The farther he went down Chestnut Street, the more he realized how total all this was, how the entire town must have been infected with… with whatever the hell this was.
And it was oh-so-perfect, wasn’t it?
The storm.
The power outage.
Then this.
Almost like it was planned or something.
He saw people from time to time, alone or in groups, but he did not approach them; he didn’t like the way they moved, the aura of menace coming off them.
Wait.
He paused there on the sidewalk. Yes, he could hear them. They were coming.
He dashed into the black mouth of an alley. So dark in there. Maybe they were drawing him in. But he didn’t have a choice—he could see the crazy ones coming now, five or six of them, their eyes shining with evil influence.
He ducked into the alley, crouched behind a dumpster.
He sat there, trembling, his heart doing a drum solo, his face wet with mist.
Closer.
He practically sank his teeth through his lower lip as they passed the alley… paused, then moved on.
God, he’d wanted to scream.
Looked to be four men, two women. They were in a various states of dress and undress. One of the men was naked. One of the women shrouded in a ratty mink coat. Another of the men carried an axe. Still another had a butcher knife. A fetid odor blew off them.
What chilled Lou the most was not the insanity on an individual level like he’d experienced back in the diner or in the back of his car, but this mass… dementia, this organized savagery where these groups of… psychos, for lack of a better word, formed themselves into gangs and patrolled the streets. The ones that had just passed, for instance. They were grouped with almost military efficiency—two in front, two in the middle, two in the back, equally spaced.
Like a fucking platoon, he thought with a shudder.
And what did that mean? What did that say about all this?
When they stopped at the entrance to the alley, they stopped en masse, as a bunch. Without a word, they all just stopped there. They did not look around. They kept their heads pointed directly ahead, and then, without reason, they moved off at the same time. Like maybe they were plugged into the same brain, some mass consciousness.
It was scary.
No words, no nothing, just wet slithering sounds.
Lou wondered if they were looking for him.
The idea made his flesh go cold, made his brain race with wild thoughts.
Sure, he thought, they’re out hunting. They’re seeking the normal ones, the human ones. Like a cancer they’re searching out the healthy, uninfected cells so they can kill or contaminate them, bring them into the fold, make them like themselves, one huge body of pestilence.
Normal human beings were the abnormal ones now… the ones to be persecuted, exterminated, and maybe infected in this pernicious witch hunt.
But how did they know?
How did they know which ones were infected and which weren’t?
Lou figured it wasn’t by sight or smell, but something more basic, more primal. Maybe a biochemical thing. A chemical signature they gave off. Same way one spider knew another spider and didn’t end up mating with a housefly.
Yeah, okay. All and fine.
Pure speculation and plenty of it.
But it didn’t get him out of this cemetery, now did it?
Crouched behind the dumpster, he lit a cigarette, very badly needing it. He’d wanted to smoke before this, but he hadn’t dared. Now… well, he just had to before he faced the streets again.
When he’d first made his run he found his fogged, reeling brain thinking all kinds of crazy things. Like the fact that maybe this epidemic, this plague was not biological, but supernatural in origin. It was nuts, but what if? Vampires. Zombies. Something like that. These psychos definitely would fit the bill… but the idea of that was nonsense, of course. The guy in the diner had bled, he’d felt pain. Neither of which had stopped him, but it proved he was living flesh and blood. And in this nightmare, God knew, the knowledge of that was something.
And Lou knew, also, that they could die.
A block back he’d found one of them on the sidewalk, a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe curled up like a dead snake. He knew she was one of them because there was foam all over her lips. Her skin was a mottled gray, but he figured that had little to do with her death. Her head was nearly cleaved from her neck, as if she’d been worked on with a crosscut saw.
But it proved they could die.
Maybe he didn’t know what this disease was. But he knew that much.
He butted his cigarette.
He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this.
Steeling himself, he got to his feet, his back and legs protesting with a series of tiny popping sounds. It had been years, too many years, since he’d gotten any real exercise other than walking. And the smoking, drinking, and fatty foods had not helped. Yet, his body was responding just fine when you considered he was on the bad side of forty.
He made to leave the alley.
And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone.
6
After all these years, the war finally came home.
It finally rose up from the violent collective blackness that is America’s love of combat, of war, of death, and bit Uncle Sam right in his fat, lazy ass. God knew, it had been a long time coming.
Johnny Davis positioned himself high above the town.
He sat in the belfry above St. Thomas Catholic Church.
It seemed like a good place from which to watch the town go to shit. Safe, defensible. He was invisible in his roost. He didn’t think the rabids would find him up here. Most had emerged from the fog as little more than animals, savage evil beasts who knew only knew two things: fucking and killing. But the others? Yes, some of them—quite a few, in fact—were capable of organization, of tactics, of subterfuge.
These were the dangerous ones.
The ones that could and possibly would lead the others.
But if they came for him up here, if it’s a fight they wanted, then it would be a fight he’d give them. Maybe they’d get him in the end, but he wouldn’t make it easy for them.
Johnny was wearing Vietnam-issue tiger stripe camouflage (pants and shirt), waterproof nylon jungle boots, and a black bandanna. It was the way he’d dressed in the war. And when this happened—like he knew it would eventually—he suited up and got ready.
Funny thing was, everyone in Cut River thought he was out of his head, some stoned-out, brain dead, shell-shocked Vietnam vet who lived in a tarpaper shack outside town at the edge of the marshes. Maybe they were right, he often thought. But the real funny thing, the ironic thing, was that he was the only one who knew what was happening here.
Wasn’t that poetic justice?
After the war, he returned home in ’73, worked a variety of jobs—factories, mills, auto garages, even yard work and construction—but found, like a lot of vets, that he couldn’t hold them. The war was too fresh, the atrocities too close for him to simply shift gears from a world of bloody survival and attrition to one of small-town monotony, hypocritical morals and value judgments. There’d been bar fights, petty crime, then the real thing when he’d hooked up with a local motorcycle gang, now defunct. It had all led to jail, the V.A. hospital, and the psycho ward at the state hospital. Nowhere good.
In the end, Johnny was only glad that he had no family to witness the self-destructive wreck he indeed became.