Necrophobia #3 Page 21

  I smiled thinly. I’m sure he was thinking something along those lines. Maybe he was right in a way. Maybe I was afraid to take a chance. But I couldn’t afford to. The girls needed me. They needed someone to get them out of this mess and I was it. If it came down to it, I would take a chance, but not until.

  Chris kept going.

  He crossed the next two cars easily. There was no slipping and sliding. The next vehicle in the train was a minivan. He got down onto the hood of the car behind it as the maggots surged around his boots. He did not hesitate. He got hold of the ski rack on top of the van and hoisted himself up, repeating the process of stomping any maggots that hitched a ride with him. Maybe he was going to do this. Maybe he’d pull it off. But if he did…then what? He’d be free, but we would still be trapped. Would he help us? Or would he just get out of town?

  I liked to think he would have helped us.

  I really wanted to think that.

  But he won’t and you know it, a voice in my head was saying. He’s doing this partly out of the reason to prove that you’re wrong and he can pull it off, but mostly out of fear. He’s terrified and you know it. He’ll do anything to escape this nightmare.

  He gave us the thumbs up to tell us all was fine, easy as pie. The maggots seemed to be sinking away, the level of slime still lowering. I took that as a good sign. We had a chance, I figured. I watched Chris climb down carefully onto the hood of the minivan. Now he had to get up onto the roof of the furniture truck. It was about four feet higher than the van itself. There was only one way to do it and he went for it. He jumped up, gripped the roof of the truck box, dangled there precariously and then, his boots skidding off the gate, he began to pull himself up.

  He would have made it, too.

  But that’s when something incredible and shocking happened. A gushing wave of maggots rose up like a roller at sea, hitting him in a wave that peeled him from the truck and dropped him to the hood of the minivan. The suction of the same, pulled him right out into the maggot sea.

  He had a lot of fight in him, I’ll give him that much. He landed in the slime and began thrashing and flailing his arms, kicking his legs, anything to get free. He managed to grab the antenna mount on the minivan and began to hoist himself up, screaming the entire time: “It’s got me! It’s got me! Somebody help me, it’s fucking got me!”

  Those were his words. Not they, but it. You would think it meant nothing. He was hysterical. He was in agony. His mind was shearing right open from the pain, the horror of it all…yet, I heard that word and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I wanted to help him. It broke my heart to feel so utterly fucking helpless. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. I turned away, not wanting to see it…but gradually, my head turned back and my eyes made me see what happened to him.

  Robin was holding onto Sandy who was not screaming but making a low whining sound of utter desperation. It wasn’t quite a squealing, but it was close. Chris was still fighting to get back up onto the minivan, but it was hopeless and I knew it. The slime was roiling beneath him. His face was purple and strained, blood running from his mouth, his nails actually cutting grooves in the paintjob of the minivan. He was making a howling sort of noise. It was a sound of pure animal pain, like some beast caught in a trap. The seething, foaming slime was bright red with blood, the maggots—God, millions of them, it seemed—were a boiling mass of worming, wriggling shapes as they stripped the flesh from his bones.

  Sandy was standing next to me, watching Chris’s death with glazed eyes. “The blood…it just keeps coming out of him,” she said. “I never knew there was that much blood in him.”

  Chris let out one last manic scream, again trying to fight free with a final surge of strength. The will to live, to survive, is amazing. Absolutely amazing. I’d seen it in Iraq, nineteen-year old kids with their guts shot out trying to stand so they could run. Death took old people easily, without much of a fuss, but with young healthy people it was a bitter, contested struggle. Chris dragged himself up, but there was nothing but bones beneath his waist. He looked like a man trying to crawl free of an acid vat. Thousands of graveworms clung to him, writhing like pseudopodia.

  Finally he sank away in the foaming, bloody slime.

  I pulled Sandy away and made her sit there with Robin and I.

  Nobody spoke. Maybe we were afraid of what we might have said. The situation seemed hopeless, just fucking stark and hopeless. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. Inside, I was trembling with rage at what had happened. I wanted to kill those damn things. I wanted to burn them and fry them and watch them sizzle and blacken as the slime that contained them went to steam.

  But there was no possibility of that.

  So I held the girls and tried to concentrate my energy on something a little more productive than fantasy reprisals.

  It’s got me! It’s got me! Somebody help me, it’s fucking got me!

  I kept hearing Chris’s words. They would not leave me alone. They echoed through my head. It. It’s got me. It. Again, not they but it. The idea disturbed me but my brain had already come to the same conclusion: the maggots were not many, they were one. The idea was fantastic, but it had taken root in my mind—millions, billions of mutated maggots that were not disorganized, separate creatures but part of a greater whole, a single immense organism that acted and reacted as a single entity. A colonial creature.

  But the idea was crazy…wasn’t it?

  I couldn’t be sure. When Chris climbed down onto the hood of the minivan, the maggot sea had definitely receded. It had lowered before that, but when he climbed down to the hood, it had noticeably ebbed. My imaginative mind told me that was because it was baiting him in. Maybe. But maybe also it had just reacted to the noise he made, his footfalls. Maybe it sensed prey and was gathering itself to strike. Because it had struck. It shot out a pseudopod composed of slime and thousands and thousands of maggots that hit him like a wave hitting a beach or, and better, like a hand swatting an insect.

  I didn’t want to give it too much credit.

  I didn’t want to be giving that organism intelligence. What it did was probably instinctual, but it surely wasn’t by accident. The sea was slow-moving and flaccid, there were no currents that could have stirred up a wave like that. I saw it. It crested at better than six feet.

  If it could do that, it could probably get to us on top of the delivery van in the same way. And given time, it would.

  I had to do something.

  I had to come up with something.

  I took another cigarette off Robin so I could focus my thoughts. I had an idea, but it was risky as hell. I needed to concentrate. When I took the cigarette, Robin did not thrust her breasts out at me. She had pulled into her shell and she was about as lusty as a bowl of cold porridge.

  I stood there, surveying the sea, the surroundings.

  Oh yes, it was doable. Dangerous, suicidal, but certainly doable. If I could pull it off and we could survive the chain reaction I would unleash, we were home free. A lot depended on the maggots. In fact, just about everything did.

  THE ENTITY

  When I announced my plans, Sandy began to shake all over. She started to cry and moan about being alone, being left alone to die. Robin just glared at me. It had taken her some time to get Sandy calmed down last time and things like sympathy and comforting did not come easily to her. It took real effort to be motherly.

  But what really pissed her off was my plan. “You’ll die, Steve. You’ll fucking die and then what? What the fuck am I going to do with a bad leg and a hysterical female?”

  “I am not hysterical,” Sandy said.

  I think any other time I might have burst out laughing, but there was nothing funny about this scenario. Nothing funny in the least. The sun was nearing the horizon and it would be full dark in about thirty minutes, I figured, and I didn’t have time to go through my theory of the entity.

  “It going to get hot,” I said. They looked at each other and didn’t seem to
mind the idea because it was getting chilly and they were both shivering. “I mean hot, real fucking hot. I want you both to lie down flat. You understand? Flat. Face down.”

  Robin bitched about it, but I could see she was glad I had come up with something. So was I. I just hoped it would work.

  I shouldered the AK.

  The maggot sea was rising again as if maybe it had some idea of what I was going to do. That’s impossible, of course, yet it seemed like they/it did. It would have been nice if I could have hatched my plan from the top of the delivery van, but I couldn’t get the right angle for shooting from there.

  Unlike Chris, who went forward up the train of cars, I needed to go back.

  Using the power lines again, I slid down onto the sedan behind us. The maggot sea was shivering. Like gelatin, it seemed to be shivering, weird little waves rolling across its surface. It was almost like it was expectant, anxious, and apprehensive.

  I moved down onto the trunk of the sedan and hopped over to the hood of the next one, quickly climbing onto the roof and stomping the maggots away. The maggot sea began to recede as it had just before it attacked Chris.

  Go, go! Do it or you’re fucking done!

  I listened to that voice and jumped down onto the trunk. There was a three to four foot gap between the car and the pick-up truck behind. It was going to take a good leap. If I fucked it up, then I most certainly was worm food. The maggot sea was roiling with secret currents, bunching maybe like the muscles of an arm that are about to strike.

  Letting out a cry, I jumped.

  It was a good one, too. I landed on the hood of the pick-up and as I did so, my boots skidded out from beneath me on the slime. I went down on my belly. I felt myself sliding back into the sea. I threw one arm forward and grasped a windshield wiper. I pulled myself up onto the hood. I crawled up onto the roof.

  There it was.

  There was the egg of the plan I wanted to hatch.

  The UPS truck. The one that was lying on its side. When the pavement opened up, nearly swallowing the sheriff’s cruiser, the sidewalk had bunched up in a hill from the pressure, lifting the back end of the truck up out of the maggot sea.

  Taking up my AK, I sighted in on it.

  The sea was moving. It was splashing up against the pick-up truck. It was coming for me and there was no doubt of that in my mind. If I didn’t do this now, I’d never do it. The UPS truck was maybe a hundred feet or more from me. I could have leapfrogged more vehicles and got in closer, but I didn’t want to be too close.

  I heard the maggot sea shifting behind me.

  I got the gas tank of the UPS truck in my sights and started punching bullets into it. I hit with every round. It was like a watering can. About fifty gallons of gasoline came squirting out, gushing into the maggot sea. The entity reacted immediately. It reacted as a single individual. It was a colonial organism. Once the gas hit it, it pulled back, it moved like some surging column of jelly, almost flinching from the invasion of the gasoline. The maggots were dying in numbers and I knew it. They were plump and soft-bodied with no protection. They were absorbing the fuel and it was poisoning them out. The maggots were the cells of the entity and they were dying by the thousands. And as the entity pulled back, it took the gasoline with it.

  The streams of fuel sprouting from the tank were losing pressure. The tank was nearly empty. The gas was killing the entity, confusing it, making it fight to survive as any living creature would. It threw out columns of slime and maggots at the UPS truck, thinking that it was attacking it. Again, like the wave that hit Chris, these columns were like the pseudopods of an amoeba, trying to engulf and immobilize its prey. The columns splashed harmlessly against the metal shell of the truck.

  Now, phase two.

  I aimed at the undercarriage of the truck.

  I needed a spark.

  I fired and the slug just punched into the axle. I fired again. Nothing. Again, nothing. Then I let loose on full auto and I got the spark I wanted. There was a resounding BOOM! as the tank went, gasoline floating atop the maggot sea instantly igniting. A heat wave hit me and almost put me on my ass. I slid down the windshield of the pick-up as flames rose up around me. I would have been burned to a crisp if it hadn’t been for the entity itself. As it pulled away from the fire that was killing it, it pulled the gasoline with it. The gas stuck to the slime like napalm, burning and hissing. The slime was going up in steam, the maggots roasting.

  The entity pulled away, faster and faster, moving in a great seething, plastic wave past the delivery truck and towards the end of the street where the fuel truck was turned over. Sections of it escaped down through numerous cracks and chasms in the pavement.

  I jumped down off the pickup.

  The street was slimy with the entity’s bodily fluid, carpeted in dying maggots. They squashed as I ran through them to the delivery truck.

  “HURRY!” I called to the girls. “WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME!”

  I helped Sandy down, then Robin. I piggybacked her and we started running, back the way we came. We poured it on, slipping and sliding on the carpet of maggots. I looked back as we neared the end of the street. The entity had engulfed the fuel truck and all the vehicles around it. Blazing bright orange and throwing off plumes of oily black smoke, it fought and raged, rising up and up and then collapsing back down in great cremating firestorm.

  I knew what would happen next.

  At least, I suspected it.

  We cut around the corner and made it maybe halfway up the avenue when there was a deafening WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP which was the fuel truck going up. Maybe it had a leak, maybe the entity smashed a hole in it, but up it went. The shock wave threw us into the street. A massive canvas of flames rose above the buildings behind us as night fell. I heard windows breaking and storefronts cracking open. A hot wave pushed over us, sucking smoke, dust and debris with it. A lake of fire gushed from the street into the avenue and then it was sucked back.

  We ran, panting and gasping we broke free of Perryville and into the yellow fields beyond. The town was glowing bright orange behind us, but we made it. Dear God, we made it out and the three of us survived.

  We ran.

  After a time we collapsed in the grass. We sat there, side-by-side and watched the town burn in the distance. It was an absolute inferno. Even as far away as we were, we could feel the heat. It warmed that chill October night just fine.

  “Like a Halloween bonfire,” Robin said.

  “Yes. Just like one,” Sandy said. “It fits. Today is Halloween.”

  She showed me her digital wristwatch. The luminous display proved it: OCT 31.

  Amazing, absolutely amazing. Images of other Halloweens ran through my mind. I could see Ricki handing out candy at the front door to little ghosts and goblins. I could almost smell the guts of a pumpkin as I carved it. I saw my son with his trick-r-treat bag. A couple tears ran from my eyes.

  “You okay, Big Steve?” Robin asked.

  “No. Not at all.”

  We had to find shelter. We stumbled along through the fields.

  “Look,” Sandy said. “Down there.”

  A fire. I saw it quite clearly. There was a fire burning down in a little hollow. It looked nice. It looked peaceful. It looked warm and comforting.

  “Well, they ain’t zombies, mutants, or maggots,” I said. “Let’s go take a look.”

  “What if they’re not the friendly type?” Robin asked.

  I had no weapon other than the knife on my belt. The AK was gone. I had nothing to fight with and even if I had, I don’t think I would have had the strength for it.

  “I think we better risk it. Let’s just take a look. I don’t think we can go much further.”

  Just this once, I thought, couldn’t we run into a spot of luck and meet up with some normal people, some good people? Just this fucking once? There had to be some left somewhere. When we got up into the treeline overlooking the hollow, I deposited Robin before she broke my back.

  “
Sandy, you wait here with her. I’m going to have a look.”

  “And if you don’t come back?” Robin said.

  I patted the top of her head. “I always come back.”

  I moved down the hillside through the heavy grasses, trying to be as quiet as possible. I had a very eerie feeling that I was being watched. I suppose they had perimeter guards. I stopped. I saw figures by the fire. Then I saw armored vehicles parked in the shadows.

  Shit.

  Maybe it was ARM, maybe it was somebody worse. I couldn’t take the chance. I moved up the hillside and as I reached the top, a shadow darted out and knocked me to the ground. It was powerful and it held me there. A powerful hand gripped my throat and I saw the gleam of a raised combat knife that was about to gut me. But in that dizzying instant, I also saw the shape of the person that wielded it and I recognized him.

  I started laughing.

  “You think this is a fucking joke?” came the gruff reply.

  “Put the fucking knife down, Tuck,” I said. “I come in peace…”

  INTO THE LIGHT

  That stopped the knife.

  The shape backed off and released my throat.

  He made a funny choking sound in his throat. The voice that came out was nearly cracked with emotion. “Steve…Steve? Booky? Is that you?”

  Then flashlights were aimed on me, right in my face. “Enough,” I said. “You’ll fucking blind me.”

  “Holy shit!” Tuck said. “How the fuck…?”

  Robin and Sandy were surround by a couple dark forms. I saw that they were my sister-in-law Diane and my friend Sabelia. They both fell on me, hugging me as I hugged them. I had finally found my people. I was hoisted to my feet and Tuck hugged me, too. Then he pulled away, slapping me on the shoulder as if he wasn’t as overcome with emotion as I was.

  “Oh, Steve,” Diane said. “We’d given hope. We’d really given up hope.”

  Sabelia wrapped herself around me, kissing my dirty face. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she said. “I can’t believe it…I prayed every night for you…I hoped and prayed…oh God…”