"Does anything strike you as unusual about this place?" The doctor asked. He was short of breath, as was Wheeler; the soft earth was threatening to swallow the damn bags. Wheeler shrugged. "It's creepy. People don't come out here much."
"Why is it 'creepy'? What's so unsettling about it?" Addison pressed. Wheeler looked at the gnarled trees, their clusters of branches covered in moss, with great leaves dragging them toward the boggy ground. The night sky was completely obscured. He opened his mouth to speak but Addison spoke first.
"You don't see plant life like this anywhere else, do you? So green, so full, devouring everything around it — it won't stop growing. We have to cut it back every day to keep it from overtaking the manor. What's your name?"
"Wheeler."
"Mister Wheeler, this swamp is a sort of Source — a wellspring, if you will, of some energy. It feeds the swamp, engorges the swamp, infuses every cell of this place. Hold tight to that bag! This place…well, rather than try to explain it I'll just show you."
Stopping, Addison opened his garbage bag and let a pair of bony arms fall out. Barren of life, wrapped in shriveled skin and tissue, the arms lay like little fallen branches among the trees.
Then they moved.
The skin tore, and stringy tendons produced only subtle, jerky movements, but Jesus Lord they were moving. That's when Wheeler felt a shuffling about inside his own bag and dropped it with a cry.
"It brings the dead to life." Addison said, his smile horrifying in the lantern light. "This is the Source of the plague. Here it isn't contagious, caught up in the simple trappings of a virus — I suspect we're responsible for that particular development — but it still infuses dead tissue." Addison watched the two corpses shaking themselves free of the bags, teeth in hollow skulls click-clacking and the bodies themselves crumbling under the strain of new life.
"How does something like this exist? Why? Did God put it here?"
Wheeler realized that what Addison was talking about had nothing to do with science or medicine. The doctor knelt and rapped his knuckles on the forehead of his corpse. "This isn't of God. He and the life He's slapped together are impermanent. Look at our bodies. He did make us in His image, after all, didn't He? Do you know why, Wheeler? We're just a shallow attempt by God to leave His mark after He's long gone.
"This energy came before God."
Wheeler was backing off, in the direction from which they'd come, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to find his way out of the swamp before — before-
"We can rise above the flaws of our 'Father' and His finite purpose. We need only appeal to the Old Ones that have given us this gift." Addison saw Wheeler backpedaling through the mud and laughed. "Run if you want. Where are you running to? Man has already set the wheels in motion, whether or not he knows it! God is dead, Wheeler, and He's not coming back!!"
So Wheeler ran. He ran and ran and ran until his legs burned and his lungs screamed. He fell into a ditch and covered himself with dirt and prayed that he'd never wake up.
Now, in the shelter, he did wake up.
To the realization that Addison had been right.
21
Mike
After getting Wheeler on his feet, Mike returned to the front entrance, where Palmer was throwing anything not nailed to the floor onto the barricade. Undead hands came through the hole in the door to sweep the obstructions away. Now would be a good time to use his gun.
He emptied the clip through the hole and went into his jeans for his backup. This was the last of his ammo. He shouted for Voorhees.
Outside, Aidan pointed to the smoldering clown; it had stopped moving. Harry lifted the mass into his arms.
The corpse crashed through the upper half of the door and clipped the light overhead, throwing the room into a tumult of shadows. Flames from the clown's ruptured gut lapped at the surrounding debris and cast an eerie new glow.
Voorhees grabbed Mike's arm. "Kitchen! The fridge!"
Palmer stomped the clown, choking on smoke; Mike pulled her off and gave her his gun. The others came running from the community room with boards in their hands. "Keep the rotters back!" Mike said, and followed Voorhees.
They wrenched the refrigerator away from the kitchen wall and lugged it across the floor with an earsplitting screech. Gunshots were heard, and the pounding of Mike's heart drove the other sounds away.
As they passed through the community room, he saw Shipley cuffed to the radiator.
"Voorhees-"
"Forget him! Move!"
Palmer tried to keep her hands steady as she held Mike's gun through a thickening haze of smoke. The evening sun backlit the undead as they tried to get in; they were a mass of writhing silhouettes, heads barely distinguishable. She whispered a prayer and pulled the trigger.
One of the dead flew back into the street. A second later Palmer was jostled aside by the cops with the fridge. Slamming it into place, Mike grabbed the gun from Palmer's hands and gasped a quick "thank you" before turning away.
Jenna and London pulled the clown into the community room and smothered it with blankets. The stench was nauseating. Blackened fingers on one hand curled into a fist; Jenna nearly fainted, but London shook her roughly. "Stay with it now!"
In the street, Harry raised his arms and studied them. His sleeves had caught aflame when he picked up the clown.
Aidan nudged him toward the broken door, even as the living blocked it off. Harry, his flesh being rapidly devoured by the heat, threw himself at the door. The refrigerator, with the survivors behind it, held fast.
Sawbones appeared with the axe; he pushed the other undead back and attacked the fridge.
Harry shuffled around the corner of the building by himself.
Mike looked from the entryway to Shipley. "We need him," he told Voorhees. The bald man shook his head. "He's the last damn thing we need."
"Give me the handcuff key."
"Weisman…"
"I won't ask again!" There was the slightest tremor in Mike's voice as he realized he had no idea what to do, if not ask. Voorhees leaned against the fridge and once again shook his head. "No."
Harry's flaming arms plunged through the window over the radiator. Shipley screamed.
Harry fought to get his shoulders through the window before the living reached him; bones snapped and flames swept up over his face. He could no longer see. There was no feeling in his upper body. Still he thrashed and thrashed and then felt himself hitting the floor, inside the shelter, bathed in fire.
Shipley kicked madly at the zombie. Mike ran up and beat at it with a board. The blanket on the nearby cot went up in seconds. "Voorhees!" He hollered. "THE KEY!!"
Voorhees entered the room. He pulled the widowmaker from his trench coat. Shipley cowered at the sight.
But the P.O. lopped the zombie's burning head off and kicked the body across the floor. He tossed the key to Mike. "Cut him loose if you want." Voorhees upended the flaming cot.
Mike knelt by Shipley. The handcuffed man kicked his legs and cried "Look…!"
The decapitated body had rolled underneath another cot and set it ablaze. "Fuck, Voorhees, fire over there!" Mike turned back and unlocked the cuffs.
Another cot was burning — dirty clothing piled beneath it sent a foul-smelling smoke into the air to join the clown's putrid odor. The whole place was going to go up. Palmer entered the room. "We've got to get out of here!"
"That's what they want!" Yelled Mike. "They're smoking us out! They're all around us!"
"If we can't-" Throwing her arms into the air, Palmer screamed "SHIT!" and ran to the chapel door. "Wendy? Kipp? You've got to open up!"
"Didn't you hear what I said?" Mike snapped. "YES I fucking heard it!" Palmer shot back. "We can get onto the roof from inside the chapel!"