Nothing about them, Lisa decided, fit any conceivable pattern.
The young girl was being pulled apart now. A teenage girl was lapping at blood from her neck like a kitty with a bowl of warm milk. One of the boys was pushing his penis into her mouth.
Lisa turned away, unable to look anymore.
She could not sup on any more horrors. She was full now like a barrel, overflowing.
The woman who’d been with the congregation had her own troubles.
Two rabids—an elderly woman in a windsuit and a bearded man wearing only a flannel shirt were pulling at her from either side, teeth bared. They were growling and snapping and drooling. Like lover’s playfully sharing a joint of beef, they began taking turns with her, each biting chunks of meat from the woman’s face and neck. There was such primitive, barbaric pleasure to their actions it was literally unspeakable.
Lisa and Johnny ran up the aisle.
Behind them, the deranged throng from outside began to rush in. There was no more time to witness the fall of civilization as such.
“They’re not people!” Johnny shouted, as if to convince himself of the same. “Not people…”
From the altar, more rabids came.
The initial offensive consisted of three adults, all men. An unlikely threesome they were—a business man in a soiled three-piece suit, barefoot, wielding a broom handle; a gangly farmer-brown type in bib overalls and a greasy Case cap, Junior Samples from Hell; and lastly, a huge, lolling fat man wearing the uniform pants of a cop with a badge pinned to his rolling fish-white belly.
If they hadn’t been so positively sinister in intent, it might have been laughable.
Johnny shouldered the .30-06, sighted, and blew the cop’s head to fragments. He did the same with the farmer. They fell into one another, dead, but their limbs continued to jump and twitch. The businessman with the broom handle vaulted over them and came on, his club held above his head for a deathblow.
He got within four feet of Johnny and Lisa.
Before Johnny could pull the trigger, Lisa brought up the .357 and shot him in the face. The back of his head exploded with a spray of meat and bone. The impact threw him up against a pew and over it.
Johnny took her by the hand, led her forward.
They weren’t far from the doorway that led to the rectory. It was just beyond the altar. Twenty feet at most. But in their situation, it might have been miles.
Behind them, the rabids were swarming like hornets. The church was filled with their screechings and howlings.
The door to the rectory suddenly slammed open and two more showed themselves.
Two twin girls, naked and scrawny, their ashen flesh black with streaks and blotches of oil and dirt like they’d been crawling around in a mechanic’s bay. Their blonde hair was matted with leaves and sticks, stringy strands of it hung limply over their faces. They could’ve been a set of porcelain dolls, so white, so perfect… except for their eyes—liquid yellow and fixed with a wolfish hunger.
They came on, arms extended, fingers clutching and clawing.
“God forgive me,” Johnny said.
And killed them both.
After that, both Lisa and he were finished.
They shambled forward, through the rectory and out into the night. They met no resistance and that was a good thing because, by that point, there wouldn’t have been much they could’ve done about it.
They made it out into the courtyard, out into the misting, damp night.
Holding each other, they fell behind a wall of cedars and trembled. Lisa sobbed and Johnny did, too, realizing it was the first time he had cried in thirty years. It went against the grain of who and what he was, but the tears felt good.
They proved he was still human.
22
Lou was armed and dangerous and pretty much out of his head.
Like Johnny, he’d survived the initial onslaught when the rabids poured through the front door of the church by simply being overwhelmed. The rabids bowled down first Ben then Joe and Johnny. The latter slammed into Lou and pitched him on his ass. The rabids went right over the top of them, trampling them to the floor.
Maybe it was sheer momentum.
Maybe they saw the men behind them with the guns and knew they were the ones who had to go first.
Regardless, Lou, bruised and banged-up from being used as a welcome mat, managed to crawl out the front door.
Scrambling away on all fours, something struck him in the back—a shotgun. It must’ve been tossed aside by one of the rabids as they fell on its owner. And now he had it. It was sawed-off right in front of the pump and he knew without a doubt it was Johnny’s.
And now, here he was, back on the streets of Cut River once again.
Alone.
A voice in his head kept telling him he had to hang on until dawn… but that was hours and hours away. He pretty much accepted the fact that the others had to be dead. Maybe by sunrise he’d run into one or more of them again… and have to kill them. He wasn’t sure he was ready for that. His tank was empty and everything seemed gray and hopeless.
But something in him told him to fight on.
If they were going to get him—and by virtue of their sheer numbers it seemed very likely—then he was going to make them pay for it.
A block from the main drag, Chestnut, he collapsed behind a parked Tony’s Pizza truck and weighed his options. He thought of getting in a car again and driving all night. If the tank was full and it was an economical job, he could cruise around until first light.
But he dismissed that idea; it would only draw attention.
He considered walking out of town again.
It seemed the only rational choice.
It didn’t seem conceivable to him that they could have every avenue of escape covered. Maybe the roads… but, Christ, Cut River wasn’t that big. It was bordered by woods and fields to all sides and where it wasn’t, there was the river. There had to be an opening somewhere. The only alternative to that was finding yet another (supposedly) defensible position and waiting out the night.
Fuck that noise, he thought. You don’t know how many rounds you have. Do the sensible thing and get the hell out.
Okay, then. Which way?
Chestnut slit right through the center of town. Main arteries fed off of it in either direction. Those were out. To the east, the town was flanked by the river. To the west, the cemetery, the trainyards, some warehouses, and what had looked to be a trailer court. Beyond that was open country.
He’d already tried the cemetery and that was no good. Those ghouls were thick in there.
The river?
Why the hell not? Maybe if he got in the water, cold as it would be, he could quietly follow the riverbank out of town. Regardless, it was better than dying on the streets.
Staying in the shadows, he crept up to Chestnut, pressing himself to the brick façade of a jewelry store. He was stunned to see that he was only a block or so away from where he’d parked his Pontiac. It was still there, he saw, across from the Town Tap. He felt a hollow yearning in his belly. The car had brought him to this graveyard. It was his only true connection with the real world.
He wiped a hand across his mouth. Chewed his fingernails.
He felt like he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Sighing, he shook his head. He couldn’t let himself weaken like that.
As he squinted his eyes, he could see shadowy forms moving not far from his Grand Am.
He thought: Cocksuckers, dirty, vile inhuman cocksuckers! Reducing me to this! I should go down there and kill ’em all! Waste those godless pricks!