Necrophobia #3 Read online

  The only thing in our favor was that the more I dropped, the more the walking ones became distracted. They couldn’t pass up a good meal. The hunger burning inside them would not allow it. Many of them stopped pursuing us, dropping to their knees and feeding on the—sometimes still kicking—forms of their brethren.

  I kept searching wildly around for some avenue of escape.

  I saw nothing promising.

  In the distance, I heard the shooters blasting away. God, the ammo they had and the destruction they must have wrought. I saw clouds of black smoke rise above the buildings. This would have been a good time for ARM (or whoever it was) to make a sweep through the neighborhood. I hated those bastards, but we were in dire straits here.

  I popped three more walking corpses.

  A trio of the dead surrounded Sandy and Charlene. Sandy, of course, channeling some stereotypical female from an old movie, just kept screaming while Charlene pulled her away from them. Before Chris did something stupid like dropping Robin right into the laps of the dead, I charged in. I blew the skull apart on one, but the others were too close to the girls.

  Charlene cried out something, but I couldn’t hear it above her sister’s shrilling.

  At the last second, I got it because Robin was shouting, too.

  Behind you, fool. Right fucking behind you.

  I turned quickly and there was a naked woman reaching towards me with long fingers. Her mouth was open, pink drool coursing down her chin. She had been a Latin girl. Very tall, very attractive, legs long and slender. One high, pert breast had a dark nipple like a pushpin. The other breast was gone. It looked like it had been gnawed out right to the roots. She grinned, showing me teeth that were perfectly white, even in death. Her face was smooth with an olive complexion, the cheekbones high, the lips full, eyes huge and dark. A serpent’s tail of jet-black hair swept down her shoulder.

  It would have been easy to have been seduced by her.

  She was a glamour girl…from a mortuary.

  I put two rounds into her and my heart ached to do so. It must have been something purely male in me that was easily dominated (as most men were) by beauty. Though I honestly think it was more than that, much more. She looked a little too much like Sabelia and that made something inside me freeze-up.

  Regardless, down went my dream-girl.

  I spun back around and went after the two that were bearing down on Charlene and Sandy. I clubbed one of them in the back of the head with the barrel of the AK and kicked the other one aside. I got in-between the girls and the hungry dead, and then I drilled both of them. I corralled the girls in with Chris and Robin and shot two more that shambled into our path.

  I had used up over half of the magazine and I knew it.

  C’mon, Steve, c’mon! Time’s running out here! You have to get these kids somewhere safe! Now where is that? And when the fuck are you going to get there?

  That’s when something truly frightening happened.

  Truly freaky…though I suppose that’s pretty subjective, considering where I was and what was happening.

  I cut in front of the others to mow a path through the dead, kind of fixing my sights on a traffic jam at the end of the block. There was a school bus wedged in there, a pick-up driven right into its side. The accordion doors were open. I was figuring we could get in there, shut the doors and hide out for a time. That’s what I was thinking.

  Then a big zombie stepped out in front of me.

  He wore tattered shadow camouflage fatigues, the Russian-type. They were filthy with gore and rot. But it was his face that held me. The decaying flesh and loose folds of skin, the bleary dead eyes, the sunken nose, the noxious yellow fluid that ran from his nostrils. His lips were leathery, the teeth nubby as if they’d been worn down from gnawing on bones.

  Just another zombie, one that had been with ARM once upon a time.

  I leveled the AK at him…and stopped.

  There’s something in that face and you know it, something you recognize…what is it? Think! There’s something very familiar about it! It’s there if you can only think of what it is!

  I took a step back, my mind whirling.

  There definitely was something there. There had to be something to make me stop like that, to give me pause, when my life, and those of the others, pretty much hung in the balance.

  Come on, Steve, you know! You know!

  He reached out for me, but I wasn’t ready to die. I slammed the AK into his chest, pushing him back. Then it hit me. A memory that was so deep and powerful that I almost tripped over my own feet in my need to escape it and him. I knew that face. I knew it very well. Before rot set in, it was the face of Phil…Phil Boncek. He was an ARM deserter that hooked up with us when we were hiding out at a deserted Air National Guard base called ANG Pelham.

  Phil, Jesus, it’s Phil.

  When I was separated from Tuck and the others in the Bronx, Phil had been part of our group. But if he was now a zombie, then that meant that maybe, good God, maybe my son and Sabelia and all the others were—

  “STEVE!” Robin screamed.

  Phil came at me to feed and I shot him dead. There were questions I wanted to ask, but they were also questions he would never be able to answer, because he was no longer a he but an it. He died quivering at my feet.

  The time I had wasted in my trip down memory lane had cost us dearly.

  From the left, eight or ten of the newly-risen were seeking us out, slavering and snapping their jaws, hands like claws held out to grip and grasp and tear. To the right, six or seven more. Behind us, twice that many closing in for the kill. I noticed, with absolute horror, that they were led by two twin girls. Little things maybe six or seven when Necrophage got them. They should have been clutching teddy bears, but they were pale things from a grave that clutched human remains to fill themselves with.

  Ahead, four more came at us.

  I did some quick shooting, killing three of them and missing the fourth. By then, he was within feet of me. I jumped up and gave him one of my clumsy Chuck Norris drop-kicks, putting him down. I shot him in the head.

  The others followed close behind me.

  The bus was about thirty feet away, but thirty feet can be miles when you’re crawling through the bowels of hell.

  Two more came at me.

  I killed them.

  Then there was just too many. I opened up on full-auto at head-level. Skulls exploded, gore and brains shooting up into the air in gouts, skull fragments glancing off the sides of parked cars like buckshot.

  I kicked another one clear.

  Split open the head of a woman.

  I shot a little boy in the face.

  I drilled his mother in the forehead.

  “MAKE A RUN FOR IT!” I called out, running and diving into a knot of zombies, scattering them. It was an opening, but not much of one. We made it through, zombie hands tearing at us in our flight. I killed two behind us, dropped three that tried to close the gap. There was no way in hell we could make it to the bus. There were zombies everywhere. I felt the ground rumble under my feet. Even the zombies were swaying with its force.

  Off to the left was an avenue that led out of town, but it was jam packed with vehicles. During the final days of the Zombpox infection, people must have been trying to get out while the getting was good. The avenue was nearly solid cars and trucks, a few delivery vans wedged in there. A UPS truck was rolled over on the sidewalk, a sheriff’s cruiser nearly imbedded in it. Nothing but wrecks, mangled metal and bones and shattered glass, all of it capped off at the end by a tanker truck that was rolled onto its side, blocking the exit from Perryville.

  The ground rumbled again.

  It shook.

  I heard glass fall from broken windows.

  Sandy cried out.

  Robin said, “What the fuck is this now?”

  The ground rolled and shook beneath our feet. The zombies pushed in. We were absolutely surrounded by them. A hundred or more were coming in from ev
ery direction. Our only chance was to climb up atop the vehicles. If we got atop one of the vans, we might keep them off us.

  The ground shook again.

  It was like the whole world was in motion. Hordes of zombies were scattered, thrown to the ground. Chris fell into Sandy and Charlene. I managed to catch Robin and then we were all on the ground.

  “What is this?” I heard Sandy cry out and the earth seemed to roll beneath us, clouds of dust rising up and blowing in the wind. “Is it an earthquake? Oh my God, is it an earthquake?”

  We climbed to our feet as the ground rumbled beneath us. I saw a section of sidewalk near the rolled UPS truck crack open and drop away into a yawning gulf beneath. The sheriff’s cruiser made a groaning sound of metal fatigue and slid into the gap, its crumpled front end aiming up at the sky like a missile poking from a silo.

  A section of pavement not five feet away from us split open with a jagged crack that was wide enough to swallow us alive. The crack ran beneath the train of stalled vehicles. The rear wheels of a pick-up truck dropped into the widening chasm. A hot, nauseous stench of corpse gas wafted from the split-open earth. It was far worse than even the stink of the zombies themselves. It was like a thousand corpses exhaling at the same time.

  “WATCH IT! WATCH IT!” I told everyone.

  I saw zombies disappearing into ragged holes in the street. The five of us held onto each other as the earth continued to move. That horrible smell was not natural and I think we all knew it. Something was about to happen. We could all feel it. Something that was far worse than an earth tremor or even the cracks opening up like mouths to either side of us.

  The earth shifted.

  The glass windows of storefronts shattered. Bricks fell from buildings. A telephone pole fell over, dragging down the lines of three or four others with it. They tangled over the wrecked vehicles like loose ropes. The pavement beneath a couple cars swelled like rising dough, then collapsed back down.

  “We have to get out of here!” Sandy said. “We have to get out of here right now!”

  Despite her hysteria, she was right.

  Regardless of the rolling earth, there were still dozens and dozens of zombies. They still sought us out. Even though the earth shook and made them stagger this way and that like a bunch of drunks, they still had us in their sights and they were coming for us. The quake meant nothing to them. Besides, if they didn’t get us, one of those cracks was going to open up below us at any moment.

  I started helping everyone to their feet. It wasn’t easy. The world seemed to be wobbling like a diving board. It was hard to get your feet under you. But we did. We had two choices. We either tried to run the gauntlet of zombies and the cracking earth or we got up on top of one of the vehicles and waited it out. The third possibility was trying to take shelter inside one of the buildings…but that wasn’t much of an option because it seemed like they were in motion, crumbling and breaking apart.

  Chris led Sandy and Charlene off.

  He was dodging zombies and leapfrogging cracks and holes. That hadn’t exactly been my plan, but boosting Robin onto my back I followed him. Jumping the fractures in the earth with a rider clinging to me was no easy bit. Luckily, most of them were no more than a foot in width.

  “TOO MANY!” Chris said, coming to a halt. “TOO GODDAMN MANY!”

  He was right on that. There were zombies everywhere. No way we could avoid them forever. They were closing in on us, slavering and snapping their teeth.

  FROM BELOW

  “UP ON THE CARS!” I said.

  It was our only viable option. The wires from the telephone pole would act as ropes to help us climb up. Sandy, who was absolutely hysterical by that point, went up first. She climbed up onto the roof of a sedan and then used the wires to pull herself up onto the roof of a delivery van. I sent Chris up next because I would need help in getting Robin up to the car and then atop the van. With his help, we got her up there.

  A few zombies came at us and I wasted them.

  The quaking earth kept the hundred or so others at bay for the time being, but it was a short leash they were on and it wouldn’t hold them back forever. I helped Charlene up onto the sedan and I followed, shouldering my AK. Another tremor struck and the ground beneath the sedan rocked and buckled. I was nearly tossed into the reaching hands of zombies.

  “Hurry!” Sandy called out to us, her voice trembling with fear and anxiety. “You don’t have much time! They’re coming! They’re coming now!”

  She was right. The zombies were pressing in. They weren’t about to let us get away. Meat was meat.

  I got onto the hood of the sedan and helped Charlene up to Chris’s waiting hands. A couple zombie hands grabbed me and I fought my way free. I grabbed the outstretched hands of Chris and Charlene. They gave me a boost up and I made it up onto the van…or almost. At the last second, my boots skidded and I nearly went down.

  It was as I climbed up on top of the van that something horrible beyond belief happened. Something that made the hordes of zombies seem almost pedestrian. The ground trembled…then it disgorged what it could not keep down. I saw rising white masses coming out of the shattered earth, flooding out from crevices and cracks and ragged chasms. I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. As absurd as it sounds, the ground looked like one of those cans of Pillsbury dough where you press the fork into the seam to make it burst open. It looked like that: like blobs of dough were rising from the earth under immense pressure from below.

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  It wasn’t blobs I was seeing.

  It was millions, billions of plump white maggots rising up, inundating the streets in a rising sea of writhing, hungry graveworms. None of us who looked down upon it did not feel sickened, did not feel our skin crawl, did not want to scream our lungs out.

  The maggots were flooding the world.

  A larval river bursting its banks and then bursting them again until you couldn’t see the banks. Or, in our case, the streets below. They were gone. They were covered in the maggot ocean. These were the same worms that had come out of the pipe and devoured the crazy woman. God only knew how many of them there were or what had mutated them below in the moist darkness or what they had been feeding on in the dank sewers below. They must have filled all the secret channels below the earth, backwashing into the wastewater systems of the buildings around us and maybe throughout the entire town. I had a feeling that this was not the first time they had flooded out. Maybe this instance was more dramatic as the earth split open from their sheer numbers and the pressure of their gases of decay, but it had happened before. They must have flooded from the mouths of sewers and covered the streets. That would certainly explain all the skeletons so carefully picked clean.

  I clambered over to Robin.

  She was sitting in the center of the roof. The tough girl was gone. Who I saw sitting there was small, frightened, and vulnerable. I went to her and held onto her. Sandy clutched Charlene and Chris.

  The seas were rising.

  We all saw that.

  I was certain we would be swamped and that, when the maggots receded, there would be five sets of polished white bones on top of the van that someone would see from one of the buildings some day. They would scratch their heads and wonder, but they would never know the horror that led to what they saw.

  The maggot sea finally crested at about five feet, which put it about two feet beneath the top of the van.

  The zombies were no longer a problem.

  They were like juicy red meat fed into a grinder. They knew no pain, of course. The only thing that drove them was hunger. But even they were taken back by what was happening and as crazy as it sounds, I almost felt sorry for the simple, stupid things. They fought and thrashed in the maggot sea. But they were dissolving, being rendered to bone. It was like they were being fed into a wood chipper, reduced to human sawdust. There had been over a hundred of them, and quite possibly much more, but now they were literally coming apart at the sea
ms as they were devoured by countless millions of busy, chewing and suckering little mouths whose appetites far exceeded even their own.

  I saw one of them sink beneath the sea only to rise up again, a fleshless skull knitted with red muscle and dozens of bloated, squirming maggots chewing into it. Then it sank away and was gone.

  It was just the maggots.

  The sea was a fluid medium of glistening slime that the worms swam in. Whether it was their own foul secretions or something else, it did not matter. The maggots were the apex predators of Perryville, a surging swamp of bubbling slime and billions of maggots that were in constant undulating motion.

  It was all bad enough.

  The gases coming off that sea made us feel dizzy.

  Then the earth rolled again. It trembled and shook and convulsed like a very ill stomach and the train of vehicles were in motion. The van canted this way, then that, threatening to spill us into the sea. Sandy screamed and so did Robin. The rest of us held onto them and I think we could have ridden it out, but a sudden violent quake sent Charlene sliding to the edge of the roof.

  “Charlene!” Sandy cried out.

  I made a grab for her and missed. She slid out towards the edge, shrieking, and it seemed she’d go down head first. She fought and scrambled, then another quake sent her legs swinging out over the edge.

  Chris grabbed at her, clutching one hand and holding it in a grip of iron. He would not let go. He would never let go.

  By then, I was there, too. I caught one flailing arm and tried to pull her up. But she was dangling too low by then, her waist over the edge and her legs from the knees down submerged in the maggot sea.

  “Don’t let her go! Don’t let her go!” Sandy screamed with horror. “Don’t…don’t…don’t let her go over the edge!”

  Charlene screamed herself. Her mouth opened in a wet O-shape and she screamed with everything she had. She screamed not out of terror, though there was that, too, but out of agony because they were eating her.

  Both Chris and I were crying out by then, trying to yank her up with everything we had but feeling the whirlpooling suction of the maggots themselves. It was hopeless and we both knew it, but we didn’t stop. We didn’t dare stop trying to pull her free.