“You ready?” he asked.
I took position beside him and aimed my pistol down at the center of the entrance. “Ready.”
He tossed the shutters open and stepped back, hand going to his pistol. I peered down, but couldn’t see more than a few feet. The entrance led straight down, lined on two sides with painted white cinder blocks. I reasoned we must have been standing at the corner of the basement. There was a ladder leading down, but I could only see the top four or five rungs.
From my vest, I produced a tactical light, pressed the switch, and shined the light downward. Other than dust motes and a few dead bugs, I didn’t see anything. All was quiet for a few moments.
Then the shuffling began.
“You hear that?” I asked Tyrel.
“Yeah. I think he’s coming our way.”
We waited, feet braced, weapons aimed. The shuffling increased in volume until the top of a man’s head came into view. He was tall, about my height, dark hair, a bald spot beginning to form in the back. He did not walk with the smooth rolling stride of a healthy, able-bodied person. It was not the carefully coordinated series of controlled falls that normally comprise human locomotion. His feet dragged, as if he had to keep them in contact with the floor or he would fall over. His head bobbed back in forth in jerky, unsteady movements, arms stiff at his sides, hands clasping and unclasping.
“Mr. Torrance?” I said.
His head snapped up, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Tyrel whispered.
His face was gray. Not pale like he hadn’t had enough sun, or the light pallor of someone who is very ill, but a different color entirely. It was the gray of hurricane clouds over the Gulf of Mexico, the color of the ashes that settled on my car the day my family and I fled our home, the leaden pewter shade of oil refinery smoke arcing toward the sky. I had never seen that particular tone on a human being before, but I knew instantly what it meant. It was as though some dim, forgotten part of me remembered that color, the same as it knew to fear the night and find comfort in the brightness of the sun. If not for Tyrel standing next to me that day, I might well have turned and fled. As it was, I shifted my aim, finger tight over the trigger.
“Tyrel, wh-”
Whatever I was going to say died on my lips when the thing that was once Perry Torrance let out a shrieking, hungry wail. It was loud enough I felt it rattling in my chest. The dead man’s voice went ragged as he cried out, the vocal cords in his neck rupturing from the force of the scream. No living person could ever have made a sound like that unless they were in the grip of indescribable agony. It was primal, animal, but at the same time, all too human.
Fear coursed up my spine and made my bowels clench. The urge to shoot the thing squarely between the eyes was almost overwhelming, a physical force that made my face burn and my hands tremble. I watched in horror as the man-thing slammed against the wall hard enough to dislodge a tooth. It showed no sign of pain as it scraped and clawed at the wall, desperately trying to reach us. Tyrel reached out and laid a steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Easy now, son.” His calm voice cut through the panic like balm on a fresh burn. The heat in my face cooled, followed by a loosening of the tension in my arms. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, shakily. The thing in the basement—I couldn’t think of it as a person—continued to howl and scratch futilely at the wall.
“I didn’t really believe it until now,” Tyrel said.
“What?”
He pointed. “That, is not a living person. No fucking way.”
“You think he’s dead? Like, really dead?”
“Look at him, Caleb. You ever seen anything like that?”
I shook my head. “No. But he’s up and moving, Tyrel. He couldn’t do that if he were really dead.”
The former SEAL holstered his pistol. “I know a way we can find out.”
*****
Two lessons I learned that day:
Lesson the first: The infected are terrifyingly strong.
Lesson the second: Subduing one without breaking every bone in its body is damned near impossible.
But we managed it, sort of. The first thing we did was search the Torrance’s garage until we found an old canvas duffel bag, a tennis ball, some duct tape, and a couple of bungee cords.
We duct taped a couple of trimmed saplings to the duffel bag and used it to cover Perry Torrance’s head, figuring it would make it harder for him to fight us. But after forcing him backward from the ladder and descending so we were on the same level with him, he seemed to have no trouble locating us despite the fact he couldn’t see us.
Next, we hit him with a classic schoolyard tackle, me hitting high and Tyrel hitting low. We managed to get him down, but the strength of the thing was enormous.
For a long time afterward, I thought the Reanimation Bacteriophage did something to human muscle to make it superhumanly strong. Later, I learned it did not. It simply eliminated the pain response, making it possible for ghouls to use a hundred percent of their strength at all times, something no living human could have done in absentia of psychotropic drugs. The human body is far stronger than people think it is, we just never realize that full potential because doing so damages tissues and muscle fibers, which causes pain, which causes us to back off. The undead do not have that problem.
I pinned Torrance to the ground by sitting on his chest and holding my rifle across his throat. One of the fundamental rules of body mechanics is if you control the head, you control the body. I managed to hold him down long enough for Tyrel to tape his ankles and knees together, but it was a near thing.
In the process, while desperately trying to keep him from sitting up, I heard the crunch of Torrance’s hyoid bone giving way. I cursed, but kept my grip on the rifle. I kept expecting to hear him choking and gagging, but the only difference was his moans now came out in a disjointed rattle instead of the previous mewling. In that moment, it finally began to sink in that this man might be really, truly dead. And still moving around.
With this realization came an odd, inexplicable rage. I pressed down harder with the rifle, teeth bared, wanting nothing more in the world than to kill the thing underneath me. The sound of harsh, labored grunting came to my ears, and after a moment of dimly wondering where it was coming from, I realized it was me.
“Caleb,” Tyrel said.
I spoke through clenched teeth. “What?”
“Ease down, kid. Just hold him, don’t rip his head off.”
I relaxed, forcing myself to breath normally. “Sorry.”
Once Torrance’s legs were secured, we rolled him over and forced his hands behind his back. His right shoulder popped out of socket in the process, but again, the stricken man gave no indication of discomfort.
“That is just fuckin’ weird,” Tyrel said as we stood up and took a few steps away.
“No shit. What now?”
Tyrel picked up the tennis ball where he had dropped it, cut a hole in two sides, and threaded a bungee cord through it so it made a makeshift ball gag. “Now comes the fun part.”
I held Torrance’s head as still as I could while Tyrel applied the gag. He poised the ball over the man’s mouth and waited for him to open it between gnashings. When the time was right, he grasped the gag by two ends of the bungee cord and forced the tennis ball into Torrance’s biting mouth. A few quick motions later, and he had secured it in place by looping the bungee cords around the head and tying them off, then double securing it with duct tape.
“Okay,” Tyrel said. “Let’s see if he has a pulse.”
I did my best to hold Torrance still while Tyrel laid two fingers on the left side of his neck, and then the right. He repeated the process two more times, eyes closed in concentration. Finally, he sat back with a sigh.
“Anything?”