The savages were all loping in that direction now, howling and screeching and making horrible congested sounds.
Nancy flipped herself over the bakery counter, knowing there was no way she could join her husband or the others. She heard gunfire and peered over the lip of the counter and heard Ben shouting her name madly, saw him disappear in a clutching profusion of white hands. Then more gunfire.
She was thinking about those zombies from Night of the Living Dead… but they were nothing like these animals. Cinematic deadheads, crafty as rusty coat hangers, all the cunning of petrified rabbit shit, but these… these things, they were smart… and fast. Whatever contagion had consumed the population of Cut River, it had only amplified their cunning.
She pressed herself under the counter, her body rigid and jumping with terror.
A weapon. She needed a weapon. Something.
She looked around. Deep fryers. Cake pans. Pie tins. Bins of flour, sugar. A rolling pin. Her hand snaked out and grabbed it. Better than nothing. She could still hear them, gibbering and hissing, so very inhuman.
There was more gunfire. Moanings. Wet sounds. Thuds. Then… silence. She waited under the counter, her heart too large for her chest, banging like drum.
Were they all dead?
Everyone?
Even Ben? Joe? Ruby Sue? Lying dead with their attackers? Is that what happened?
Nancy needed badly to cry, to scream, to do anything but lay there, trembling like some frightened animal. The sense of loss—Sam and now possibly Ben—was huge and overwhelming, a feeling of violation. As if all the rules of normalcy had been set on their heads by some lunatic, giggling god. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t take anymore.
She pulled herself up gradually.
Slow, shuffling footsteps.
She froze, fear clinging to her like a sheet of ice. She lay under its weight, shivering, her brain desperately seeking the peace of blackness, of oblivion.
But she wouldn’t allow it.
She bit down on her lower lip, bringing pain bright and real.
The silence was heavy, filled with ominous potential or the lack of it. Someone was near. She knew that much. She could hear them breathing. Drawing in low, rattling breaths. Louder now.
And then a smell… Christ, like rotting meat.
Although herbrain demanded she hide, that she be still and silent, she could not be. She raised herself up careful inches, brought her face up over the lip of the counter to look, to see what form her death would take—
And something struck her square in the face.
She fell back, black dots before her eyes.
She never passed out, but it was close. Blood ran from her nose. She could taste it on her lips. Reality swam back in completely.
Whatever had struck her brought pain, but she was unaware of it, her mind locked now in battle mode, ready to fight to the death. She still had the rolling pin. Her fist was wrapped stiffly around it. As she moved, something rolled off her lap.
A softball.
Softball?
Yes, of course. That’s what had hit her. That’s what—
There was a little boy standing before her dressed in a muddy, rumpled blue suit. Looked like maybe he’d just come from choir practice. Seven, eight years old. No more. Nancy made to smile at him, but she saw his eyes, leering and yellow like full moons, filled with a total, unflinching hatred. A blind hate that was not human, not animal, but something feral and rabid.
Yes, he looked like a little boy, but he was not a little boy.
Some atavistic nightmare from the dawn of the race when people were predatory things that lived only to hunt and kill.
He smiled down at her, drool running from his lips.
His hair was wild, leaves stuck in it, his face was the color of fresh cream, but mottled and streaked with grime.
Not a boy, just a thing from a grave.
Nancy drew herself slowly to her feet. “Please,” she said, close to tears, very aware of the weight of the rolling pin in her hand. “I know you’re sick… you can’t help what you are, but I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t make me.”
He kept smiling, but came no closer. “Please,” he mocked in a choking voice thick with phlegm. “I don’t wanna hurt you, don’t make me.” Then he started to laugh, cold, baying laughter like the shrieking of a maniac.
Nancy took a step back, the flesh crawling on her bones, and he leapt.
She swung the rolling pin at him, but missed as he rammed into her, spilling the both of them to the floor. He was wild in her arms, fingers clawing, legs kicking, head thrashing, teeth snapping. Alive and deadly like a sack of copperheads, contorting and twisting in every direction as Nancy tried to keep his teeth from her. The feel of him… hideous, like living, breathing meat. She managed to hook a foot under him and launch him backwards.
He slammed into the counter with a sickly, fleshy thud.
He came again, a macabre grin slitting open his pallid face.
Nancy brought the rolling pin down and it crashed into the crown of his head. She heard a soft cracking sound. He pulled himself up and she kept bringing the rolling pin down until blood spattered her face and his head was caved-in like a rotting pumpkin. Until his skull was opened like a can, the contents running to the floor. And even then, she had to peel his cold fingers from her ankles where they were seized in a death grip. The back of his hands were gray and flaking.
Nancy staggered off, felt the wind being sucked from her lungs.
She went down to her knees, whimpering and shuddering, finally vomiting.
She only wanted to die then.
She’d killed a little boy.
That’s what this fucking town had done to her. Maybe it hadn’t acted like a boy or even looked too much like a boy, but once, yes, once it had been. An innocent child corrupted by this place, polluted. Cut River had done that to him and she’d supplied the final unspeakable denouement to his lamentable existence.
Again, totally numb, the part of her that had been human and hopeful just a windblown memory, Nancy got to her feet.
She started towards the back of the store to find the stairs, knowing it was where she had to go. Dragging her feet, she continued on.
She saw the stairs now, the door that hid them nearly ripped from its hinges. There was a tumble of bodies on the steps, great sections of their anatomies blown away. A scene from some medieval hell. Bodies heaped like jackstraw.
She would have to climb over them.
No other way.
Then she heard motion behind her.
She turned and brought up the rolling pin limply, no longer noticing that it was caked with blood and brains and tangles of hair.
Sam was standing there.
Something like October moonlight filled his eyes. They were a brilliant yellow, yes, the yellow of a pumpkin skull lit by a candle, but they seemed almost silvery, reflective like the surface of mirrors. She could see herself quite plainly in them. His flesh was colorless and he stank like death.
Nancy felt something wet tickle her lips and realized it was her tongue.
She took it all in and something in her shut down completely, refused to accept this. She could see the grisly wound on his neck, swollen purple, blackening at the edges, dried blood everywhere like rust.
He was dead.
He had to be dead.
No one could live with their throat laid open like that.
Sam grinned at her, a broad toothy smile of shining white teeth that was as evil and vicious as anything she’d ever seen. A baboon’s grin. He was no more human than that. There was nothing but desolation in those shining eyes, a ravening insanity.
“Nancy,” he said and it sounded like water dumped on a hot stove lid. “It doesn’t hurt at all, it just feels good.”