Toxic Shadows

30

They made it maybe thirty feet into the rambling confines of the municipal building when one of the crazy bastards came stumbling out of the shadows to meet them.

Lou and Lisa hung back while Johnny faced the psycho dead-on.

Something he didn’t mind too much, considering he’d gotten his shotgun back now.

The rabid was a big, ugly man that could’ve passed for Joe’s twin brother, save that he was balding and beardless. He was shirtless, wearing stained jeans and rubber boots. There was something almost profane about that jiggling mountain of ashen flesh before them. Drool hung from his chin like stalactites. He had something in his filthy right fist that at first looked like a club but upon closer inspection could be nothing but a human femur, dyed dark with old blood. A cord of gristle hung from the hip ball.

“I’ve been waiting all night, friend,” the flabby, leering monstrosity said. “What took you so long?”

Johnny shook his head.

He hated the idea of shooting this creature, repellent though he was; he started busting caps all over and everyone and everything would know right where to find them. He had high hopes they could do what he had in mind covertly.

But the rabid came on, swinging the thigh bone.

Johnny stood his ground and gave him a burst to the belly.

The rabid stumbled back three, four feet, but did not go down. There was a huge, smoking crater where his belly had been. Intestines—what was left of them—trailed out like burnt sausages. He reached in there with one shaking hand, rooted around in his abdomen, brought his hand back out. It was dark with blood and cinders of flesh.

His raging yellow eyes never left Johnny.

A good deal of his anatomy had been sprayed against the marble wall behind him. With a crazy, agonized smile, he shambled forward, bone raised high to strike.

Johnny stepped back now, a cold terror in his belly.

He racked the pump and aimed for the guy’s head.

He pulled the trigger.

It blew away the left side of the guy’s face, leaving a ruin of blistered meat, tendrils of smoke puffing from the bleeding cavity. He made it two, three steps and pitched over face-first, limbs still attempting locomotion.

“C’mon,” Johnny told the others in an airless voice.

They passed a bank of elevators and then paused before a set of steps climbing into the darkness. There was a body sprawled near the bottom. A naked woman.

Johnny approached her carefully, nudged her with his combat boot.

A surge of panic rode through him as she began to move, but it was only gravity, he saw, her body tumbling down the last few steps onto the floor. Her chest was riddled with bullet wounds, the trail of blood—still wet—glistened on the steps. Somebody must’ve shot her (and with an automatic weapon, judging by the pattern of wounds) and she dragged herself down the steps and died near the bottom.

Nothing spooky about that.

Johnny started up.

“Shouldn’t we try the police station?” Lou suggested, clutching the wound in his shoulder Johnny had bandaged with strips of rags. “It might be worth a shot.”

Lisa licked her lips, shook violently. “I thought… I thought you said the place was trashed?”

“Maybe I overlooked something.”

Johnny shook his head. “You didn’t. It won’t do us any good. Even if we found a working radio, we couldn’t transmit. It would be just like the radios in the cruisers. That army out there, they’re jamming everything. They don’t want any messages getting out.”

Lisa and Lou didn’t argue with that.

They both remembered how Johnny had tried in vain to raise the outside world with one of the radios in a parked police car and had gotten nothing but static.

Isolated. Contained. That’s what they were.

They submitted. They both knew what Johnny’s alternate plan was and it was as good as any. Make for the roof. It was defensible. Lock themselves up there and wait for dawn.

At least that’s what he told them.

His real plan was only slightly different in that it had something to do with a glorious death.

He led them up through the darkness, his bald head gleaming with sweat.

Go slow, he told himself. There’s probably rabids everywhere. And there might be soldiers, too. You run into a group of them and you’re all dead.

So he moved slowly, quietly up the steps, knowing he had only two rounds left in his shotgun and they were valuable. More priceless than gold now.

They made it to the second floor, or Johnny did.

Lou and Lisa waited on the stairs. The second floor was much like the first, dimly lit, corridors snaking this way and that, studded with doors.

Johnny waved them forward.

He kept the 12-gauge before him, the stock greasy beneath his sweating fingers. He rounded a corner, coming down low. There were a few bodies sprawled on the floor. Dead rabids, a man and a woman. They were both naked. Looked like they’d been fucking when the soldiers found them. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes. Brass shell casings littered the floors.

The rabids were tough.

They could take shit that would have killed normal people five times over. But, still, this many rounds spent on these two was a real waste. Johnny could see those soldiers in his mind, spraying down the copulating rabids on full auto. He’d seen plenty of that in Vietnam—cherries, newbies, spending magazine after magazine when two, three well-directed bursts would have done the job quite nicely.

It told him something about these troops.

Either they were scared shitless or inexperienced.

He figured it was probably both.

Okay, keep going.

He led the other two past the bodies. A few offices were lit up, light spilling into the hallway. He didn’t like that—either the lights had been left on or somebody had turned them on.

The latter was a possibility he didn’t care for.

Why he didn’t see the guy squatting in the doorway of the dark office was beyond him. In the old days, the guy would have been dead. But tonight Johnny had walked practically right up on him. He didn’t even notice him until he’d seen the gleam of metal from the rifle barrel.

Johnny went down low, bringing the shotgun to bear.

“Don’t even think about it, motherfucker,” the guy said. “You touch that trigger, I cut you all down.”

And that was what stopped Johnny.

His finger touched the trigger, then retreated.

He knew he could grease the guy… but he didn’t want Lou and Lisa paying the price for it. So he let the shotgun down, knew that they were at the mercy of this sonofabitch. Good thing was, his eyes were normal. They didn’t shine at all. If rabids started using guns, the jig was up.

“Come in here,” the guy said. “It’s cool.”

They filed into the office, sat next to each other on the floor in front of a big desk. It was just a typical office—desks, filing cabinets, computers, water cooler in the corner.

The guy stayed in the doorway.

With the moonlight flooding in through the big windows in the rear, they could see him well enough. He was one of the soldiers. He had a white protective suit on, sans hood. Some young white guy, early twenties maybe, narrow face, crewcut.

“I ain’t gonna shoot you,” he said. “You’re the first normals I’ve seen in an hour. Creepers are everywhere, man. Them bastards’ll eat your ass for breakfast soon as look at you. If they don’t fuck you first.”

“What’s your name?” Johnny asked.

“Johnson… nah, fuck that, name’s Tony Terra. You?”

They introduced themselves.

“Why’d you say Johnson?” Lou wanted to know.

He laughed at that, plugged a little cigar in the corner of his mouth, lit it. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he said. “Not supposed to, you know. Smoke, that is. Creepers can see in the dark like fucking cats. They can smell body heat. That’s what they told us. A cigar? A cigarette? Like a bonfire to those animals. But, fuck it, right?” He dragged off his cigar, blew smoke into the shadows. “Reason I said Johnson, man, was because we all got code names, you see? Smiths and Johnsons and Browns and Blacks—you get the idea. Must be a hundred Johnsons. I was Johnson-12, see? We never knew each other’s names. That’s the way this shit works.”

Lou said, “You’re in the army?”

“Yes and no. I was part of the force, man. ERG. That’s Emergency Response Group. My battalion is one of dozens, so they say. Some shit comes down, we’re trained to contain it. We don’t take our orders from the army, though.” He laughed. “Nobody knows who we take our orders from. Ain’t that a rush?”

Lisa was moaning, her body shuddering with spasms.

Terra was keeping an eye on her. “She infected?”

Johnny assured him she wasn’t. “She’s coming down from her drug habit.”

“Junk?” Terra said. “Yeah, my brother was on that shit. Bad news.”

“What the hell happened here?” Lou asked, lighting a cigarette.

Terra shrugged. “I ain’t supposed to say. We’re not even supposed to talk to civilians. We’re supposed to consider ’em all infected and shoot ’em dead. Jesus H. Christ. I trained for this—nuclear, biological, chemical, NBC—for the past three years. But, oh shit, none of us ever thought—fuck, man.” He cradled his head between his knees, sobbed. Sighing, he looked at them. “They told us there was an outbreak. We thought it was another goddamn drill, a war game. But it was real. They told us an unfriendly foreign power had dumped some germs on this little town. I don’t even know what fucking state I’m in!”

“You’re in Michigan,” Johnny said. “It’s okay now, pal. Just tell us.”

Terra sat there silently for a moment, rolling the cherry of his cigar across the sole of his boot. “So, we were sent here to contain this mess, see that it didn’t spread. But, holy shit, those creepers… like zombies or vampires or something straight out of them horror movies, right? They don’t die easy.” He licked his lips, looking close to a breakdown. “We came in three, four hours back, surrounded the town. We came in by helicopter—all of us. Even the hummers and equipment came in by air. They started sending in recon teams right away, but none of ’em came back. Once we were deployed, they broke us into platoons and told us to kill everyone. Even the kids, the babies.” He started crying for real now. “All the little kids are monsters… oh, oh, oh, Jesus… we were shooting down toddlers. Oh Christ in Heaven, I’m gonna burn in Hell, I’m gonna burn in Hell…”

Johnny went to him, put an arm around him. “No, you’re not. People who created this stuff, let it loose on this town, yeah, they’re going to burn.”

It took Terra about five minutes to compose himself. “Okay, I’m all right. I’m cool. They told us to kill everyone. No exceptions. It’s what we were trained to do, so we did it. When we were done, we were to burn this town to the ground. Nothing could be left.” He motioned towards the window, the orange glow reflected on the glass. “Somebody already started that, though.”

Johnny thought it all through and still had questions. “Did they tell you what it was? What these people are contaminated with?”

He shrugged. “A virus of some kind. Spread by bites, body fluids. Supposed to be some shit they engineered from the rabies virus. Agent-X. That’s what they said. But there were rumors…”

“Yeah?”

Terra started talking in a whisper now. “Fucking-A. Guys have been saying that it ain’t fucking terrorists or any of that shit, they’re saying it’s us. Saying we created it. That we used it—”

“In Vietnam?”

Terra looked like he’d been slapped. “How the hell you know that?” He looked concerned.

“I was in Vietnam,” Johnny told him. “I saw what it did there. We called it Laughing Man because it drove people stark crazy. They told us it was a defoliant. But nobody bought it. We saw what that garbage did. My team got infected.”

Terra nodded, patting Johnny’s knee. “Yeah. My platoon, man, creepers wiped ’em all out… downstairs. Motherfucker. I got away, hid out.” His face looked like it had been sculpted from sallow wax. “Rumor says they developed it back then, but they shelved it for further study. Then, I don’t know, while back they pulled it out of the freezer and started refining it or something.”

The ash on Lou’s cigarette was an inch long. It fell onto his lap. “Why did they spray it here? What the hell were they thinking?”

“Guys were saying it wasn’t on purpose. An accident or something,” Terra told him.

Johnny felt suddenly vindicated.

After all these years of bullshit and denial, it had all come full circle now. There was no getting around the truth any longer. Oh, sure, they’d kill everyone and burn the town down, but the truth would come out… eventually.

In one form or another.

There would be too many questions.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Johnny asked Terra. “We’re making for the roof. We’re gonna hide out until dawn.”

“Yeah, fucking vampires, they don’t like the sunlight. They told us that much.” Terra looked half out of his mind. “I can hear the boys out there, can’t you? Boom, bang, boom. Mopping up this here burg. Fucking right. Flamethrowers and everything. Shit yeah. They go crazy when you crisp ’em, creepers do. Start jumping around and trying to fight the flames. Sometimes, they don’t even give a shit that they’re burning—they come right at you. Then you gotta pop ’em. Pop ’em and drop ’em. Blood and bodies and brains. I’m covered in it. Fuck if I ain’t.”

Johnny led the others back out into the corridor.

Terra took up the rear, with Johnny in front, the others in the middle.

“Let’s be careful out there,” Terra said and started giggling. He pulled something out of the ammo pouch slung around his shoulder. He hung it over his neck.

A necklace of human ears.

31

“Stone-two?”

“Johnson-four?”

“Smith-Seventeen?”

Silence. Maybe a minute, maybe two.

“Where the fuck are you guys?”

From where she hid, Ruby Sue was hearing it all.

Unlike the others, she’d come into the municipal building from the back. She’d slipped through the rear courtyard and waded through dozens of dismembered corpses dressed in red protective suits that had once been sparkling white. She’d didn’t spend too much time studying the fallen soldiers, just long enough to know they were dead, to see that they’d been mutilated, partially devoured.

Now she was in the garage.

But she wasn’t alone.

On the other side, hidden by the looming hulk of a fire truck were the soldiers. They sounded panicked and with good reason: most of their comrades had been wiped out, apparently by a large force of rabids.

Ruby Sue was crouched behind a pump truck.

The garage was huge and shadowy, lit dimly by emergency lights and moonlight seeping through tall windows set along the far wall. There were two fire trucks in there, a half dozen other city vehicles… not to mention the bodies of other soldiers, sprawled and twisted in heaps along the concrete floor. There was one a few feet away from her. He was missing his left arm and his protective hood had been ripped off, his face meticulously stripped down to the skull beneath. The grinning death mask watched her, but offered no suggestions.

What to do?

She waited there and contemplated it.

Her original mission had been to kill as many rabids as she could. Payback for Joe. Now she was starting to wonder who the real enemy was here.

She could hear the soldiers whispering amongst themselves.

She had to wait until they moved; the state they were in, they’d shoot anything they saw.

Not good.

About ten minutes later, she saw them crawl up towards the front of the garage, moving beneath vehicles on their bellies like lizards. They were uncomfortably close when they re-grouped.

“There’s only four of us,” a voice said. “That’s all.”

“We had thirty guys here,” another said, his voice breaking with stress. “They… they can’t all be dead.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Shit.”

“Don’t be such a pussy. This is what you trained for.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Lock and load. Let’s do this. We don’t have a choice.”

“The radio—”

“Piss on that,” the first voice said. “We’re transmitting, but they’re not receiving. Stupid pricks are jamming the secure channel, too.”

“I knew this would happen.”

Ruby Sue was grinning at the exchange.

It was somehow satisfying to see the military hamstrung by the situation, too. If Johnny was right, they had created it, so let them suffer along with the rest. It was only fair, wasn’t it?

She crept towards the front of the truck, bare inches now from the dead soldier. She looked down at the raw meat of his face glistening in the moonlight. It didn’t bother her; nothing seemed to bother her anymore. There was something lying by his side. Something dark and shiny. She touched it. Metal.

Jesus, it was his rifle. His M-16.

Carefully, she picked it up.

She’d never fired one before. It was remarkably light, fitted with a bayonet. The barrel was short and ribbed, the magazine jutting from beneath banana-shaped. She stuck her Colt in the other pocket of her jean jacket. The soldiers were standing up now, approaching a door which read EXIT in glowing red letters.

Breathing hard now, more out of fear and apprehension than any exertion, she moved soundlessly to the front of the pump truck. She aimed at the silhouettes, no easy task with her sprained left wrist. They were still arguing as to whether they should go into the building proper or escape out the back way.

“I got a better idea,” she said under her breath.

She pulled the trigger.

The M-16 came alive in her hands, the bullets going everywhere but where she’d aimed them. The rocking motion of the rifle sent knives of pain into her damaged wrist. But then, in a split second, beyond pain, she had the rifle under control, pressing the stock into her shoulder where it rode easily. Shell casings rained in the air.

The soldiers instinctively went down low, but not fast enough.

They were clumsy in their spaceman suits.

She hit two of them and then a third as he opened fire in her direction, taking out his aggression and terror on the windshield of the pump truck. He screamed as bullets ripped through his face shield. The last soldier tried to scramble away, but she shot his legs out from under him. He screamed and started shooting in every direction.

By then, she was on the other side of the vehicle.

She drew a bead on the solder’s head and let go with another burst. He went down face-first.

She waited then.

She could hear one or two of them moaning, whimpering, begging for help.

Here comes your fucking help.

She walked over to them, nearly slipping on all the brass scattered over the floor. She couldn’t see their faces in the hoods, but she could see that there was no way they could get to their rifles. And that was the most important thing.

One of the soldiers held bloody, gloved hands out to her.

She swatted them away with the barrel of her 16. “Welcome to the jungle,” she told him and rammed the bayonet into his chest continually until he quit writhing and screeching and her arms were sore and his blood was spattered over her in a fine, coppery mist.

She took the man’s rifle and slung it over her shoulder.

He had some sort of ammo pouch with him. In it were three smooth-bodied grenades and two others shaped like blunt cylinders. She shouldered the sack, stuffed her pistols in there and some more magazines for the M-16s. It was heavy by then and bulging, but she was ready for war.

She stepped into the corridor on the other side of the fire door.

It was empty.

Too bad. She liked using her new rifle. Liked the way it put out the rounds. She wished Joe were here, though. For many reasons, of course, but mainly because he’d been in the service and he knew how to load these things.

She supposed she’d figure it out, though.

The walls were cement block painted an ugly piss yellow. She went through the first doorway she found and into a bank of offices. Fluorescents were on overhead. A few of them, anyway.

The rabids had been through here.

There was no doubt of that. Desks were overturned, computers shattered into plastic shards, phones ripped from walls. The floor was littered with papers and file folders.

She found a cell phone, but all she got was static on it.

She moved to the end and around a corner. More of the same. A framed sepia photo of the municipal building, probably taken back in the 1920s or ’30s was shattered on the floor. It looked like somebody had vomited on it. The only constant was the smell of urine, as if the rabids had gone through here and then marked their territory like dogs.

Nothing else except the woman.

She was sitting in a swivel chair up against a bank of file cabinets. She was naked save for a pair of orange knee-high socks. There was a bullet hole in her forehead, a few of them in fact. Congealed brains and blood trailed down her face onto her chest. There was a rose tattoo on her left breast. Her legs were spread wide, her cold sex on grisly display.

Ruby Sue looked at her for a long time. “There’s no dignity in death in this fucking town, sister,” she told the corpse.

What she was most perplexed by was the woman’s position in the chair. It wasn’t the position in which someone would sit in a chair—her ass was down low, almost hanging off the seat, her back had slid nearly to the bottom of the backrest, head slumped forward. Maybe she had been killed and slid down like that, but it didn’t fit: Why were there no bullet holes in the chair? In the file cabinets behind her?

No, she’d been killed somewhere else and put there.

But why? And by who?

And then Ruby Sue saw the dried patches of clear material around the woman’s vagina and thighs. She’d been laid out in the chair like that so her body could be screwed. That’s what it was.

And although Ruby Sue had gone deep cold inside now, she still found it sickening.

And that’s when she heard them coming up behind her.

She wheeled around with the 16, but never even squeezed off a shot.

The rifle was snatched from her grip and sent spinning across the office. Two naked men—rabids—stood before her. They were giggling, drool running down their chins. Their yellow glaring eyes were swimming with a ghastly hunger.

They tried to speak and succeeded only in making morbid gurgling sounds like bad plumbing.

She did not panic.

This was no place for someone who couldn’t keep their head. The two of them held her by the arms now and with their huge, erect penises pressing against her like missiles, there was no doubt what they had in mind. They’d rape her. Then kill her. Then keep raping her until there was nothing left.

The M-16 she had around her shoulder was stripped free now.

But not the ammo pouch. There was still hope.

Use your head, outsmart them.

They threw her roughly atop a desk.

So much for foreplay.

One rabid held her head down by the hair, brushing his frigid, damp penis against her face. The other began ripping her pants off. He didn’t bother with niceties like zippers and buttons. He yanked them down with savage force, the button popping and sailing away. He tore everything away.

And Ruby Sue, despite the almost phobic horror that trembled in her, did not fight. If she fought, she knew, they’d hold her arms down and she couldn’t have that.

Her pouch was still at her side, the strap wedged around her shoulder. They didn’t seem to be concerned about that.

They were pawing her with their contaminated fingers.

That shouldn’t have mattered, but it didn’t.

The man holding her down leaned in close, a slimy grin stitched across his bloodless lips. A thread of germ-rich drool broke across her face like a spider web. It was cold and gelatinous like old snot, but its touch made her skin feel hot. Waves of nausea rolled through her. She needed badly to vomit, to scream, but since she wasn’t about to lose control like that, she did nothing.

She steeled herself, internalized it all.

The rabid leered at her with a lewd, degenerate mockery of carnal need.

She laid there motionless, her right hand inching slowly to the pouch.

He pushed her legs apart with the hands of a man who’d just handled frozen meat.

Her fingers brushed the pouch.

His breath was rancid, his penis hard against her thigh.

Her fingers slipped into the pouch.

She felt his cock press against her sex.

He started to giggle. A wet, horrible sound. The laughter of the criminally insane.

Her hand closed around the butt of the Browning .380.

The head of his penis found where it had to go.

It slid roughly into her and she gasped.

With a quick, economical motion, she brought out the Browning and shot him in the face. His nose exploded in a spray of blood and he fell back, screaming and clawing at the air in front of him.

The other rabid went into instant action.

He literally pulled Ruby Sue off the desk by her hair and tossed her through the air. She tumbled across another desk, taking the blotter and lamp with her. Her knees cracked the desk and her head cracked the floor. The Browning slid away.

The rabid came right at her.

He kicked her in the belly with enough force to knock the wind out of her. He aimed another for her face, but she darted back quick enough so it only caught her shoulder, flipping her over on her back.

But she still had the pouch.

The rabids came on.

The one with the hole in his face knocked the other out of the way, lurching forward, baying like a hound, spraying blood from his mouth.

She brought out the Colt Python.

It was heavy in her hand. She pulled the trigger and it went off like a cannon, the recoil almost throwing the weapon from her hand. It blew another hole in the rabid, this one right in the center of his chest. He flew back, dead before he hit the floor.

The other one came on and she shot him in the throat, the side of his neck pulverized. He went down, dying, but refusing to go quietly. His fingers wriggled in the air.

Ruby Sue pulled herself up, pressing her wrist against her side. Her right hand, the one that had held the Colt, was numb from the recoil. She slid the weapon back in her pack and retrieved the Browning.

The rabid with the gored throat was up on his knees, head hanging to one side, blood gushing from the ruptured tissues. She put another round in his head and he went down and stayed down.

She went to her knees, vomiting, then began to cry.

But not for long. She found her pants, hitched them up the best she could and found her M-16. The spare one she couldn’t seem to find and didn’t want to take the time. She could hear gunfire again, the poppings of automatics. Sounded like it was both outside and inside the building. She could smell smoke and not just the acrid stink of her own cordite.

Was the fire that close?

She ducked back into the hallway and someone came running at her.

At her and past her.

It was hard to tell whether it was a woman or a man.

Just a figure completely engulfed in flames, stumbling up the corridor, bounding off the walls, making some high-pitched whining sound. The smell of cremated flesh was sickening. The figure made it to the fire door and actually tried to work the handle futilely before dropping into a smoking, roasted heap.

The fire didn’t do that.

The soldiers had flamethrowers.

32

They were moving up the stairs to the third floor.

Johnny was leading the way in a low crouch. The stairwell was like being inside a black box. They could see the lights from below and some illumination from the bend in the stairs above, but that was it.

“We should’ve taken the elevator,” Lou said.

“Sure,” Johnny said, “and get trapped between floors? That would be great. Might take maintenance awhile to reach us.”

He kept going.

He was figuring that if they were extremely lucky, they might make the roof. He knew where the doorway was. It would be locked, but that wouldn’t be a problem. When he was sixteen he’d worked here mopping floors and cleaning the shitters. He was pretty certain everything would still be pretty much the same.

That was, if they could make it there.

The building, he knew, was crawling with rabids and soldiers now. It was like some sort of war and they were trapped in-between. If the rabids didn’t get them, the soldiers would.

He could hear gunfire. It was closer all the time.

Just because Terra and his boys had gotten wiped out, that didn’t mean shit, he knew. The troops would keep coming and coming. They wouldn’t stop until they’d mopped up the entire town.

Nobody had commented on the necklace of trophies Terra was sporting.

That was probably a good thing, Johnny figured. He’d seen guys mutilate cadavers in the war. It was a very solemn thing to them, symbolic of their ferocity perhaps.

Truth was, it was also the act of a damaged mind.

And Terra? He was damaged, all right.

At the top of the steps, Johnny paused.

It was quiet, but he knew there were people up here. Maybe human, maybe not.

His fatigue shirt plastered to his back with sweat, he slipped out into the corridor. It was dimly lit like those below. In either direction were doorways. Some open. Some closed.

The others followed him up.

Their footfalls were very loud, echoing in the stillness.

“Well, what took you, partner?”

That voice…

They turned and Rawley was standing in the doorway of an office. He had an M-16 rifle pointed in their direction, a big shit-eating grin on his piggish features. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost his hat and had his shirt nearly torn off. His face was bruised, crusted with fingers of old blood.

Lou saw him, his jaw dropped. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Back at you, buddy.”

Terra had his weapon on him. “Who’s this greaseball?” he wanted to know.

“Just call him Greaseball, everyone does,” Lou informed him with a very straight face.

Rawley was pretty much as they remembered him—save that he looked like some pissed-off mongrel had chewed him up and shit him back out again. He still had the same crooked smile, the same unreadable eyes.

“Hate to break up the fun and games,” he said, “but you may have noticed that I have a rifle here in my hands and if you don’t drop your artillery, well, shit, in about five seconds you’ll be deader than Jesus.”

“If we stand around bullshitting much longer, we’ll all be dead,” Johnny said.

Terra laughed that high giggle again. “I ain’t about to drop my weapon. You’re either with us or I kill your redneck ass right here.”

Rawley nodded. “Could be. But first, how do I know you aren’t infected?”

“How do we know you aren’t?” Lisa managed.

“Morning, cutie-pie,” Rawley said, bowing slightly. “Hate to be the one to say it, but you look like three-day old dog shit.”

“Go… fuck yourself.”

Rawley laughed. “That’s my girl.”

“We’re going to the roof, Texas. We’re gonna make a stand,” Lou explained to him very calmly. “You’re either in or you’re out. Make your choice. We’re not fucking around here, okay? You can pretend you’re Jim-fucking-Bowie or some shit. That ought to make you happy. Now move or fucking die.”

Rawley did not move. He kept his gun leveled on them.

Lisa let out a grating moan and collapsed.

Lou pulled her to her feet with his good arm, pretty much using up what remained of his strength. “She’s okay,” he said to them, to Johnny in particular. “She needs a rest. We all need a rest.”

“All right, Rawley,” Johnny said with a look in his eye like maybe he had the urge to play a little fast-pitch with the man’s testicles. He had his rifle on Rawley now. “What’s it gonna be?”

Rawley shrugged. “You Yankees certainly are a violent bunch. Must be the climate.” He lowered his sixteen. “Of course, I’ll join you. I was only playing a bit, relieving the tension.”

Terra glared at him. “I came real close to relieving your brains all over the wall, motherfucker.”

“Don’t say?” Rawley acted like this was very interesting. “Where’s your Buck Roger’s helmet, soldier boy?”

“I shoved it up my ass to keep it warm.”

Rawley was still grinning.

“Let’s go,” Johnny said and started down the hall.

Terra turned his back on Rawley for just a second. Then he came around real quick with the barrel of his rifle, slashing the bayonet across Rawley’s face. Rawley screamed and dropped his weapon.

His face was splashed with blood.

He had barely hit the ground when Terra started jabbing him viciously with the bayonet—in the belly, the ribs, the throat, the balls, the ass. Anywhere that was soft and unguarded, the bayonet got him. Pretty soon Rawley was curled into a frayed red ball, the floor wet with his fluids.

Neither Lou nor Johnny intervened.

They just looked at each other and made a mutual decision to let the man die. The world—Cut River, at least—had been thrown back into the Stone Age. Atrocity was nothing new. Barbarism was the norm. Why fight it? Besides they were too damn tired to save the ass of some Texican peckerwood who would have fed them to the dogs the first chance he got.

Terra stooped down next to Rawley’s cooling body.

“What’re you doing?” Johnny asked him, though he well knew.

Terra laughed, thinking it was all pretty funny. He slid a K-Bar knife from its sheath and slit off Rawley’s left ear. Then, in no hurry whatsoever, he carefully threaded it onto his necklace. He had an even ten now. He seemed happy.

“Just a hobby,” he said when he saw Lou staring at him.

Lou nodded dumbly, nervously. “Yeah, you should see my football cards. Mint.”

And then there was the sound of feet coming up the stairs. Many of them.

33

“Boy, am I glad to see you guys,” Terra told the half-dozen soldiers watching him through the goggle visors of their protective hoods.

“Are you?”

The soldiers wore no insignia, so Terra didn’t know if he was talking to a private or a major. Didn’t matter, he figured.

“Johnson-12,” he said, saluting. “Bravo Company, 1st Platoon.” He swept his hand towards his trio of new-found friends. “These ones are okay. Norms.”

The soldiers stood there with weapons raised. They muttered amongst themselves.

“Where’s your hood, Johnson?” another said. “You know the rules.”

And he did: anyone without full protective gear was to be considered infected, as was anyone found within the city limits of Cut River.

He knew that.

He hadn’t forgotten.

He couldn’t help it if his hand casually (or not so casually) drifted up to his face and then slid down again. “Creepers tore it off me,” he explained. “But I drilled ’em all. I’m okay.”

“Are you?” the first one said again.

“Course I am.”

Lou felt like he was stuck in a maze.

A maze full of crazies—some that way by accident, others by training.

He said, “We’re just survivors. That’s all. We’re not foaming at the mouth. Our eyes aren’t lit up like Jack-o-’lanterns. So cut the shit for chrissake. We’re taxpayers. Now do your duty and get our asses out of here.”

Johnny watched them. He expected the worst and kept his mouth shut.

Lou lowered Lisa to the floor because she was getting too goddamned heavy to lug around with his busted-up shoulder and aching leg. She started to tremble and gag, writhing around like she was about to swallow her tongue.

They were all watching her then.

How thin she was.

The sweat beaded on her face.

The bubble of snot in her left nostril.

They were watching her and although nobody could see their eyes behind the visors, it was obvious what was going through their little minds.

“What about her?” one of them said stepping forward. He carried a H & K submachine gun.

The others inched forward. Including the guy with the flamethrower strapped to his back.

“She’s just sick,” Lou said.

“She looks it.”

Terra shook his head. “No, she ain’t got it, man. She’s an addict. She’s strung out.”

Another of the soldiers said, “The town’s burning. It’ll get here soon enough. We should be gone by then.”

“So let’s go,” Lou said.

“We will. Soon enough.”

He whispered something to the other soldiers.

They drew their weapons and formed a defensive perimeter.

“Here’s how it works,” the soldier said. “You and these other two drop your weapons and step away from the girl. She’s infected. She’s gotta go.”

Johnny’s hands tensed on his rifle. “I don’t think so.”

“Then you all burn.”

A tongue of flame licked out of the end of the flamethrower two or three inches. Just enough so all present could see it was primed and ready to do some damage. The guy carrying it stepped forward.

“She’s not infected,” Terra maintained.

“Don’t tell me my business, soldier. I know infected when I see it.”

Terra turned away and then came back with his M-16, sprayed a volley of rounds into the soldiers chest. He stumbled back, pissing red, and went down.

The other soldiers didn’t move.

Nobody moved.

Except the rabids.

A howling, screeching pack of them came flooding down the corridor, bringing the stink of death with them. There had to be nearly twenty of them. Some running, some hopping like insects, others barrel-crawling on hands and feet.

The soldiers didn’t care about Lisa or the others then.

Terra opened up on them.

Johnny and Lou hit the floor, both trying to cover Lisa. A spout of flame whistled over their heads, singeing Lou’s hair.

The rabids ran right into it.

It barely slowed them down.

A few were thrown into a deranged mania as flames swallowed them up. They ran right into the ranks of the soldiers, throwing themselves madly into the walls, the floors, dancing and jumping and shrieking, looking like flaming puppets with clipped strings.

The soldiers were overwhelmed instantly.

They kept shooting, but it did little good.

Some of the rabids dropped and died, but the main force—many of them lit up like Guy Fawkes effigies—fell on them.

The air was putrid with the stench of scorched flesh and hair, gunpowder and blood. There was smoke and tumbling bodies everywhere. The floor was littered with spent brass.

Terra felt teeth bite into the nape of his neck as he smashed his empty rifle down on the head of a rabid. He wheeled around, got hold of his assailant and flipped him through the air. He slipped through the grasp of the others, shoved a whimpering soldier into their midst, and threw himself down the stairs.

Johnny and Lou dragged Lisa away through an open doorway and into a conference room.

A naked woman decided to come with them.

Her hair was smoking, blasted away from the side of her head.

Lou tried to knock her back with his fist, but she absorbed the punch and took hold of him. Her anemic face darted to bite at his throat and he blocked it, trying to elbow her in the mouth. She bit down on his forearm, her yellow sepulchral eyes blazing with delight. He cried out and managed to throw her back out into the hallway, back into the haze and smoke.

He slammed the door shut after her and instantly fists began to hammer on it.

It began to buckle in its frame.

He locked it almost casually, studying the blood welling from the wound in his forearm. It hurt much worse than his shoulder or leg. He stood there looking at the bite marks, the torn tissues, the blood dripping from them. The snotty mucus all over his skin.

It didn’t matter now. Any of it.

Because he wasn’t getting out alive.

34

Tony Terra stumbled blindly down the stairs, lost in an unreasoning panic.

He was infected.

He could feel the burning wound at the back of his neck. God, yes. The virus, Agent-X, Laughing-fucking-Man, was in him now, too.

He tripped down the last three steps and landed on the body of a dead rabid.

Her head was blown open by gunfire. She was a big fat woman. He pulled himself off her. Fat… no, not fat. Her belly was a huge, hard mound.

She’d been pregnant.

Terra started to weep.

He ran a hand across the hill of her abdomen. Wasn’t there any end to what this shit could do? Even expectant women. My God, my God, my God—

The flesh under his palm undulated with a slow, sudden movement. The baby. The baby was still alive in her.

Terra thought of things he could do, might do in a sane world. But not here, not in this awful, hellish place.

The woman was dead. Her flesh was cold.

But her belly… it was hot, waves of heat emanating from it.

The baby couldn’t possibly be alive.

Her belly began to shudder and palpitate with obscene life; the flesh literally began to squirm with a fluidic motion.

He watched, transfixed with terror.

Her body was rocking back and forth as her progeny raged within, a caged animal.

Terra screamed and jumped to his feet.

He didn’t want to see what might chew and claw its way out.

He ran down the corridor, vaulting the bodies of dead rabids and soldiers alike. He saw a restroom door and piled through it. The door swung closed behind him and he was lost in limitless blackness. His fingers pawed the wall, found the switch. Overhead lights buzzed into life.

There was another body on the floor.

Another dead woman.

Maybe a rabid, maybe just some poor civilian caught by them. Didn’t matter one way or another because she was stone cold dead. Dead as a squashed woodchuck on the interstate. Her skirt was hiked up to her flat belly, nothing on beneath. He refused to speculate what that might mean.

He paid her no mind.

Frantically, he went to the row of sinks. He splashed water on his face, all over his neck. He kept dousing the bite until the skin there began to cool slightly. Then he took a handful of pink disinfectant soap from the dispenser and scrubbed it liberally into the wound. The pain it caused brought tears to his eyes, but he kept it up until the bite was numb. Then he doused it again with water. He repeated the entire process three times.

He let the water continue to run.

He put his face in it. God, it felt so good.

As he splashed water onto his face again and again, he told himself that what he needed here was a plan. Any plan. Somehow, he had to get a hood for his suit and link up with one of the units. If he had a hood, he might be able to pull it off. If not, they wouldn’t even show him the courtesy the soldiers upstairs had—they’d shoot him on sight.

Okay.

Maybe, just maybe he’d be okay.

He stood up, rivulets of water running down his shoulders, his back, making their way into the suit. He was going to survive this. He’d show them all. Then maybe when this was all over with (if it ever was), months from now, he’d tell them he’d been bitten. Maybe. Maybe not.

He looked at his haggard reflection in the mirror.

There was someone standing behind him.

A soldier in a protective suit.

The suit was filthy, soiled with patches of dried blood, soot, and dirt. There was a huge tear in the sleeve.

Terra’s heart hitched in his chest.

What bothered him the most was that this soldier had no weapon.

Terra turned and faced him. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “My unit got wiped out upstairs.”

The figure waited there, face veiled behind the visor.

Terra licked his lips. He remembered the knife on his web belt, the 9mm Smith & Wesson. His hand drifted slowly toward it.

The soldier moved now.

Terra brought out the knife because it was quicker and jammed it into the rip in the suit, felt it find flesh and bisect it. The soldier came on regardless, took Terra in his arms, slammed him up against the sink.

Terra tore the hood away. Easy enough: it wasn’t attached.

What he saw came out of a nightmare.

The sunless face was the embodiment of black, barren hatred. Nothing with a soul could look like that. The face was ashen, the mouth hooked in a drooling, noxious grin.

With the sweep of one arm, Terra was thrown to the floor.

His attacker came on like some relentless wind-up toy. His luminous graveyard eyes were merciless and unforgiving.

Terra tried to speak, but all that came out was a dry croaking.

No matter. This thing was not human. The only thing that propelled it was cold, flat hunger and the lust for blood and killing.

The soldier fell on Terra, fingers like icicles digging into his throat. His breath stank of morgues, teeth drawn back, toxic tangles of drool swaying from his cracked lips like braids.

Terra found the 9mm Smith.

As the rabid made to bite him, he put the barrel alongside the maniac’s head and splashed his brains all over the stalls.

He had to pull the fingers from his throat.

Then, gun in hand, he stumbled back into the corridor. He started running to the left, then the right, finally sliding down the wall and whimpering. He put the barrel of the 9mm into his mouth… but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Tears rolled down his face. He stayed that way for some time, listening to distant screams and gunfire, explosions and howling sounds.

Finally, he got to his feet.

He dragged himself down the corridor, towards the stairs. He felt empty, deflated, and hopeless. He wanted out. He wanted it to end. He wanted—

He went down into a crouch as he heard a strange, sloppy sound.

He inched forward, his heart thudding.

He heard a loathsome, wet mewling noise that reminded him of the squeal of a newborn kitten, but blasphemous somehow, degenerate. It set his flesh to crawling like there were worms knitting his skin.

He saw the corpse of the pregnant woman… saw the blood everywhere, the grisly smeared path of something black and oily.

It went up the wall.

Right up the wall and he followed it with his eyes…

Oh, Jesus, I forgot, I forgot.

There was something up there clinging to the ceiling like a pink and gray fleshy spider, an eyeless and pulsing mass that dropped down onto him, fell over him in a squirming, writhing horror.

It was flabby and warm, like being caressed by a placenta.

It forced itself into his eyes and down his throat, up his nostrils and through his pores. Wherever he was open, it surged and flowed and consumed. It was the first true citizen of the new Cut River.

And for Terra, it was an unspeakable death.

35

It was time to make a run for it.

Out in the corridor, they could hear battle being waged—soldiers screaming and dying, rabids falling on them like animals. There was the constant report of rifles and submachine guns, the acrid stink of flamethrowers. The occupying force was intent on cleaning out the municipal building which had become something of a hive.

It was here that the end would be played out.

That much was obvious.

The door was under constant barrage as the rabids tried to get in.

Lou, Johnny, and Lisa were in a conference room. Its primary features were the long, polished oak table and the windows that looked down on the burning city. Other than that it was unremarkable. There was a pegboard on the wall with various civil announcements and the minutes of previous city council meetings.

There was another door at the far end of the room.

The one they came in was buckling in its frame. It was a big heavy job or it wouldn’t have even lasted this long. The one at the far end seemed unmolested… so far.

“It’s death to go out there,” Johnny said, “but we can’t stay here.”

Lou said, “Then let’s do it. I don’t have shit to lose now.”

Lisa, who swam in and out of her fugue, made a few grunting sounds which they took as assent.

Lou stood before the door. He had Lisa’s .357 now. The shotgun was empty.

Johnny, holding Lisa at his side, said simply, “Ready?”

Lou nodded.

The other door burst in and two or three rabids fell in with it, along with a lot of billowing black smoke and the nauseating stench of burning flesh and blasted wood. No sense in discussing it any longer.

Lou led the way out into the hall.

The corridor was hazy with smoke.

As Johnny and Lisa slipped by, Lou watched the far end. There was no more shooting. Just a lot of moaning. Cries for help. The slithering, hissing sound of the rabids as they mutilated and possibly devoured the soldiers. Lou could hear violent thuds, wet ripping sounds, sucking and tearing noises. The smoke, thankfully, blocked his view. Tongues of flame licked up the walls. The smoke made his eyes burn.

“Come on,” Johnny said as he led Lisa away.

And Lou had every intention of doing so, except that out of the smoke three forms came walking. Rabids. Three men. One of them had several bullet holes in him, but he came on regardless. Demented eyes swam in bleached faces, a moldering stink of sick wards drifted off the trio.

Lou shot two of them in the head and they fell back into the wall of smoke, spraying blood. The third simply snarled, went down low and disappeared the way he’d come.

“You okay?” Johnny asked him when he caught up.

“Fine,” Lou said. “Let’s go.”

The soldiers, it occurred to him, were losing this battle.

The dire army of rabids were overwhelming them by numbers and sheer ferocity. How could you hope to fight savages like that by conventional means? And that got him to thinking that if this went on any length of time, Terra’s Emergency Response Group would start using more lethal means to control and crush the good citizens of Cut River.

No matter.

He wouldn’t live to see it.

They moved up the smoky corridor, coughing, eyes watering. The fog of smoke was good and bad—it helped to hide them, but it also concealed the forms of their enemies. Lou kept seeing the faces of his ex-wives and lovers and wished to God he would have had the chance to say good-bye to them. But such a thing was far beyond the realm of possibility now.

They moved around a bend in the corridor and right away found more bodies. There were holes punched into the walls—literally hundreds of them—from gunfire. Great areas were scorched from the flamethrowers.

And bodies.

Dozens.

Rabids and soldiers.

Many locked in death embraces. The hallway looked like a litter pile from an extermination camp. The smell of smoke was overpowered here by the corrupt and polluted stink of mass death.

Johnny lowered Lisa to the floor and stripped a flamethrower and a 9mm sidearm from a soldier.

Lou, following his lead, took a gun off a corpse, too. They’d need everything they could get.

“There’s a doorway up ahead,” Johnny explained. “It leads into a maintenance corridor. The stairs to the roof are in there.”

“If we make it.”

“Sure, if we make it.”

Johnny led the way again.

Lisa was still lost in her narcotic dreams (or the lack of them), but she was able to shuffle along if she had an arm to hang onto. Lou figured she was the lucky one. She’d been out of it for hours now. With any luck, he figured, maybe she’d die without truly coming to her senses and, really, what else was there to hope for?

And that’s when the woman stepped out of the murk.

Lou saw her and cringed.

She reminded him vaguely of the rabid police woman he’d fought earlier that evening downstairs. She was equally as lovely—tall, elegant, completely naked, a sweep of blonde hair falling down one shoulder. She had a knife in one hand and something in the other. A head. The head of man which had been decapitated crudely, dripping meat hanging from the stump like confetti. She offered Lou a sardonic, hungry grin, a skullish rictus really, and a single rope of glistening drool ran from her mouth, oozing down the cone of one perfect breast, pooling at the nipple.

He remembered his gun and brought it up.

Something struck him in the chest and he went on his ass.

The head.

With one fluid sweep of musculature, she’d flung the head at him and with such force it was like being hit by a medicine ball. The wind was literally knocked out of him. He’d lost his gun and she was advancing like a starved wolf that had separated a weak stag from the pack.

She dove on him.

He fought with everything he had left which wasn’t much. She overpowered him effortlessly, pinning him to the floor and slavering his screaming face with kisses, with licks from her long discolored tongue which was so cold, so very cold… like a snake from a meat locker. Drool washed over his face and he fought hopelessly as she licked a spot at his neck and playfully nipped it with her teeth, sucking up the blood that ran out like an infant at its mother’s teat.

He was locked down by her glaring vulpine eyes… and suddenly, was liking it.

And then there was a gunshot.

Followed by a second and a third.

The woman went taut, began to shudder, her mouth split open into a bestial cry of defeat. She howled and screeched and then slumped forward, vomiting a sea of black blood and toxic waste all over him.

Lou kicked free.

Johnny was a few feet away, but his weapon was lowered. He was looking past Lou at the rabid woman clawing her way up the wall with snake-like gyrations of her trunk.

Ruby Sue was standing there, gun in hand.

She was bloody and beaten and looked like she’d just escaped from a tiger cage. But her eyes were normal, if not glazed and empty. They mirrored recognition of those she saw in the corridor.

The woman pulled herself up the wall, three gaping bloody holes in her back. She turned and leered at her attacker with poisoned eyes. She growled and snapped her jaws and spit out clots of blood and phlegm. Her eyes found Lou and fixed on him with that vicious, boiling hatred.

And then Ruby Sue shot her in the head.

She slid down the wall slowly like a raindrop down a window, leaving a smear of gore behind her. But not for one moment did her manic eyes leave Lou’s own. Even in death, cheated of prey, like some morbid human lioness, that flat and cold appetite remained.

Ruby Sue looked down at her, stepped over the armless body of a soldier. “Well,” she said very nonchalantly, “let’s get moving.”

Lou sat there on his ass, bitten, clawed, bruised and bleeding. Through a mask of blood and bile he began to laugh. In fact, he began to cackle madly as if it was all the funniest thing he’d ever heard of.

Ruby Sue took him by the arm and helped him to his feet.

“So you finally went crazy, eh?” she said. “Well, goddamn, it’s about time, man.”

Nobody bothered to ask her what she was doing there or if she’d been infected. It was pretty much a given thing by this point: outside of Lisa, there were no more virgins among them.

They all had it.

They all had tasted the teeth of the rabids and carried the dark secret of Cut River within them.

Johnny was in the lead again.

Lou was the rear guard man.

Ruby Sue helped Lisa along.

No group of soldiers had seen worse action than they, had waded through more blood and viscera and insanity. And even if by some crazy, impossible set of circumstances one or more managed to survive, they would never be the same again, would never be whole, would never be human as such.

They were moving lower now, almost at a staggering crouch.

The corridor was so thick with smoke it was like to trying to suck breath from the tailpipe of a Buick.

“Door should be just ahead,” Johnny said to them, leading on.

He stopped suddenly, hearing a shrill cackling sound.

It reminded him of fingers drawn over a blackboard. Not even remotely human. An elderly woman wearing the bedraggled, bloody remains of a bathrobe squatted in a doorway. She dropped what she’d been nibbling on—a human hand.

Her voice was wet and congested like the lungs of an ammonia victim: “How’s about a kiss, handsome?” Then the voice dissolved into a hissing like acid dissolving flesh.

She stood upright and came at him, drool spraying from her lips.

Her hands were almost at his throat when he pressed the trigger of the automatic he’d taken from the dead soldier. Her body jerked as a volley of three rounds punched through it. Her eyes glazed-over, went wet and vitreous, translucent like high-gloss enamel. She stepped back, fingering her wounds.

Johnny shot her in the face and she pitched stiffly over, trembling on the floor, arms slapping at her sides. Ichor and filth bubbled from her lips and she went still.

Another woman came to take her place.

She wore a short business skirt slit at the thigh and high heels, but nothing more. A river of foamy drool flooded from her mouth and painted her large, jiggling breasts like a slime of oil. She opened her mouth and let out a peal of wailing torment at them. Her tongue flicked across her lips and she spat a wad of mucus into Johnny’s face.

He brought his 9mm up.

Hands on her knees, she rocked from side to side like some child daring to be hit with a ball. A stream of sour-smelling urine ran from beneath her skirt and rained to the floor. Her flesh was glistening with plague excretions, issuing a sharp, caustic mist.

But she did not attempt an attack.

Johnny pumped four rounds into her.

The first went between her legs, missing entirely. The next went into her thigh, the others into her belly. She spun around bleeding and screaming like a woman in a padded cell.

He shot her in the chest, pulverizing one breast into a drooping sac of meat.

She turned and clawed at the air, barked at the ceiling, eyes rolling madly like marbles on a roulette table. A steady stream of something black and oozing poured from her wounds. The raw bile of human evil. The stuff that flowed in the veins of child molesters and rapists and mass murderers. She shook all over like a wet, stinking dog, then went down in a heap, spasms running through her.

Then the survivors were moving again and they could hear more gunfire and much closer. Not only small arms, but heavy machine guns now. What sounded like helicopters buzzing the building as if they were hunting wasps on a mission.

Then the door.

It was locked. Johnny put a few bullets in it and threw it open.

He led the way in followed by Ruby Sue and Lisa. Lou came last.

Only he never actually made it in.

Because he heard them coming: the pounding feet and hissing voices and knew there was too many this time, just too many. He turned and decided it was as good a place as any to make his last stand. He thought of matinees as a kid, old movies on TV. Heroism. It had never been in him. Not until now. And he decided that heroism, though once a very unthinkable, abstract concept, made perfect sense now that he didn’t give a flaming shit about his own life and had absolutely nothing to lose.

“COME ON GODDAMMIT!” Ruby Sue called out to him and Johnny said something familiar.

“Go!” he ordered them. “It’s Alamo-time, people! I’ll hold ’em off!”

His eyes connected with theirs one last time and some sliver of hope, of selfish survival lodged momentarily in his mind: Just what in fuck’s name are you doing, Lou? What do you hope to accomplish here? But there was no real answer to that, only a warm pervading sense that for the first time in his life he was doing something completely unselfish and damn if it didn’t feel good.

He shut the door behind him, pressed his back to it.

They were coming, maybe drawn by the shooting or the rich smell of fresh blood, regardless, they were coming.

He saw them moving out of the smoke, swimming out of the murk like piranhas. Jesus, so many.

Hundreds?

Could there really be that many?

Was it even remotely possible?

He chewed down on his lip until it bled, his guts gone to jelly, as utterly terrified as he’d ever been in his entire life. So many of them. God, how he wanted to run, to make it easier on himself and fuck the rest.

But he wouldn’t.

Not this time. And not ever again.

And maybe the true measure of a man, of a human being, was how he faced death. Not biting and clawing like an animal, like them, but as a human being.

As a man.

As the rabids poured forth he suddenly saw them as they were: a hive. A mass army under a single set of imperatives and drives. A single cold, relentless intellect. Like ants or wasps they lived only to serve the hive, to crush intruders, to gather food and defend their lair.

And that’s how they came at him, scampering forward like rats, all teeth and eyes and clutching fingers. He was what Terra had called a norm and, yes, he was the enemy and they could smell it on him.

Mostly, the ones that came for him were children.

He wondered if he’d encountered any of them back at the playground.

He brought up his guns, one in each hand, feeling oddly like a gunslinger in a surreal, nightmarish western and started shooting. They absorbed his bullets and, although some fell, the mass crawled and hopped and lurched forward.

And then he was out of shells.

Staring into their cruel, sadistic faces, he said, he shouted, “I AM NOT THE ENEMY! DON’T YOU SEE THAT? THE SOLDIERS! THEY’RE THE ENEMY! THEY’RE PART OF WHAT MADE YOU LIKE THIS!”

But those baneful white faces did not care.

They came on, a noisome throng, rustling and slithering and growling and hissing. He could see their sharp teeth and the pawing nails at the end of their pallid hands, the matted hair and yellow eyes like harvest moons rising above blighted October fields.

Yes, they came on in a swarm, totally detached of humanity, human insects ritually purging the hive of dangerous elements much as our ancestors might once have done under a boiling black sky of slaughter. Theirs was a fixed society and there was no room for those who did not fit seamlessly into the mass.

Lou heard his voice scream as they got closer, as he smelled their dark stink.

They circled around him and pressed in slowly, in no hurry whatsoever.

As he felt their cold fingers open furrows in his face and their teeth divorce him of flesh, all he could think of were their eyes. Those phobic, predatory pits.

He kept watching them until his own eyes were torn free from their housings.

36

“We’re all going to die,” Lisa heard someone say. “All of us. It all ends here. This is where it all ends for us.”

It took her a moment or two to realize that she was saying it.

She wasn’t entirely sure whether she was dreaming or awake and in this goddamn town, did it really matter? Because that was one thing she was sure of—she was still in Cut River. She could feel fresh air brush her face. Fresh, damp, yet carrying the smell of smoke.

So they’d made it to the roof, had they?

No matter, it was all coming down now and there was little she or any of the others could do but accept it and pray it happened quick.

She knew she personally couldn’t take much more.

Her nerves were frayed and her body ached and, God, this is what the junk had done to her. The one night of her life when she couldn’t afford to be anything but sharp, she’d fallen apart.

She was awake now.

The world was ending and she could smell the smoke and feel the fear of those around her. Although it was night, she could see plumes of smoke drifting against the retreating face of the moon and smell the burning stink of the town as it died. Beyond the rooftop, the horizon was blazing orange and red and yellow like the perimeter of hell itself.

She suddenly realized that her head was cradled in Ruby Sue’s lap and that Ruby Sue was droning on and on.

“…it was never nothing personal, girl, you have to understand that. That manager of yours… well… he played with the wrong people. The day you came here, I guess that would be today or was it yesterday? Fuck it. They found him, dragged him out of hiding and, well, you get the idea. They whacked him out, you know? Joe was hooked up with… well, I guess it doesn’t matter… but he got the contract on you and that brought us here. It was never anything personal. You believe that, don’t you?”

Lisa didn’t really care.

In the back of her mind, sure, it explained things, but it seemed so trivial now. What did any of it matter?

She blinked her eyes and saw Johnny.

Saw the way he was looking at her.

His eyes radiated a certain fuzzy warmth and she was pretty certain that in these few short hours he’d fallen in love with her. She smiled at him and it felt good to do so. She imagined she looked a real fright, like an extra from an Italian zombie movie.

But he didn’t seem to care.

“We made it?” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah, finally.”

Ruby Sue stroked her face. There were tears in her eyes. “Joe didn’t… he didn’t make it here. Not this time.”

“Lou?” she said.

Johnny shook his head, looked away.

So it was only the three of them now. She guessed it really didn’t matter. She could hear gunfire and explosions and figured the army, or whoever those people were, were closing in, cleansing the town of its infected elements. Which, she knew, would include them eventually.

“I think the shit’s about to get deep,” Johnny said.

And he was right.

“I don’t mind dying,” Lisa said to him, “as long as I’m with you.”

37

Johnny smiled at her in the glow of the burning town, beneath the baleful eye of the full moon which was slipping away now into the western sky. He wanted to tell her many things, but there was no time. War had broken out below and there was gunfire and explosions and screaming and dying. A main force group had probably made it up to the third floor and encountered the mob that had gotten Lou.

Hell was breaking loose now.

The rooftop was pretty much the same as Johnny remembered from when he was a teenager. There were two maintenance sheds up there as well as some sort of radio shack with an antenna climbing into the hazy sky. Probably for the police and fire radios.

The three survivors were hidden around the side of one of the sheds, backs up against the projecting outer ledge of the southern exposure. They were on the only flat expanse of roof. The rest was all sheer and pitched, jutting domes and towers and you name it. Behind them, if you were to look up above the four-foot ledge, you could see the town burning.

Johnny had looked for some time and then forced himself to look away. The destruction of his hometown wasn’t as pleasant a thing as he’d once envisioned.

They were waiting for the killers.

Crouched in a tight little formation, they were waiting to die.

Ruby Sue said, “Maybe we should just get the fuck out of—”

“Quiet,” Johnny whispered.

They were coming.

The only true advantage the three of them had was that their assailants did not know precisely where they were. Maybe they had a general idea there would be something up here, but not who or what. The door on the far side swung open and out came a soldier, moving low and defensively, M-16 cradled in his arms. His vision was obscured by his hood, so he had to stop and scan his surroundings from time to time.

“He’s mine,” Ruby Sue said, picking up her rifle.

The soldier was followed by three others, part of a recon team.

They would check the roof and if there was trouble, they’d call in a main force body. They fanned out, paying particular attention to the radio shack. The first guy crept over near the maintenance sheds.

Ruby Sue got a bead on him with her M-16, aiming the barrel in the general direction of his upper body. It was unlikely she’d miss—the bastard was close enough to spit at now.

In his hood, he hadn’t seen her yet.

Then he did.

As he made eye contact (or what passed for it under the hood), Ruby Sue pulled the trigger. He took two three-shot bursts directly in the chest. His rifle went one way and he went the other, his arms flaying, his suit painted red. He hit the ground kicking and wailing and gurgling, trying in vain to strip his hood off. In a moment or two, he was still. Only the stink of cordite in the air remained.

The other three charged out, shooting in every conceivable direction.

Using the .30-06, Johnny dropped both of them with head-shots, their visors exploding with blood and meat.

The last man carried a flamethrower and he squirted a barrage of fire in their general direction. It struck one of the sheds and lit it up. As the guy tried to make it back through the doorway, Johnny shot him in the tanks and there was eruption of fire as burning fuel engulfed the man and everything around him. Like a villager caught in a napalm burst, the guy danced around wildly before collapsing in a blackened, sizzling heap.

There was more gunfire then, coming from the stairwell.

Lisa screamed.

Near where the body of the first soldier lay, a white and skeletal hand swung up and over the ledge, a rabid pulling itself up onto the roof. It was hard to say whether it was a man or a woman.

Lisa looked over the ledge and saw chaos.

The parking lot and courtyard below were a hive of activity.

There were assault vehicles with searchlights scanning the night, scanning the building. Hordes of rabids were attacking groups of soldiers and there were the continual reports of machine guns and small-arms fire. Grenades were bursting and flamethrowers spitting out streams of flame. A lot of dying and screaming and madness. The stink wafting up from down there was the smell of crematory ovens—thick, pungent, and nauseating.

But it was hardly the worse thing.

For the façade of the municipal building was actually alive with creeping, slinking motion as rabids scaled the walls. They were crawling upwards like spiders. Literally hundreds of them fighting for space. The building was infested with them. Some fell, only to be replaced by three or four others.

Many were very near the top.

As evidence of this, two or three more of them made it over the ledge, hissing and angry.

“Jesus Christ,” Johnny muttered.

Thirty or forty others were creeping over the peaked roofs, dragging the bodies of dead soldiers with them. The only thing all of this had in common was that they were all making for the same place: the section of roof Johnny and the others had once considered a safe haven.

More soldiers came through the doorway.

Ruby Sue’s body jerked as slugs swept across her chest.

Johnny watched, squeezing off shots as did Lisa now.

But who to shoot at?

Rabids?

Soldiers?

They were all congregating here for the final, apocalyptic battle as the building burned and the town raged and death hung in the air like a shroud.

Ruby Sue got to her feet and dropped two soldiers, despite the fact that she was badly wounded. There were fifteen or twenty soldiers on the roof now and more coming from the mouth of the stairwell all the time.

A cloud of flame inundated both Ruby Sue and a pair of rabids closing in on her. They stumbled into each other, human candles, greasy black smoke coming off them in churning plumes.

Johnny and Lisa shot alternately at rabids and soldiers until they were just out of ammunition.

Rabids swarmed over the ledge.

Many were gunned down or lit on fire before they stepped onto the roof, but they kept coming, a human wave attack of the damned.

The air was black with smoke and the stink of cremated meat and fresh blood.

The rabids that had come over the rooftops dove on the soldiers.

Others formed themselves into ranks atop the maintenance sheds. In a grisly, almost cartoonish display, they pelted the soldiers with the only things they had at their disposal: body parts. They dismembered the bodies of their kills and heaved heads and legs and arms at the white-suited troops. Entire trunks spun through the air and flattened troopers.

The confused soldiers were firing in all directions, dropping rabids and their fellow soldiers as well.

Lisa and Johnny stayed down low and fought on.

Johnny picked an M-16 up off a dead soldier and cut down an advancing wave of rabids, catching two, three white suits in the process. He felt a stray round rip through his shoulder and then another pulverize his right kneecap.

Lisa had the sidearm of a fallen trooper—a 9mm auto—and she was shooting pretty much at anything that moved.

The rooftop was a perpetual motion machine of fire and bodies and shooting and blinding smoke and howling rabids.

She dropped a rabid that beat a soldier to the ground with a severed limb.

Then she heard a high, whining sibilance like the buzz of a pissed-off hornet.

She spun around and a rabid whose face had been blasted right down to the bone clawed out at her. She kicked out, catching him in the thigh and knocking him momentarily off balance. She blocked another lunge, felt a spray of drool splatter against her face, and put two rounds in his chest. He fell back and was replaced by two, three others and she just kept shooting until there was nothing left to shoot.

The rooftop was a gray, spiraling haze of smoke and flames and she couldn’t tell any longer where the rabids and the soldiers were.

It was a free-fire zone.

The flames were eating away at the building and occasional muffled explosions rocked everyone to the ground. The fire was advancing through the city and Lisa could hear something in the distance like an air raid siren. But it was nearly blotted out by the confused shrieks of the dying and the screeching of killers and the sounds of blaring loudspeaker horns and gunfire.

A rabid was on top of Johnny—a naked, barking woman with a cleaver in her hand.

She was bringing it down in lethal arcs.

He was blocking its edge with his rifle, but stroke after stroke, she was whittling through it.

Lisa ran over there and pounded the woman’s head with the butt of the empty automatic. She kept at until the maniac dropped her cleaver and her head was pulped and bleeding.

But it didn’t stop her.

She wrapped her fingers around Johnny’s throat despite the blows he rained into her face. Lisa dug her fingers into the woman’s cold neck and screamed as the flesh peeled away in strips like flaking dough.

Johnny cracked the woman in the face with the butt of his Remington and both she and Lisa went over in a fighting heap.

Lisa fought free and pulled Johnny to his feet.

His body jerked as bullets shredded through it.

His hand brushed Lisa’s face and then more slugs ripped into him and he fell back over the ledge and into the night.

The soldiers were losing.

Most of them were dead and the rabids were still coming on, driven into a manic feeding frenzy like sharks in a bloody sea. They mutilated soldiers and bit the flesh from their faces, stripped away containment suits and skin in the process. A woman was sucking at the bleeding throat of a fallen soldier as a man raped her from behind. And that seemed to be all they wanted to do or were interested in doing in this stinking envelope of scorched bodies: feeding, killing, and fornicating.

Beneath the sinking moon, they celebrated this night of festival with feasting and fucking.

Lisa took up a gun and killed a few, but it was all really quite pointless.

A bloody leg slammed into her face and she fell back against the ledge, nearly going right over and not really making much of an attempt to stop herself, knowing it would be better that way.

And then they were on her, too, three of them.

They fell on her and teeth sank into her throat and fingers gouged valleys into her flesh. She propped her foot against the side of the maintenance shed and, drawing upon every remaining bit of energy that pulsed in her veins, she kicked off with everything she had.

She and her host of rabids flipped over the edge, careening down.

Still they held her, though, biting and pulling at her.

They were in free fall, the four of them, flipping over and over through the air, and then Lisa was riding atop them and they began to smash through the upper limbs of a tree. Their bodies took the impacts, breaking and crushing beneath her. And then the final resounding, jarring impact as they slammed into the grass below.

Lisa was knocked numb and senseless, but unbroken.

After a time, she crawled away from the human wreckage, away from the burning building and the attacking rabids and the peals of machine gun fire. Uninjured except for bites and scratches and numerous lumps and bumps, she crawled like a baby through the grass over mutilated bodies and into the darkness.

Soon, there would be nowhere to escape the flames.

She pulled herself over a curb and into the road.

The pavement was cold beneath her, wet leaves sticking to her pants and shirt. She found a manhole cover. Pressing her fingers into the lip, she began tugging at it until it loosened, came up a few inches. She managed to get it standing upright in its cavity… but then it slipped from her fingers and fell into the murk below with a splash.

She crept down the ladder after it.

It was cool down there.

Cool, dank, and quiet.

She splashed on through the maze of tunnels until she finally felt safe. She found a shelf of frigid concrete sticking out above the waterline and lowered herself onto it. Stretching out like a corpse on a slab, she folded her hands across her bosom and closed her sore eyes.

Sleep came almost instantly.

In the darkness, rats splashed through the water and moved across the brickwork industriously. A few rabids took shelter down there, too.

But Lisa knew nothing of this. She slept on as a coma settled over her and would for hours and hours until the mop-up and extermination above was completed.

But she wouldn’t sleep forever.

Maybe tonight or the next she would waken.

Waken and claim the night as only her kind could.