I burned them.
I burned them all down.
I saw what they did to Hill and I fucking torched them. About thirty of them, I’m figuring. I lit them up like Fourth of July sparklers and Guy Fawkes dummies and true to the latter, they stumbled about blazing like hay-stuffed scarecrows, burning pieces and sections falling off them. One by one, they hit the yellow, straw-arid grass and lit it up and before long that whole goddamn summer-dry field was burning. Dozens of them were caught out in it as the flames came at them from every direction, encircling them, then claiming them and roasting them down to blackened, twitching, crumbling things.
But by then we were on the run, Sylvia and I.
My empty shotgun had been used to split the skull of an inquisitive Wormboy. Sylvia had a few rounds left in her. 9mm. Mine was gone. We had fire…we had the will to survive…we had hot terror leaping in our bellies…but that’s all we had. The dead kept coming like we were some wondrous new tourist attraction they had heard of and they just had to get a peek…or a stray nibble.
I cooked about a dozen more of them, trying to cut us a path to the front door but it was no go. Maybe the walking dead will never understand quantum physics or write a truly great sonnet, but they are not entirely stupid. They knew we’d be making for that door and there had to be hundreds crowded in the parking lot waiting for us.
It was hopeless.
Taking Sylvia by the hand, we circled around back, clinging to the shadows thrown by the outbuildings, the generating station, and the water tanks. The action was lighter back there. We found a shadowy crevice between a couple tanks and we waited.
“ There’s too many of them,” Sylvia whispered in my ear. “We can’t make it.”
“ You got a better idea?”
But she didn’t.
I had this crazy idea that if we could wait until daylight, we might have a chance. The Wormboys were more sluggish in direct sunlight.
That was my plan, anyway.
13
I don’t know if they could see in the dark or just smell prey, but about five of them showed within minutes and they knew right where we were like they were being guided by some unseen intelligence. I had no choice but to toast them. And in the light of those shambling human corpse-fat candles, I saw there were at least a dozen others closing the gap. I saw a face that was infested with crawling red beetles. They skittered out of holes and tunnels in the cheeks and forehead, nipping and chewing, carrying bits of tissue back into their nests in the skull like cartoon ants stealing away with picnic goodies.
More faces came into the field of light.
Many of them were clustered with feeding insects, but many others had no eyes. They’d been sewn shut and these ones were hunting by sound alone. Sylvia pressed her. 9mm into my hand without me asking for it. It was so greasy from her sweaty palm that I nearly dropped it.
The lead Wormboy-I don’t know what else to call him-was this massive naked man who’d apparently lost his own skin at some point because he was wearing what at first looked like a rippling pale poncho but soon revealed itself to be a patchwork of human skins sewed into a single garment and then tacked to the muscle and tissue beneath. It fluttered in the wind. I saw a section that was tattooed joined to another with a single flaccid breast which itself was stitched to another with a puckering navel. His face was a creeping mass of fungal rot, green and dripping, moving with slow, greasy undulations over the jutting skull beneath.
I shot him point blank in the face and then put another through the side of his head and he crashed drunkenly to the ground, his hastily-sewn garment/pelt/skin bursting open. The others fell on him right away, stripping him like carrion birds. He was torn open, his wormy guts ripped free, rib bones snapped off and gnawed, skull crushed and the gray slime within sucked up by anxious mouths.
Then I saw something that turned even my stomach.
By that point, I assumed it impossible to be sickened.
But I was wrong. The zombies that were busy feeding on him suddenly reared away, stumbling, crawling, tearing at their throats and making hissing/gobbling sounds and then I watched as they began to regurgitate what they had just eaten in clotty globs of worms, inky fluid, and rancid meat.
Maybe there was something after all they couldn’t abide.
Sylvia and I ran. I don’t know where we thought we were going, but we were determined to get there. Then something smashed into us…a couple big Wormboys and I heard Sylvia scream as she was pulled away into the night. A Wormgirl came at me and I forgot the gun tucked in my pants and went at her with absolute rage. I don’t think she was prepared for it. I launched myself at her, breaking her face open with my fists, then clawing her skull clean of flesh until she fell to her knees and I cleaved her head open with one good punt.
I was alone.
But they were coming for me. ill
14
I ran for the parking lot, thinking that if I couldn’t make the front door there always the vehicles parked just off the tarmac. If worse came to worse, I’d find one with keys in it and take off into the night, circle around until dawn. But to my surprise, the parking lot was nearly deserted. I used up the last of the fuel in the flamethrower to toast a few stragglers and then I was beating my fists against the flaking green steel door, screaming for help.
Doc opened the door for me and said, “What in God’s name have you done?”
I whipped out Sylvia’s. 9mm and put the last round through his left eye socket. Then I threw him outside to the wolves. And as I did so, I saw thousands of the dead massing for a concerted attack.
I slammed the door, locked it, then the siege began.
The shelter was not intended to withstand the barrage it took.
The doors did not come off their hinges, they blew off them. The children were all locked down in the bomb shelter beneath, but everyone else was on the main floor. There was no time to set up any defenses. There was no time for anything.
The dead rushed in.
Wormboys and Wormgirls came in with axes and machetes and knives and cleavers and sharpened broomsticks. They brandished decapitated heads on poles, chewed and worried things spattered with old blood. Some were naked, others dressed in shrouds and rags and shapeless ponchos that looked to be sewn together out of tanned human hides. Naked bodies were painted with arcane symbols. Some were bald, others without scalps, still others had their hair greased into mohawks and scalp locks with corpse fat. They were adorned in necklaces of human scalps and loops of dried entrails. Some wore death masks. Most had the carved, slit, and beaded faces of warriors. A few had gotten truly creative and inserted needles into their faces, spikes, shards of broken glass. They had removed hands and replaced them with blades and cleavers.
They didn’t waste any time.
They mowed down the survivors. The air was cacophonous with shrieking and screaming, people begging for mercy, praying to gods that would not listen…and the gnawing, tearing, and grinding sounds of the living dead as they fed. Blood sprayed the walls, pooled on the floor. Limbs were broken, chewed, tossed aside. People were disemboweled while they were still alive. Sylvia’s husband was eviscerated with a butcher knife and when he screamed, flopping on the floor, his own entrails were stuffed down his throat.
It was a slaughterhouse.
They must have got poor old Shacks, too, but I never saw it.
I fired every round from every gun I could find. I fought and killed and maimed, but it was hopeless. Entirely hopeless. The dining hall lived up to its name because that’s where everyone was ritually devoured. Everything was red and dripping, feeding sounds echoing out, bodies quartered and skinned and peeled and then quartered again.