I fell away from her and Maria pulled me back.
There was a moist smacking sound and a hole opened in her face that must have been a mouth, strings of tissue webbing the lips together. Her tongue was a bloated flap of maggots. When she spoke it sounded like her mouth was full of warm gruel. But as bad as that was, what she said was somehow worse: “Going…to the chapel…and I’m…going to get…marrrieeeeed.” And that barely even left her mouth in her slopping, regurgitive voice when Ape opened up on her with his twelve-gauge pump, firing not only out of fear but pure, unreasoning disgust.
He blew holes in her big enough to pass your arm through. Flesh that had the consistency of gelatin blew off her, revealing rungs of rib, a pelvic wing, a ladder of spinal vertebrae. He kept pumping and shooting and she made a sort of globby, mewling sound as she came apart in a cyclone of meat and black blood, gray ooze and suppurating tissue like rice pudding, leaking piss and shit and yolky egg-like masses of tangled red graveworms. Before she went down into a seething mass of carrion and plumes of corpse-gas, something fell from between her legs and splashed to the floor.
I saw it.
We all did.
A rubbery doll-like form…a cross between a human infant and a bloated white coffin-worm. It squirmed free of the slime and ichor. It looked up at me with a face like a glistening grub, reaching out with yellow-green gelid fingers.
That’s what I saw right before Ape blew it in half and then in thirds and then I could not be certain I wasn’t looking at a colony of undulant maggots.
The woman hit the floor in a splattering of meat and fluid and a flyblown, acrid stink that nearly reamed my nose out.
But we were hardly done.
The above nightmare probably only lasted a minute or two, but the entire time the door was open to the night and what waited out there. They were crowded outside the door by then: graying, gibbering ghost faces-dozens of them-that looked less like dead humans than the carven ritualistic masks of Chinese festival demons. Another sect of the undead with their own look: I saw bald, mottled heads, viscid yellow-silver eyes sitting in carved, up-tilted pits, noses fallen into skullish hollows, faces elaborately cut and scarified into braided, convoluting patterns, the corners of mouths slit up to cheekbones…all of it creating the gruesome effect of grinning death fetishes.
These were Wormgirl’s boyfriends, her suitors and lovers, maybe.
Then Ape kicked the door shut and without even thinking, I was throwing locks and muttering nonsensical prayers under my breath.
Then we stood around in the remains of Wormgirl and her progeny, seeped to the skin in a noisome membrane of rot. We had averted disaster…but just barely.
8
Once we had shoveled out the remains of our visitor and incinerated them, scrubbed down the entry with caustic antiseptics, and disposed of Earl’s corpse, we were faced with a new problem. Murph had been number six in the lottery and that meant we had to play again. We had to go through that insanity again scarcely a day later. Usually, there was a month and sometimes three, I was told, but here we were again, gearing up to play Doc’s sadistic little game and learn all about the creepy-crawly things that lived inside each other’s heads.
There was nothing quite like the lottery to bring them slithering out.
Maria and Shacks were probably the only two that were on my side, ready to mount an armed insurrection at my say so. But I wasn’t saying so. What I didn’t want here was some violent purge that would not only destroy Doc’s half-assed utopian society but leave a trail of bodies. These people had to simply refuse to play. I was pretty sure that Ape and Sonny and Conroy, Doc’s would-be goons, would stand with us if it came to that. They were not evil men any more than the rest of us. They were scared, is all. They were following Doc because Doc had a plan and they had spent their lives as good little soldiers doing what they were told. None of them were particularly well-practiced in the smarts department.
But like I said, I didn’t want bloodshed.
And if I swung them my way…what then? I had no plan other than a half-baked possibly suicidal idea of us loading up in the trucks and buses outside and making a run up for Canada. I had a feeling the Wormboys and Wormgirls and all the wriggling, drooling Wormkids wouldn’t do real well in sub-zero temperatures when their limbs started locking up.
I was your basic anarchist in that I wanted to destroy the government but once everything lay in ruin I had no idea what to do next.
So lacking a cohesive plan we went about business as usual.
We played the lottery.
9
Again, the same scene: a group of shifty-eyed, borderline neurotic people packed into the dining hall, whispering, praying, chain-smoking, or just staring into space with a steely silence that spoke volumes. You could smell the stale sweat, the feverish anxiety, a fear that was bright and hot coming off every one of them and I had to wonder if that’s what it smelled like in those packed cattle cars bound for places like Treblinka and Sobibor during World War II. There was very little talking. Now and then a peal of almost hysterical laughter that was sharp as a pin would break out amongst the condemned.
Because we were condemned, you know.
Each and every one of us who stayed and played that awful fucking game were most definitely condemned. It was only a matter of when sentence would be passed.
Before we filed in there, Shacks pulled me aside and said, “I keep thinking about the things you’re saying, Tommy…I mean, really thinking about them. Maybe I never did before. Maybe I never wanted to. But…but to be tied up out there, alive, while those things feed on you…Jesus.”
And that’s exactly what needed to happen: every one these goddamn scared rabbits in Doc’s personal warren needed to do some thinking. Some real thinking. They just couldn’t go on like this, hiding behind a crumbling wall of denial that it would never happen to them while their odds dwindled and dwindled.
I sat by Maria and stared at Doc. “Well, let’s get going, Doc. Let’s find out whose ass is raw meat.”
“ Tommy-”
“ Why don’t you shut up?” Sonny said.
“ You think they start with your throat or your balls?” I asked him. “Which do they bite into first?”
Ape glared at me with full menace and I smiled at him. “You better cold-cock me, asshole, because I won’t shut up. But don’t damage me…Dragna likes his cold cuts fresh and chewy.”
An elderly woman named Peggy began to sob and her husband made a low wailing sound that put chills up everyone’s spine: it was the sound of bitter, broken finality, of life accepting death and it was eerie.
“ Please everyone,” Doc said. He cast me a look that tried unbelievably hard to be tolerant and sage, but it was wearing thin and Doc was getting very fucking sick of me and my mouth. I think as far as he was concerned, I was guilty of treason and sedition. He was probably hoping that I’d draw the X and he’d be rid of me.
The cigar box made the rounds.
People either tore them open with a mad, suicidal glee or held them out in trembling fingers like they were poisonous spiders.
“ Hallelujah!” Sonny cried out in the giddy voice of a nine year old on Christmas morning, born again on the spot. “It’s not me! It’s not me!”