He saw the corpse of the pregnant woman… saw the blood everywhere, the grisly smeared path of something black and oily.
It went up the wall.
Right up the wall and he followed it with his eyes…
Oh, Jesus, I forgot, I forgot.
There was something up there clinging to the ceiling like a pink and gray fleshy spider, an eyeless and pulsing mass that dropped down onto him, fell over him in a squirming, writhing horror.
It was flabby and warm, like being caressed by a placenta.
It forced itself into his eyes and down his throat, up his nostrils and through his pores. Wherever he was open, it surged and flowed and consumed. It was the first true citizen of the new Cut River.
And for Terra, it was an unspeakable death.
35
It was time to make a run for it.
Out in the corridor, they could hear battle being waged—soldiers screaming and dying, rabids falling on them like animals. There was the constant report of rifles and submachine guns, the acrid stink of flamethrowers. The occupying force was intent on cleaning out the municipal building which had become something of a hive.
It was here that the end would be played out.
That much was obvious.
The door was under constant barrage as the rabids tried to get in.
Lou, Johnny, and Lisa were in a conference room. Its primary features were the long, polished oak table and the windows that looked down on the burning city. Other than that it was unremarkable. There was a pegboard on the wall with various civil announcements and the minutes of previous city council meetings.
There was another door at the far end of the room.
The one they came in was buckling in its frame. It was a big heavy job or it wouldn’t have even lasted this long. The one at the far end seemed unmolested… so far.
“It’s death to go out there,” Johnny said, “but we can’t stay here.”
Lou said, “Then let’s do it. I don’t have shit to lose now.”
Lisa, who swam in and out of her fugue, made a few grunting sounds which they took as assent.
Lou stood before the door. He had Lisa’s .357 now. The shotgun was empty.
Johnny, holding Lisa at his side, said simply, “Ready?”
Lou nodded.
The other door burst in and two or three rabids fell in with it, along with a lot of billowing black smoke and the nauseating stench of burning flesh and blasted wood. No sense in discussing it any longer.
Lou led the way out into the hall.
The corridor was hazy with smoke.
As Johnny and Lisa slipped by, Lou watched the far end. There was no more shooting. Just a lot of moaning. Cries for help. The slithering, hissing sound of the rabids as they mutilated and possibly devoured the soldiers. Lou could hear violent thuds, wet ripping sounds, sucking and tearing noises. The smoke, thankfully, blocked his view. Tongues of flame licked up the walls. The smoke made his eyes burn.
“Come on,” Johnny said as he led Lisa away.
And Lou had every intention of doing so, except that out of the smoke three forms came walking. Rabids. Three men. One of them had several bullet holes in him, but he came on regardless. Demented eyes swam in bleached faces, a moldering stink of sick wards drifted off the trio.
Lou shot two of them in the head and they fell back into the wall of smoke, spraying blood. The third simply snarled, went down low and disappeared the way he’d come.
“You okay?” Johnny asked him when he caught up.
“Fine,” Lou said. “Let’s go.”
The soldiers, it occurred to him, were losing this battle.
The dire army of rabids were overwhelming them by numbers and sheer ferocity. How could you hope to fight savages like that by conventional means? And that got him to thinking that if this went on any length of time, Terra’s Emergency Response Group would start using more lethal means to control and crush the good citizens of Cut River.
No matter.
He wouldn’t live to see it.
They moved up the smoky corridor, coughing, eyes watering. The fog of smoke was good and bad—it helped to hide them, but it also concealed the forms of their enemies. Lou kept seeing the faces of his ex-wives and lovers and wished to God he would have had the chance to say good-bye to them. But such a thing was far beyond the realm of possibility now.
They moved around a bend in the corridor and right away found more bodies. There were holes punched into the walls—literally hundreds of them—from gunfire. Great areas were scorched from the flamethrowers.
And bodies.
Dozens.
Rabids and soldiers.
Many locked in death embraces. The hallway looked like a litter pile from an extermination camp. The smell of smoke was overpowered here by the corrupt and polluted stink of mass death.
Johnny lowered Lisa to the floor and stripped a flamethrower and a 9mm sidearm from a soldier.
Lou, following his lead, took a gun off a corpse, too. They’d need everything they could get.
“There’s a doorway up ahead,” Johnny explained. “It leads into a maintenance corridor. The stairs to the roof are in there.”
“If we make it.”
“Sure, if we make it.”
Johnny led the way again.
Lisa was still lost in her narcotic dreams (or the lack of them), but she was able to shuffle along if she had an arm to hang onto. Lou figured she was the lucky one. She’d been out of it for hours now. With any luck, he figured, maybe she’d die without truly coming to her senses and, really, what else was there to hope for?
And that’s when the woman stepped out of the murk.
Lou saw her and cringed.
She reminded him vaguely of the rabid police woman he’d fought earlier that evening downstairs. She was equally as lovely—tall, elegant, completely naked, a sweep of blonde hair falling down one shoulder. She had a knife in one hand and something in the other. A head. The head of man which had been decapitated crudely, dripping meat hanging from the stump like confetti. She offered Lou a sardonic, hungry grin, a skullish rictus really, and a single rope of glistening drool ran from her mouth, oozing down the cone of one perfect breast, pooling at the nipple.
He remembered his gun and brought it up.
Something struck him in the chest and he went on his ass.
The head.
With one fluid sweep of musculature, she’d flung the head at him and with such force it was like being hit by a medicine ball. The wind was literally knocked out of him. He’d lost his gun and she was advancing like a starved wolf that had separated a weak stag from the pack.
She dove on him.
He fought with everything he had left which wasn’t much. She overpowered him effortlessly, pinning him to the floor and slavering his screaming face with kisses, with licks from her long discolored tongue which was so cold, so very cold… like a snake from a meat locker. Drool washed over his face and he fought hopelessly as she licked a spot at his neck and playfully nipped it with her teeth, sucking up the blood that ran out like an infant at its mother’s teat.
He was locked down by her glaring vulpine eyes… and suddenly, was liking it.
And then there was a gunshot.
Followed by a second and a third.
The woman went taut, began to shudder, her mouth split open into a bestial cry of defeat. She howled and screeched and then slumped forward, vomiting a sea of black blood and toxic waste all over him.
Lou kicked free.
Johnny was a few feet away, but his weapon was lowered. He was looking past Lou at the rabid woman clawing her way up the wall with snake-like gyrations of her trunk.
Ruby Sue was standing there, gun in hand.