The sun was behind her.
Her shadow was cast over the walk as was that of the oak. She could see its twisting limbs and threading branches…and in them, hunched-over shadows like gargoyles.
Something hit her in the back of the head.
She heard a high chittering sound.
She turned and something hit her in the face.
Something wet and crawling and stinking.
She clawed it away with her fingers…bloody meat that crawled with bloated white grave maggots. Gagging, she tossed it away, the stink of putrescence putting her down to her knees.
With a gore-streaked face she stared up into the tree.
She saw a grinning, demonic visage staring down at her. It snapped its teeth at her.
Emma screamed.
*
Through the gunport slit in the living room wall, Gus watched his wife walk away. She was making a big mistake and he was angry that she did not know it. Angry that a bright woman like that did not realize the fix they were in.
And after all he had done for her.
Betrayal.
He didn’t need the Army.
He didn’t need Fort Kendrix.
Everything he needed was here in the shelter where he was master and commander.
He lit a cigarette. It was stale but he didn’t even notice anymore. He blew smoke out through his nose and scratched at the stubble on his chin. Automatically, obsessively, his hands roamed his body making a quick inventory:. 45 Smith in the holster-check; K-Bar fighting knife in its sheath-check; extra magazine for the What the hell is she doing?
Emma had stopped on the walk. She had dropped her bags. She made a gagging sound, digging something from the back of her head that was tangled in her hair.
Gus grabbed his M-14 sniper rifle and ran to the door.
He threw the bolts and was outside in seconds.
Emma was sitting there on her ass as something dropped out of the tree not five feet from her.
The thing saw him, hissed, and charged in his direction.
Gus just stood there, shocked at what he was seeing.
A baboon.
A baboon of all crazy fucked-up things: thick-bodied, compact, covered in a down of shaggy brown fur. Its eyes were shining a tarnished silver like dirty nickels, huge jaws wide open, fangs bared. It left a trail of slime in its wake.
There were huge ulcers eaten through its skin.
You could see its bones.
Zombie.
When it was ten feet away, Gus automatically shouldered the M-14 and fired just as he’d been taught at Parris Island so many years before. He popped the ape in the left eye socket with a. 308 round that blew its skull apart in a spray of gray-pink mucilage and sent its corpse tumbling through the grass. A jelly of worms bubbled from its ruined head.
“EMMA!” he called out. “EMMA! RUN!”
Two more baboons dropped from the trees, then a third and a fourth. There had to be a dozen more up in the branches. They were shrieking and growling, absolutely enraged.
Gus heard a scratching, scrambling sound and turned. Two more were up on the roof. They were leaping from the trees onto the top of the house.
He dropped one that was five feet from him, pivoted, and knocked another off the roof that had only one arm.
He could hear Emma screaming.
The baboons were coming at him from every direction.
They looked like the remains of test animals that had been slit and bisected, poked and peeled and drained: grave-waste. He saw one lacking legs that swung its torso forward with its arms and others that seemed to be missing sections of flesh as if they’d been biopsied.
They all had huge holes eaten through them, bones jutting from their maggoty hides, meatflies rising from them in clouds. Baboon faces were skinned to pink meat or gray muscle, some were chewed to the bone by carrion beetles.
He dropped two more and then there was no room to shoot as they nipped at him, raking his legs with sharp skeletal fingers. He used his rifle like a club, swinging it, bashing in heads and smashing snarling faces to pulp until he was sprayed with rancid gouts of brown and red fluids.
The baboons circled him, gnashing their teeth.
He waited, the M-14 encrusted with gore and dripping a foul corpse slime.
He knew Emma was out there, but he didn’t dare look for her. He couldn’t even hear her now over the wailing and yipping sounds of the baboons.
Claws laid his knees open as he smashed the butt of the gun into a baboon face that was threaded with a filigree of mildew.
Then one of them bit into his ankle.
Another vaulted forward and bit into his left hand.
Crying out, he dropped the rifle, pulling the Smith. 45 with his good hand.
A big baboon with a reddish-brown pelt and a pronounced white mane charged in at him, scattering the others. It had no eyes. The flesh was eaten away from its face revealing a cadaverous simian skull, jaws yawned wide to expose gleaming yellow upper and lower canines, each long and sharp enough to lay an artery open.
But what Gus noticed mostly was that its belly and chest had been completely shaven, a Y-shaped incision running from crotch to shoulders.
Autopsied. This thing had been autopsied.
Bleeding and hurting, Gus faced off with it while the others formed a tight and cohesive circle around them.
“EMMA!” he shouted. “GODDAMMIT, EMMA!”
The beast kept snapping its teeth at him, making a shrill staccato whooping noise.
Gus put three bullets into it and all that did was piss it off.
It charged and so did the others. The baboons hit him from every side and he felt himself go down under a sea of maggoty hides.
*
Emma, of course, saw Gus charge out of the house with his rifle, heard him call to her, but she was otherwise occupied.
The baboon in the tree above her was amused.
It was making that weird chittering sound that was chitinous and strident.
Staring up at it, Emma knew instinctively it was a female as were the others in the higher branches. She knew this just as she knew the males had gone after Gus.
Wiping slop from her face, she did not dare move.
The baboon stared at her with glassy, fixed eyes, grinning that toothy clownlike grin that made it look very much like some deranged pygmy looking for meat to skewer. There was some morbid growth like a grave fungus that consumed most of the left quadrant of if its face and was creeping in on the right. It seemed to be moving.
Emma heard Gus cry out.
She felt his voice slide through her heart like a needle.
He was shooting.
The baboon in the tree showed its teeth, letting out a piercing reverberating cry that was chilling and deranged and sounded very much like wild hysterical laughter.
It threw something at her that splatted on the walk. Meat. Greening meat threaded with corpse worms. It made that laughing sound again when it saw or sensed the revulsion coming from her. Then it slid its black leathery fingers into a gaping bloodless wound at its belly and pulled out more rotten tissue and threw it at her.
Emma ducked away.
The baboon laughed.
Her heart thumping in her chest, she stared at the horror with its greasy, nappy fur and yellow fangs and carrion eyes. Her terror pleased it, made it grin with an idiotic bestial splendor. And this more than anything not only disgusted her, it offended her.
It pissed her off.
It made Emma get to her feet, the ancestral apex predator within rising for battle.
The baboon in the tree stopped cackling now, it made a threatening almost territorial barking that got all the other females worked up. They all started screeching and baring their fangs, beating and scratching at themselves, pulling out clods of fur and necrotic tissue, throwing it like monkeys throwing shit.
Emma was pelted with the stuff.
She heard shooting, fighting, the constant screeching of the baboons.