up and down, spun around in circles, slammed himself into walls like a man covered in nipping ants, anything to pull those grasping hands off him.

The TAC unit was shooting as they backed away, just white with a rolling terror now.

And though they beat off the zombies, the hands were something else entirely.

Johnson choked to death on one as it got in his screaming mouth and lodged itself in his throat, curling up there in a fleshy ball.

And the other TAC unit troopers let him die as the hands came on and flashlight beams cast dizzying flashes and weapons were discharged. And through it all, Oliverez forgot about the crawling heaps of bones. Until he fell down and they swarmed over him, that was.

*

Hell in a handbasket.

AD Silva had heard the expression, but until that fateful night at the compound he had no idea of the reality of it. His TAC units had been deployed and what he was hearing over the radio just could not be.

The living dead?

Zombies
for the life of Christ?

It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be. He could not accept the idea that his men were being attacked by hordes of the walking dead. Every cheap, low-budget horror film he’d ever seen as a kid was coming back to him now, coming back to roost and his flesh was crawling and a buzzing whiteness was droning in his head.

The agents piled into the back of the comm van were all watching him now, their faces drained of color, their mouths hanging slack. Silva could not look at them. He clutched his headset in shaking hands and licked his lips and watched the monitors and wished to dear God he wasn’t in charge.

“Okay,” he said, “okay. Let’s get some back-up in there.”

Men started to scramble out of the back of the van, glad to be doing anything other than sitting there and imagining what must be going on in that lightless mortuary.

And that was when Silva started laughing.

You see, he’d finally gotten the joke. Finally gotten Paul Henry Dade’s little joke and it was a doozy, yes sir. The Divine Church of the Resurrection.
Resurrection.
Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, it was a good one, all right.

And Silva just could not stop laughing.

Even when they finally took him away, he was still laughing his ass off.

*

What happened to Red Team was this:

Moments after Weston began to feel something building in the air around him, the dead began to wake up. In the panning lights of his TAC unit, the dead were coming to life…or some blasphemous semblance of it engineered by Paul Henry Dade and his crazy cult. It started with the crinkling of plastic and the squeaking of vinyl as the dead on the shelves began to make themselves known.

Corpses zipped in body bags sat up.

Corpses wrapped in plastic began to claw their way free…sheets were sloughed like snakeskins…long-armed shapes rose up…heads snapped their teeth and hands in buckets began to scratch and whisper and spill to the floor.

Chains began to clink and creak as the bodies on the meat hooks in the other room began to stir and fight, thrashing and writhing and trying to wrestle themselves free.

LeClere screamed.

Screamed and ran as the dead stepped off the shelves. He made it into the other room, running straight into that swinging menagerie of hanging cadavers. Bodies bumped into him, arms swatted at him, faces nipped and spit and licked at him. His light was bobbing and flashing, cold hands caressing him and finally he was locked in a tangle of clutching hands. All those arms hanging from the hooks had him, crushing him in an embrace of cold white flesh and putrescence.

The rest of Red Team had no time to help him.

They had their own problems.

It was pandemonium.

Becker fought his way from the clutching hands of two skull-faced assassins—their fingers coming away with him—and brought out a massive .44 magnum. Another cadaver shambled in his direction, hands held out like bailing hooks and Becker began jerking the trigger frantically. The slugs ate huge and gaping holes in the cadaver, making a sound like a hammer into dry kindling as they blew their way through. Even though much of the cadaver’s wasted anatomy was blown across the shelves, it crept forward. Becker stared into ruined eye sockets, saw black beetles congregating in that skull and then hands like raw, cold liver caressed him and began pulling him apart like a screaming gingerbread man.

Hookley kicked his way free of several corpse assassins and saw the bloody ball of a snapping head roll across his boots. Then he was up and wanting to run, but there were simply too many. A dark and hulking form of a large corpse with an insect-ravaged face tossed others aside to get at him. Hookley emptied his carbine into the monstrosity, then hammered the death’shead with the butt…the flesh falling away like sheets of balsa wood. It looked like termites had been at this one. His seamed face split in a sardonic grin, hating, hating. One eye was but a blackened, festering socket and the other housed a milky opal that glistened and cried tears of worms. Skinless fingers reached out for Hookley and that face of furry gray-green mold swam in for a kiss.

Hookley screeched and brought the stock of the carbine down in a powerful arc. It struck that bobbing skull with the sound of damp, rotting wood splitting. The puckered forehead shattered, the cranium collapsed and within was a nest of feeding maggots.

Hookley, cackling insanely now, brought the stock down again and again. And that graveyard face came apart like a moldy house of cards and the body stumbled blindly past him and fell forward stiffly.

Hookley fought through two or three others, could hear someone making a deranged, wet shrieking sound, but he never guessed it was himself. He fell to his knees, drooling and pissing himself, and then he saw his executioner.

A woman—or something that had once been one—slithered forward with a slime trail of moist soil. She had no legs, no nothing beneath the waist, just a few moth-eaten rags that might have been flesh and ligament once. She propelled herself like a slug, grinning with a moldering flap of face. The empty holes of her eyes found Hookley and the gray mouth smiled, the pitted stumps of teeth gnashed and chomped.

But Hookley was beyond it.

He held himself, rocking, discordant laughter belching from his throat as the woman swam in, that worm-holed face oozing slime and falling into itself like a rotting Jack-o’-Lantern.

And then he was wrapped in a blanket of putrefaction, those jagged teeth opening his belly and biting down on what they found there.

Weston was squeezed into a corner just beyond the shelves.

The room was on fire now. Maybe from stray rounds or a tossed incendiary grenade. It didn’t matter. Flames were licking up the shelving, throwing a wavering, surreal illumination.

It was light to die by.

A ring of zombies was pressing in closer, their threadbare hides punched with smoking bullet holes. Ravenous and ruined, they marched forward with skeletal fingers outstretched. Weston watched them come and wished he’d saved one round to use on himself.

The cadaverous sea parted and Paul Henry Dade stepped forward, his face hanging in fluttering tatters, gouts of black blood drooling from his lips in streamers.

Weston let that atrocity get in close, then he pulled his knife and sank it into Dade’s belly, slitting him to the throat. A tide of viscous ichor drained from the wound like puss from a festering boil. It splashed over Weston and he saw it swam with worms.

Then Dade’s cold hands were on his shoulders, tightening with a grave rictus. Weston cried out as he felt his bones snap, as his mind released itself in a whimpering tirade.

Dade was trying to tell him something, but all that came out was a bubbling, slopping sound, his crypt-breath sour and sweet and sickening.

Dade split Weston lengthwise like a sausage and fed on the hot, salty bounty within. He chewed and tore and ripped and sucked. And much later, painted red with blood, stepped away and held Weston’s bloody head high. The agent’s viscera decorated the shelves like Christmas garland. He was divided and scattered and mutilated, his bones broken open and leeched of marrow and stacked in a tidy heap on the floor.

And all was silent then, save for the crackling of the fire and the sound of bones being gnawed and bowels being nibbled. The floor was a bloody, stinking stew of flesh and meat. Some of it was still, but much of it moved and pulsed and hungered, unable to die as such.

*

Rice of Green Team was not dead.

Hell, no.

He was bitten and clawed, bruised and bleeding, but surely not dead. Problem was, he was mostly fucked and knew it. His helmet was gone, his assault shotgun history now. He’d used every last round putting down the mutiny of the dead hands, tossing the Remington when the hands were replaced by zombies that flooded down the corridor.

He’d been hiding ever since.

He did not know if anybody else was alive.

Right then, he didn’t really care. All he cared about was a quick way out. He was hiding in a closet with a Colt 9mm handgun clenched tight in his fists, trying to remember the TAC leader, Weston, going over the map of the compound that was tacked to the wall. Problem was, the map was World War II vintage and there had been a lot of remodeling since. Stairways were gone. Hallways sealed up. Walls knocked down. So, yeah, Rice was trying to think his way out, but it didn’t look good.

He hadn’t heard any gunfire for awhile now, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. He could smell the death in the compound…like pressing your face into roadkill, filling your nostrils with that rank green smell and swallowing it down in reeking rivers. He could also smell the cordite and something like wood smoke, which told him the complex was burning.

But who lit it up?

The zombies? The FBI? Helicopters buzzed the roof from time to time and loudspeakers were broadcasting muffled appeals for Dade’s people to surrender.

And that was pretty funny when you thought about it.

Rice thought:
They ain’t gonna surrender unless you bring a hearse.

He sat stiffly in the darkness. He had a small tactical flashlight and his Colt nine, that was about it. But maybe he could just wait this out, maybe—

Footsteps.

Something like them.

A lumbering, heavy sound. Like a bull was coming down the hallway, smashing into the walls, grunting and puffing. It passed by the door, then paused and Rice was certain it was sniffing, making a wet snorting sound.