Hookley screeched and brought the stock of the carbine down in a powerful arc. It struck that bobbing skull with the sound of damp, rotting wood splitting. The puckered forehead shattered, the cranium collapsed and within was a nest of feeding maggots.
Hookley, cackling insanely now, brought the stock down again and again. And that graveyard face came apart like a moldy house of cards and the body stumbled blindly past him and fell forward stiffly.
Hookley fought through two or three others, could hear someone making a deranged, wet shrieking sound, but he never guessed it was himself. He fell to his knees, drooling and pissing himself, and then he saw his executioner.
A woman-or something that had once been one-slithered forward with a slime trail of moist soil. She had no legs, no nothing beneath the waist, just a few moth-eaten rags that might have been flesh and ligament once. She propelled herself like a slug, grinning with a moldering flap of face. The empty holes of her eyes found Hookley and the gray mouth smiled, the pitted stumps of teeth gnashed and chomped.
But Hookley was beyond it.
He held himself, rocking, discordant laughter belching from his throat as the woman swam in, that worm-holed face oozing slime and falling into itself like a rotting Jack-o’-Lantern.
And then he was wrapped in a blanket of putrefaction, those jagged teeth opening his belly and biting down on what they found there.
Weston was squeezed into a corner just beyond the shelves.
The room was on fire now. Maybe from stray rounds or a tossed incendiary grenade. It didn’t matter. Flames were licking up the shelving, throwing a wavering, surreal illumination.
It was light to die by.
A ring of zombies was pressing in closer, their threadbare hides punched with smoking bullet holes. Ravenous and ruined, they marched forward with skeletal fingers outstretched. Weston watched them come and wished he’d saved one round to use on himself.
The cadaverous sea parted and Paul Henry Dade stepped forward, his face hanging in fluttering tatters, gouts of black blood drooling from his lips in streamers.
Weston let that atrocity get in close, then he pulled his knife and sank it into Dade’s belly, slitting him to the throat. A tide of viscous ichor drained from the wound like puss from a festering boil. It splashed over Weston and he saw it swam with worms.
Then Dade’s cold hands were on his shoulders, tightening with a grave rictus. Weston cried out as he felt his bones snap, as his mind released itself in a whimpering tirade.
Dade was trying to tell him something, but all that came out was a bubbling, slopping sound, his crypt-breath sour and sweet and sickening.
Dade split Weston lengthwise like a sausage and fed on the hot, salty bounty within. He chewed and tore and ripped and sucked. And much later, painted red with blood, stepped away and held Weston’s bloody head high. The agent’s viscera decorated the shelves like Christmas garland. He was divided and scattered and mutilated, his bones broken open and leeched of marrow and stacked in a tidy heap on the floor.
And all was silent then, save for the crackling of the fire and the sound of bones being gnawed and bowels being nibbled. The floor was a bloody, stinking stew of flesh and meat. Some of it was still, but much of it moved and pulsed and hungered, unable to die as such.
*
Rice of Green Team was not dead.
Hell, no.
He was bitten and clawed, bruised and bleeding, but surely not dead. Problem was, he was mostly fucked and knew it. His helmet was gone, his assault shotgun history now. He’d used every last round putting down the mutiny of the dead hands, tossing the Remington when the hands were replaced by zombies that flooded down the corridor.
He’d been hiding ever since.
He did not know if anybody else was alive.
Right then, he didn’t really care. All he cared about was a quick way out. He was hiding in a closet with a Colt 9mm handgun clenched tight in his fists, trying to remember the TAC leader, Weston, going over the map of the compound that was tacked to the wall. Problem was, the map was World War II vintage and there had been a lot of remodeling since. Stairways were gone. Hallways sealed up. Walls knocked down. So, yeah, Rice was trying to think his way out, but it didn’t look good.
He hadn’t heard any gunfire for awhile now, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. He could smell the death in the compound…like pressing your face into roadkill, filling your nostrils with that rank green smell and swallowing it down in reeking rivers. He could also smell the cordite and something like wood smoke, which told him the complex was burning.
But who lit it up?
The zombies? The FBI? Helicopters buzzed the roof from time to time and loudspeakers were broadcasting muffled appeals for Dade’s people to surrender.
And that was pretty funny when you thought about it.
Rice thought: They ain’t gonna surrender unless you bring a hearse.
He sat stiffly in the darkness. He had a small tactical flashlight and his Colt nine, that was about it. But maybe he could just wait this out, maybe Footsteps.
Something like them.
A lumbering, heavy sound. Like a bull was coming down the hallway, smashing into the walls, grunting and puffing. It passed by the door, then paused and Rice was certain it was sniffing, making a wet snorting sound.
The doorknob jiggled.
Jiggled again.
Whatever was out there stank like an open grave and it was strong, God, very strong, because it was yanking on the door now, rattling it on its frame. There was a groaning, crashing sound and the door was ripped from its hinges in a rain of wood splinters.
Rice made a choking sound in his throat and put the flashlight beam on it. But what was he seeing? A man…or something like one, immense and distended…white and black, swollen and mildewed and rancid. It was grotesquely bloated with gases, its eye sockets fluid with maggots and yellow bile.
Rice emptied the Colt into it and it took hold of him, dragged him down the hallway.
It opened an iron door and tossed him through, slamming it shut behind him.
Rice had the flashlight, but he didn’t dare turn it on.
Because he wasn’t alone in there. He could smell the others, hear them chewing and sucking and licking. Something damp brushed his arm, something like a tongue licked the back of his neck.
He turned on the light.
Yes, they were all around him, the zombies. Disfigured, grotesque, rotted to mush. Some were missing limbs and others looked like they’d been burned. One of them had a meat cleaver instead of a hand and another-a woman-was pregnant, or had been at the hour of her death. Her blue-black belly was voluminous and heaving, split wide open. There was something like a wormy fetus coming out, pulling itself out in a wash of noisome jelly, a crawling gray carrion.
It splashed to the floor, inching itself forward like a leech, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. The others dropped the limbs they’d been chewing on and watched what was about to happen. Grinned with disfigured faces like raw beef.
Long before that undulating, boneless thing touched him, Rice had gone raving mad.
*
Turner was the last TAC member alive.
He crawled through a slick of blood, his eyes wide and staring, his jaws clamped tight. He still had his Colt tactical carbine, but he was down to his last magazine. On hands and knees, he peered through a doorway, crab-crawled over there, breathing hard, his face beaded with sweat.