Platz never screamed; he was way beyond that.
And then flashlight beams were flickering and bobbing, men were shouting and swearing, weapons discharging.
Because they were all waking up.
Sheets were sliding from ravaged faces and licking black tongues. Bloated hands reached out, teeth gnashed together.
The TAC unit was shooting and screaming for back-up, but it was simply too late.
A door slammed open on the far side of the room.
Shapes, forms, figures…they came hobbling through the doorway with a putrescent grave stench. The strangers were rotting and crumbling, sporting beards of mold and cobwebbed faces. Some lacked limbs and others lacked faces, but they were united for a single purpose and as Clark and the others watched, it all became horribly clear what that was.
His people started screaming and shrieking, drawing guns and trying to run, shooting and shooting, and on came their killers. He saw Tuchman smash the butt of his machine pistol into one decayed face and put two rounds into another. But like swatted mosquitoes, the dead were instantly replaced by others. Tuchman fought and kept fighting until a fleshless face darted in and tore out the soft meat of his throat. And then they had him and he disappeared in a noisome sea of fungus-covered bone and chattering, ripping teeth.
Clark could hear Silva shouting, demanding to know what was happening.
But there was no time to tell him.
Clark emptied his Colt carbine into a wall of deadwood faces, then fished a 9mm Steyr auto from his vest and fired on a gray and withered stickwoman who literally disintegrated as if she were made of dehydrated clay. And then skeletal fingers were on him and he was thrown to the ground. He saw Seaver-his face a drooling, demented mask-start spraying down anything that moved with his submachine gun.
And on it went, bullets ripping through the air and mouths screaming and everywhere the stink of cordite and violated tombs. It became a nightmare shadow-show of darting figures and slashing teeth, muzzle flashes and clutching fungous fingers, atrocities captured in the strobing flashlights. Yellow-eyed faces with flesh hanging in loops and mouths vomiting froths of black putrescent slime.
Clark fought bravely through that barrage of gnarled hands and chomping teeth, saw his men go down in bloody seas, saw them unzipped and eviscerated and divided by thrashing fingers and tearing red mouths. The dead yanked out ribbons of greasy entrails and fought like starving dogs over them, biting and chewing and sucking and slurping.
And then something looped around Clark’s throat and snapped tight like a garrote, collapsing his windpipe as lewd mouths bit into his legs and crotch and belly. But all he was really aware of was his mind falling into a coveting blackness as that cord strangled him.
Finally, ultimately, he went down.
Not knowing that a woman dead some three weeks had strangled him with a loop of her own viscera.
*
As the zombie woman woke up and stabbed a shard of glass into Platz’s soft white throat, Green Team, waiting up on the roof, got the word. They crashed through the skylights, rappelling down on ropes into that claustrophobic blackness. They climbed out of their harnesses and regrouped, prepared to deploy.
Oliverez was in charge. He said, “All right, don’t bother with the NV goggles. We need all the lights we can get. Red Team and Blue Team have made contact with unfriendlies, but they’re not armed.”
“At least not yet,” Rice said.
Johnson and Turner slid tactical goggles over their eyes, checked their weapons quickly, flexed their hands in fingerless gloves. Oliverez was going on about what Silva had said, the chatter from Red and Blue that he’d monitored.
“I don’t know what kind of clusterfuck this is, but be ready.”
They moved out, Rice taking point, his big Remington 12-gauge police shotgun held out before him. The flashlight attached to the barrel cut through that roiling tenebrous darkness, showing everyone an empty corridor.
They slipped single-file down a set of iron steps and came into another corridor which split off ahead to the right and left. They could hear the other TAC units crying out, opening up with their weapons, calling out for back-up…but Green Team did not rush to their aid. They had orders to proceed with extreme caution and they followed them.
They came to the T in the corridor and Rice spotted a form shambling in their direction. At first he thought the guy was drunk, but as he closed in, Rice saw he was dead. His face had been blasted down to meat and bone like it had been used for target practice and he was carrying what looked to be coils of linked sausages.
“His fucking intestines,” Johnson said.
The man kept coming despite being told to get on the floor and Oliverez said, almost too calmly, “Rice? Put that peckerwood down.”
Rice closed the gap between them, got a real good look at the man’s face…what there was of it. He had no eyes, no nose to speak of, his face hanging from the bone beneath in bloody tethers.
“Hey,” the mutilated man said in congested voice like his throat was full of wet leaves. “My sister’s going to love your ass…you see if she don’t…”
Rice said, “Sonofabitch,” and gave him a load of buckshot at point blank range.
The impact knocked the zombie over, nearly split him in half. But instead of lying down and waiting for a box and grave, he sat back up. His ragged shirt was smoking from contact burns, flames climbing up his collar. His guts were gone now, as was one of his hands. There was a gaping black hole in his abdomen and you could see right through it. Plumes of smoke were wafting from it.
The air was redolent with a stink of incinerated meat.
Rice made a funny, strangled sound and blew the dead man’s head to shards of bone that tinkled down the hallway like broken crockery. He fell over, his face missing from the nasal cavity on up. His jaws were still there, though, and they were snapping open and shut in rapid succession like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.
“Move out,” Oliverez said, not wanting the men to pause long enough to let any of this insanity sink in. Because if it did, they were done.
He led on to the left-the gunshots echoing louder from that direction-and the others fell in behind him. They came to an open door and saw candlelight flickering in there, throwing weird hopping shadows and bathing everything in a dirty orange light.
He came low through the doorway and saw a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed in there, the candle next to her on a little nightstand. She was humming. Utterly naked, she rocked back and forth, back and forth.
“Lady…” Oliverez managed.
She looked up at him, fixing him with a malignant leer…with her right eye, that was, because the left was just a blackened socket from which fed a moist pelt of yellow-green fungus that covered the left side of her face like a caul. She kept humming and rocking, flaking lips pulling back from narrow discolored teeth.
And it was bad, certainly.
But it wasn’t what made Oliverez’s stomach clamp tight like a vise.
What did that was what the woman was holding…an infant. It was gray and bloated and putrefied, like something pulled from a lake. It was sucking on her left breast with a sloshing, repulsive sound. The woman’s other breast was also moving, but that was because of the pockets of larva feasting within.
Then the infant pulled away from that gray nipple, looked over at the TAC unit and made a gurgling sound. Maggots were wriggling free of the woman’s tit and this is what the baby had been feeding on. Its face was distorted…bulging and sunken and eyeless, great holes torn in it and through them you could see the worms boiling within.