A shadow stepped out of a pocket of blackness hugging the shelter itself.
A girl. A girl of maybe seven or eight in a white burial dress gone gray and ragged. She smiled at me with a flat, inhuman evil. Rats or maybe dogs had chewed the meat away from the left side of her face. There was nothing there now but sculpted gray muscle and ligament shrouding gleaming white bone. The wind blew her hair around in a wild halo. She looked up at me with a single eye that was yellow and glossy like an unfertilized egg. “Hey, mister,” she said in a scraping voice. “You wanna fuck?” Then she lifted her dress, exposing a hairless corpse-white vulva of ghost-flesh that was puckering with maggots.
I think I might have screamed.
Or maybe it was Shipman doing the screaming. The Wormboys and Wormgirls had found him, ringed him like starving dogs. They came from every direction and out there in the parking lot, Shippy looked like a lone swimmer in a moonlit choppy sea surrounded by sharks. He started this way, then that, finally fell to his knees and started praying in a high, whining voice.
The dead.
It wasn’t enough to wander the gutted landscape anymore searching for meat. In the two years since they’d started rising, they’d gotten clever, imaginative, and tribal. Their faces were scarred from ritualistic cutting and carving so they resembled fetish masks. Noses had rotted into hollows or been sliced clean, flesh gouged in half-moons or jagged triangles, tongues slit so they were forked, lips peeled free so gums and teeth jutted obscenely. Many had shaved heads, some peeled right down to the raw bone beneath, and others wore dangling scalp-locks greased with human fat and braided with the tiny bones of children.
Every Wormboy tribe had its own look, you might say.
The little girl was ready to leap at me and I can’t say that I would’ve gotten clear of her. Luckily, Earl stepped out with his sawed-off twelve-gauge pump. “Smile for the camera, honey,” he said.
The girl bared her teeth like a wolf moving in for the kill.
Saliva hung from her shriveled graying lips.
Earl gave her a round that splashed what was left of her face off the skull beneath. Brains, meat, and bloody mucilage splattered against the wall of the shelter and she went down in loose-limbed heap.
“C’mon!” he called to me.
The Wormboys had Shipman and he was howling like an animal being put to death. They weren’t eating him or even chopping him into shanks with their machetes, they were just biting him. One after the other, biting and nipping, sinking in their teeth and making him suffer.
A dead woman stepped out and smiled at me.
At least, I think she was smiling.
Her face was a writhing mass of larval action, worms roiling in her eye sockets. She was naked except for a purse that she carried for some reason, and her skin was throbbing and undulant from what was feeding upon it. She held a hand out to me that was knotty and scabrous, the nails black and thorny like those of a beast. She would have gutted me cleanly with them, gutted me and stuffed herself with my entrails while I was still alive if Earl hadn’t put her down.
“How’s about you and me and baby makes three?” she said in a hollow voice.
The dead often say such nonsensical things, re-spooled, replayed bits of their lives, I suppose. I once had a Wormgirl dressed in the filthy cerements of a Burger King uniform ask me if I wanted cheese on my Whopper right before she tried to take my head off with an axe.
Earl killed the woman, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the shelter. I was shaking. I was nauseous. I was disappointed in myself because I’d frozen up out there. Mostly, I suppose, I was in shock. I stumbled blindly back to the table and Murph giggled as Maria poured bourbon into me and Shacks put a cigarette in my mouth even though I hadn’t smoked in years.
“Nice going, soldier boy,” Murph said.
I ignored him. It was easy. “Thanks,” I said to Earl.
He grunted. “Need you for the lottery, don’t we?”
Then Doc was standing there, smiling thinly down at me and shaking his head with the quiet, patient shame a man feels for a son who has brought disgrace upon him once again. “Now that wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Tommy?” he said.
“I…I tried to stop him. I tried to save him.”
“Fucking moron,” Murph tittered.
“Shut the hell up!” Maria shouted at him. Maria came from Puerto Rico when she was a child and when her Latin temper got boiling, one look from those smoldering dark eyes of hers could peel paint from a door.
“Mr. Shipman was a loose cannon,” Doc said. “He simply couldn’t adapt. I was expecting him to do something like this. But I was expecting better from you, Tommy. You were a soldier. You know better than to go out alone and unarmed at night.”
And he was right: I did.
The Wormboys were active day or night, true, but at night they were just a little deadlier, a little more insidious. They became crafty, wicked, using the shadows as camouflage. I’m not sure if they were technically nocturnal, but they were nasty by daylight and absolute hell after dark. I remember a guy once told me that when they reanimated, most retained a rudimentary intellect while some were unnaturally cunning, but all were driven by predatory instinctual drives. And like any beast of prey, they made the darkness their own.
I sat there wilting under Doc’s gaze, but I wasn’t going to give in. Maybe my tactics weren’t so good, but my heart was in the right place. “I couldn’t let him just…I mean, I couldn’t let those things slaughter him.”
Doc shook his head. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. You haven’t been with us long enough. It takes time. Sacrifice is simply a way of life here.”
“The lottery,” I said.
“Yes, that’s part of it.”
I had been in the shelter for two months. I had never played the lottery before or marched the “winners” out into the killing fields to be trussed up for sacrifice. The idea of that sickened me.
“You can’t do it, Doc. You can’t hand your own people over to those fucking monsters.”
“I have to.”
I slammed a hand on the table. “It’s sick! It’s cold blooded! You can’t do it! You just can’t do it!”
“It has to be done, Tommy.”
Maria was holding my hand and Shacks was patting my back, making me part of them, I guess. But I didn’t want to be part of…of that. “Goddammit, Doc. We can fight. We have guns. We can fight.”
“Thirty-seven of us against thousands of them?” He shook his head again. “No, it would be a massacre. It would be the Little Big Horn all over again. We must survive by any means necessary. At whatever cost. It is our only reason for existing now.”
Thousands of them. I didn’t doubt that…but how could an offering of six every so many months keep thousands full and happy? I put that to Doc.
“It’s a symbolic offering, Tommy. That’s all. Dragna lets us live as long as we choose who dies. It’s simple as that.”
“Dragna’s a fucking monster,” was all I could say. “And so are you.”
Doc just smiled and left the room, calmly as ever, and I sat there, something running hot inside me. “He’s a fucking animal,” I said, not really meaning it, but meaning it all the same. “How can he do it? How can he?”
“He does what he has to do,” Shacks said.
Murph chuckled. “That’s life in the big city, Tommy. Get used to it. Get used to watching your friends die.”
I just shook my head, trying to clear the stink of that Wormgirl from my mind. “But Doc…he’s so…so cold about it.”
“Do you think so?” Maria said. “Well, he doesn’t ask anything of us he doesn’t ask of himself.”
“Really?” I said, the sarcasm so thick in my voice you could have caulked a window with it.
She nodded. “Yes. Tomorrow it might be you or me, Tommy, but last year, last year before you arrived…it was his wife. She won the lottery.”
“And he marched her out?”
“Damn straight he did,” Shacks said, his eyes shiny and wet. “I was there. I saw it. He marched her out and tied her to the post. And when they came to take her, he pretended he couldn’t hear her screaming.”