He took one nipple in his mouth, licking and tasting it and feeling a strange sort of warmth spreading beneath the skin. And it was exciting and liberating and, dear God, she had been right. In a situation like this, what better thing could a man and woman do for one another?
Turner pushed her onto her back and spread her legs. She hooked her ankles behind his back and guided him in, positioned him properly. But she wouldn’t let him enter her. She gripped the globes of his ass, teased his cock with her moist sex and then, staring into his eyes with a voracious appetite, she thrust him into her with a delicious force and And Turner screamed.
Screamed as his penis was impaled on something in there, ripped and gouged and slit. He tried to pull out, to push off her, but her legs were wrapped around him and she clung to him tenaciously. He saw the blossom of blood at their hips, saw that raging demented hunger in her eyes.
Like the others, just like the others.
Thrashing together, trying to fight and only succeeding in wounding himself further, Turner ignored the white-hot blades of pain and felt his fingers brush the stock of his Colt carbine.
She saw him bring up the weapon and fixed him with a raw, unflinching hatred. Her eyes oozed filth like infected sores. Turner brought the stock down on her face again and again and again until it split open like a knife-cut, until the skull beneath cracked open and what was inside, was exposed. Worms. Knotted, squirming lengths of blood-red worms moving in and out of her brain, slipping now from her eye sockets.
Turner fell off her, his penis hanging in shreds now, blood running down his legs and pooling at his hips. Shards of razors were still embedded in it. The woman had stuffed herself with them. Turner crashed to the floor and closed his eyes against the agony, the defilement.
He did not open them again.
*
Now that Silva was taken away in an ambulance, heavily-medicated because it was the only way to get him to stop laughing at the wonderful joke he kept trying to share with the others, Runyon was in charge.
He did not want to be in charge.
He had been in the comm van when the truth was told first by Red and Blue Teams, then by Green.
Runyon did not want to believe it, felt himself slowly going mad, but given the fact that the TAC units had not been heard from in nearly thirty minutes now, he had no choice.
Something had happened in the compound.
Whatever it had been, it was bad enough to take down twelve highly-trained, highly-motivated men. Take them down and silence them. And Runyon had a feeling, it was far worse than mere cultists.
So Runyon rallied his troops-two back-up TAC units, some thirty sheriff’s deputies and state troopers, and an infantry platoon from a local National Guard base. Armed, pissed-off, and scared, they moved in formation at the compound. Armored vehicles knocked the barbwire fences down and Runyon’s army followed in their wake.
The siege was about to begin.
And it was about that time, that the zombies started coming out of the compound. Zombies led by members of TAC units Red, Green, and Blue that still had their limbs. The living dead poured from the diseased carcass of the compound like worms out of pork.
And the real battle began.
EULOGY OF THE STRAW-WITCH
It was in Boone County, Nebraska, that Strand first heard tell of Missy Crow, the old straw-witch what could call the dead up out of their graves. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that Mama Lucille had passed of the consumption not two days before, Strand probably wouldn’t have paid such a tale any mind.
He never had before.
Boone County was hot as hell’s own skillet in the summer and cold, white, and bitter from December to first thaw. And maybe those extremes did something to people there. Boiled their brains to mash and made ‘em start thinking funny things. Things they might be ashamed of by day.
But at night it was different.
The wind would come moaning across the plains without much more than a few silos or a cottonwood thicket to stop it. The corn would rustle with the sound of hollow breathing and the shadows would creep and whisper. And if you listened to the wind speak, you might hear scraping voices telling you things you did not want to know or hear a low malevolent howling from the dry ravine. These things worked a dark alchemy on the soul and, soon enough, gathered in bunkhouses and at firesides, tales were told of things that lived that should have been buried and things that walked that should have crept. Yarns would be swapped of deserted farmhouses and the pale loathsome things that crawled in their dank cellars or stared out from the rotting hay of crumbling barns with peeled, yellow eyes.
And sometimes, you just might hear about Missy Crow, the straw-witch, and the things she could do and those she would never attempt, which were few. Such stories might get you to thinking impure thoughts and particularly if you’d just buried your mother two days before.
*
That’s how it was with Strand.
At the Broken Arrow Saloon, well into his cups, grief punching a hole in his belly like an awl, he listened to a skinner name of Lester Koats and heard all he needed about the old straw-witch and her wicked ways.
“Missy Crow were born of straw-devil and witch-wife,” Lester said, his boozy breath hot and sour. “She can call the dead up out of their graves with a song and whistle demons to her hearthside like a hound brought to heel. She talks with ghosts and commands vile spirits and has herself rode through the holes between the stars themselves with evil shadows that feed on men’s souls.”
Lester kept on with the tale-spinning until Sheriff Bolan came over and broke the whole thing up, letting Lester see the hard gleam in his eye and the nickel-plated Army. 44’s that rode his hips. Lester took the hint and disappeared out the batwings like a bad stink.
Bolan put one callused, thick-fingered hand on Strand’s arm, said, “You don’t want to be listening to that fool nonsense, son. Stump-water hag like Missy Crow can only bring you six inches closer to hell. So do yourself a favor, just go on home and mourn your mama proper.”
Strand told Bolan that he would do just that, yes sir, straight away.
But he had no intention. Grief can be an immense and stark machine. And once caught in the terrible grinding of its gears, your sense of perspective can be worn smooth as those teeth bite into you and empty you.
When he got home, he told Eileen his intentions.
“But that’s…that’s blasphemy, Luke,” she said. “It’s unholy, it’s witchcraft! You can’t be a party to that! The dead have to stay dead…it’s not natural to bring them back.”
But Strand did not listen. He could not explain what fever burned in his brain or how since his mother’s death there was no shine left in his soul, only a terrible dark graininess.
So he went up to the Oak Grove Burial Ground with a shovel and exhumed Mama Lucille with that big old harvest moon grinning high above like something hungry.
And maybe that was an omen.
*
It took three days of hard riding to find the straw-witch.
Three days in which a hot wind of crematoriums blew across those range grasses and buzzards circled in a sky the color of dead bone. Scarecrows creaked in rustling corn patches, smiling and pointing the way, always pointing the way. Strand rode alone through that lonesome far country, swatting at flies and mopping sweat from his sunburned brow. He searched every dusty corner of Boone County. And in the wagon, Mama Lucille was still stitched in her linen shroud, resting silently in the crate which had brought her grandfather clock some years before, packed in dry ice so she would not turn.
“Don’t you be worrying none, Mama,” Strand would tell that soundless box at the evening’s fire as the wind walked and talked. “I’ll get you fixed up proper, see if I don’t. We gonna find that straw-witch. Maybe tomorrow.”