She was bloody and beaten and looked like she’d just escaped from a tiger cage. But her eyes were normal, if not glazed and empty. They mirrored recognition of those she saw in the corridor.
The woman pulled herself up the wall, three gaping bloody holes in her back. She turned and leered at her attacker with poisoned eyes. She growled and snapped her jaws and spit out clots of blood and phlegm. Her eyes found Lou and fixed on him with that vicious, boiling hatred.
And then Ruby Sue shot her in the head.
She slid down the wall slowly like a raindrop down a window, leaving a smear of gore behind her. But not for one moment did her manic eyes leave Lou’s own. Even in death, cheated of prey, like some morbid human lioness, that flat and cold appetite remained.
Ruby Sue looked down at her, stepped over the armless body of a soldier. “Well,” she said very nonchalantly, “let’s get moving.”
Lou sat there on his ass, bitten, clawed, bruised and bleeding. Through a mask of blood and bile he began to laugh. In fact, he began to cackle madly as if it was all the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.
Ruby Sue took him by the arm and helped him to his feet.
“So you finally went crazy, eh?” she said. “Well, goddamn, it’s about time, man.”
Nobody bothered to ask her what she was doing there or if she’d been infected. It was pretty much a given thing by this point: outside of Lisa, there were no more virgins among them.
They all had it.
They all had tasted the teeth of the rabids and carried the dark secret of Cut River within them.
Johnny was in the lead again.
Lou was the rear guard man.
Ruby Sue helped Lisa along.
No group of soldiers had seen worse action than they, had waded through more blood and viscera and insanity. And even if by some crazy, impossible set of circumstances one or more managed to survive, they would never be the same again, would never be whole, would never be human as such.
They were moving lower now, almost at a staggering crouch.
The corridor was so thick with smoke it was like to trying to suck breath from the tailpipe of a Buick.
“Door should be just ahead,” Johnny said to them, leading on.
He stopped suddenly, hearing a shrill cackling sound.
It reminded him of fingers drawn over a blackboard. Not even remotely human. An elderly woman wearing the bedraggled, bloody remains of a bathrobe squatted in a doorway. She dropped what she’d been nibbling on—a human hand.
Her voice was wet and congested like the lungs of an ammonia victim: “How’s about a kiss, handsome?” Then the voice dissolved into a hissing like acid dissolving flesh.
She stood upright and came at him, drool spraying from her lips.
Her hands were almost at his throat when he pressed the trigger of the automatic he’d taken from the dead soldier. Her body jerked as a volley of three rounds punched through it. Her eyes glazed-over, went wet and vitreous, translucent like high-gloss enamel. She stepped back, fingering her wounds.
Johnny shot her in the face and she pitched stiffly over, trembling on the floor, arms slapping at her sides. Ichor and filth bubbled from her lips and she went still.
Another woman came to take her place.
She wore a short business skirt slit at the thigh and high heels, but nothing more. A river of foamy drool flooded from her mouth and painted her large, jiggling breasts like a slime of oil. She opened her mouth and let out a peal of wailing torment at them. Her tongue flicked across her lips and she spat a wad of mucus into Johnny’s face.
He brought his 9mm up.
Hands on her knees, she rocked from side to side like some child daring to be hit with a ball. A stream of sour-smelling urine ran from beneath her skirt and rained to the floor. Her flesh was glistening with plague excretions, issuing a sharp, caustic mist.
But she did not attempt an attack.
Johnny pumped four rounds into her.
The first went between her legs, missing entirely. The next went into her thigh, the others into her belly. She spun around bleeding and screaming like a woman in a padded cell.
He shot her in the chest, pulverizing one breast into a drooping sac of meat.
She turned and clawed at the air, barked at the ceiling, eyes rolling madly like marbles on a roulette table. A steady stream of something black and oozing poured from her wounds. The raw bile of human evil. The stuff that flowed in the veins of child molesters and rapists and mass murderers. She shook all over like a wet, stinking dog, then went down in a heap, spasms running through her.
Then the survivors were moving again and they could hear more gunfire and much closer. Not only small arms, but heavy machine guns now. What sounded like helicopters buzzing the building as if they were hunting wasps on a mission.
Then the door.
It was locked. Johnny put a few bullets in it and threw it open.
He led the way in followed by Ruby Sue and Lisa. Lou came last.
Only he never actually made it in.
Because he heard them coming: the pounding feet and hissing voices and knew there was too many this time, just too many. He turned and decided it was as good a place as any to make his last stand. He thought of matinees as a kid, old movies on TV. Heroism. It had never been in him. Not until now. And he decided that heroism, though once a very unthinkable, abstract concept, made perfect sense now that he didn’t give a flaming shit about his own life and had absolutely nothing to lose.
“COME ON GODDAMMIT!” Ruby Sue called out to him and Johnny said something familiar.
“Go!” he ordered them. “It’s Alamo-time, people! I’ll hold ’em off!”
His eyes connected with theirs one last time and some sliver of hope, of selfish survival lodged momentarily in his mind: Just what in fuck’s name are you doing, Lou? What do you hope to accomplish here? But there was no real answer to that, only a warm pervading sense that for the first time in his life he was doing something completely unselfish and damn if it didn’t feel good.
He shut the door behind him, pressed his back to it.
They were coming, maybe drawn by the shooting or the rich smell of fresh blood, regardless, they were coming.
He saw them moving out of the smoke, swimming out of the murk like piranhas. Jesus, so many.
Hundreds?
Could there really be that many?
Was it even remotely possible?
He chewed down on his lip until it bled, his guts gone to jelly, as utterly terrified as he’d ever been in his entire life. So many of them. God, how he wanted to run, to make it easier on himself and fuck the rest.
But he wouldn’t.
Not this time. And not ever again.
And maybe the true measure of a man, of a human being, was how he faced death. Not biting and clawing like an animal, like them, but as a human being.
As a man.
As the rabids poured forth he suddenly saw them as they were: a hive. A mass army under a single set of imperatives and drives. A single cold, relentless intellect. Like ants or wasps they lived only to serve the hive, to crush intruders, to gather food and defend their lair.
And that’s how they came at him, scampering forward like rats, all teeth and eyes and clutching fingers. He was what Terra had called a norm and, yes, he was the enemy and they could smell it on him.
Mostly, the ones that came for him were children.
He wondered if he’d encountered any of them back at the playground.
He brought up his guns, one in each hand, feeling oddly like a gunslinger in a surreal, nightmarish western and started shooting. They absorbed his bullets and, although some fell, the mass crawled and hopped and lurched forward.
And then he was out of shells.