Zombie Pulp

MORTUARY

Weston said his people were ready to kick ass and take names and Silva knew the moment had come. A lot was riding on what he did in the new few minutes. The decisions he made now—or didn’t make—could haunt him for years.

“We’re going to do this right, understand?” he said to Weston. “This operation is not going to become another Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m not about to become the subject of a Senate investigation.”

And now that it was time to break the standoff between the FBI and the religious crazies down in the compound, Silva was wondering for the first time in his career if he was the right man for the job.

Using a nightscope, he was looking across that open stretch of field, thinking the complex looked like something from an old prison movie. A sprawling, flat-roofed collection of rectangular buildings quarried from a dirty gray stone. The windows were tall and narrow, set with iron bars. The grounds were barren, the perimeter wrapped up in a high chain-link fence topped with coiled barbwire. A very utilitarian sort of place. About as cozy as a Victorian madhouse.

A helicopter buzzed overhead, a mounted searchlight scanning over the darkened, interconnected buildings.

Silva didn’t like it. Didn’t like the feeling twisting in his belly.

And he liked even less what was going to happen within the next ten minutes or so.

Things went well and nobody got hurt… well, careers were going to be made here tonight. But, if on the other hand, the whole thing went south… somebody’s ass was going to get hung out to dry. And Silva pretty much figured whose ass it would be.

Silva was an FBI Assistant Director for the Critical Incident Response Team, the CIRT. He was in direct charge of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. The HRT was a Tactical Support Branch of the CIRT, a highly-trained paramilitary force used in every delicate situation from hostage rescue and high-risk arrests to mobile assaults and the search for WMDs.

One of their specialties were raids against barricaded subjects.

Something they were going to be practicing real soon now.

Down in the compound were members of the Divine Church of the Resurrection, a shadowy cult led by a psychotic messiah name of Paul Henry Dade. Dade’s specialty was kidnapping new recruits, brainwashing them and putting them to work in his domestic terror network which he funded with everything from narcotics trafficking to the sale of illegal arms.

This guy was so fucked-up, Charles Manson had openly called him a fanatic in a taped interview two months before.

And for once, old Charlie was right.

Night had fallen now and the immediate area around the police blockade was a hive of bustling activity. Hostage negotiators on loudspeakers were trying to get Dade’s people to give themselves up. Floodlights were sweeping the compound. Armored trucks and support units were pulled up at the ready, ambulances and fire engines behind them. And to the immediate rear, the county sheriff and his people keeping the press and the curious at bay.

Jesus, it was like a circus, Silva thought.

He got on his walkie-talkie: “All right, Weston,” he said, his voice oddly shrill, “tell your teams to prepare to stage.”

A balding agent named Runyon came running up, leaping from the back of a tactical support van. He wore a midnight blue windbreaker like Silva with the letters FBI stenciled on the back in day-glo yellow.

“Sir,” he said, “thermal imaging still isn’t picking up a goddamn thing down there.”

“Dammit,” Silva said. “I knew we should have kicked the door in two days ago.”

But it wasn’t his decision. The timing of the raid was his, but the actual decision came down from the Attorney General. The standoff had been going on for nearly a week now and the administration was in no hurry to get anymore bureaucratic egg on their faces. So they’d held back. Until tonight. And that was just plain bullshit because thermal imaging had told them the worst possible thing since early that morning: no infrared signatures.

Meaning, if there was anything alive in the complex, it must have been hiding pretty damn deep.

Silva thumbed his walkie-talkie. “Weston. Deploy your teams. Repeat: It’s a go. Take it down…”

There were three HRT tactical teams: Red Team, Blue Team, and Green Team. Each had four operatives. Blue Team came in from the rear, cutting its way through the chain link fence and blowing the backdoor with a shaped charge of C-4. Green Team was helicoptered to the roof, put on standby. Red Team blew their way through the front entrance.

And waltzed right into the mouth of hell itself.

TAC unit Red Team was led by Weston himself, an ex-Delta Force commando. When the door was blown in, he charged through, LeClere, Becker, and Hookley right behind him. All the HRT TAC teams were dressed in black coveralls and Kevlar vests. They wore ballistic helmets with headsets and NV goggles, carried Colt M4 tactical carbines, assault shotguns, and H & K MP5 machine pistols.

They were loaded for bear.

The compound was blacker than the inside of a body bag, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and staircases leading up and down. Dead-ends and cul-de-sacs and storage closets. The place had originally been a U.S. Army military complex in World Wars I and II, then a government warehouse, and now?

Now it was a trap waiting to be sprung.

No electricity, no water. No nothing. Just the unknown waiting in the damp darkness.

“Keep your eyes open,” Weston told them over his headset, studying the corridor ahead through the green field of his NV goggles. “Not seeing any movement… not a damn thing…”

Becker said, “Not picking up shit on infrared.”

They probed farther, weapons held out at the ready. The corridor angled off to the left and Weston came around the corner fast, ducking down low in a firing stance. Immediately he scanned for unfriendlies. Found absolutely nothing.

“Clear,” he said.

The others came around the corner.

There were four doorways ahead, every one of them closed. The TAC unit took them down one by one. They were all vacant, nothing inside but some old packing crates, a few empty twenty-five gallon drums. Red Team moved to the end of the corridor. There was a heavy iron door blocking their progress and it was locked.

Becker slapped a charge on it, set it, and the TAC unit stepped back.

The charge went with a peal of thunder, nearly stripping the door from its hinges. Red Team moved in, taking up firing positions. It was a big room, dank and chill, about forty-feet in length, thirty in width. The air was rancid with a pall of moist bacterial decay.

And there was a very good reason for that.

Infrared told them there was nothing alive inside and, God, how true that was. The place was like a slaughterhouse. But instead of carcasses of beef, human bodies were hung from meat hooks chained to the ceiling, dozens and dozens of them. Naked and stark, they’d been skinned, disemboweled, carved and plucked. Men, women, children. Some had no limbs, others were lacking heads. They twisted in the air with a slow, dreadful motion, a dance macabre.

Their body cavities had been quite neatly hollowed out.

The TAC unit just stood there, the stink of death rubbed in their faces. All those sightless, staring eyes and empty sockets glaring down at them with an almost primal hunger.

“Jesus Christ,” LeClere finally said. “It’s like a morgue in here.”

“All right,” Weston managed. “It’s bad… but we’ve got work to do here.”

Red Team slid their NV goggles back up onto their helmets, slipped protective goggles over their eyes and clicked on the tactical flashlights bracketed to their weapons. They played the lights around, gigantic shadows jumping over the walls.

Weston reported what they found to AD Silva as the TAC unit moved through the carnage, their faces pale and corded. The bodies were hung in neat rows, the sweeping beams of the flashlights making them seem to move and creep, duck away and dart forward. Shadows crawled over those bloodless death masks, making them grin and leer with a macabre life.

Together, the troopers moved down the rows of bodies and saw there were not just bodies, but arms hanging from those chains as well. Hooks inserted at the meat of their elbows, they were colorless things spattered with dark spirals of old blood.

Nobody was saying anything now.

Only hard-edged discipline, unit integrity, and months of tough training kept the men from bolting out of there. Weston would not have blamed them if they had. Not really. Because he was examining the bodies much closer than they were and he knew what those gashed punctures he was seeing were.

Teeth marks.

These bodies had been gnawed on. Faces and wrists, legs and necks. Something had been at them. And from the arrangement of the bites, Weston had a pretty good idea it hadn’t been animals.

As they moved down the rows, Becker bumped into the corpse of a woman and she bumped into another who bumped into yet another, until that entire row was swinging and twisting and gyrating. It was a horrible thing to see. The shadows pooling and jumping, those bodies filled with a hideous animation, looking as if they were trying to pull themselves free.

The men could barely take it.

Weston had not expected anything like this. He could feel the horror and revulsion coming off his men in raw, sickening waves.

There was another door beyond the dancing cadavers which led into another room much like the first. Instead of a meat locker, this one looked more like a warehouse. Deep shelves ran from floor to ceiling on either wall. But the shelves were heaped with things.

And Weston wanted to know what, despite himself. He just had to know. And not out of morbid curiosity, but because it was his job.

The shelves were stacked with bodies. Dozens and dozens of corpses wrapped in plastic sheeting or stained shrouds. Men, women, children. Cultists and kidnapped victims. Some newly dead and others severely decomposed… maybe dead for weeks, if not months, faces boiled right down to muscle and ligament and knobs of bone. Some were zipped in bags and others… what there were of them… secreted in buckets.

As they went about their grim business, pawing through the remains, making one grisly discovery after another, the TAC unit found worse things. Not just cadavers, but parts of them… hands and heads and torsos.

This place, the entire place, not just a mortuary, but something worse. A dissection room. An anatomical theater… only Weston knew it was far worse than that. For there was a rhyme and reason to this carnage, a secret truth that he feared was so awful it would lick his sanity straight into the void if he had to look it in the face.

And he was not a man who frightened easily.

But something was happening here and it was leagues beyond dead cultists. For he could feel it building in the air around him like a scream, a heavy and electric sense of… activity. The air had gone thin as ether and the shadows were slithering around them like fat-bodied vipers coming out of a snake pit.

Gripping his weapon tightly, he said, “Stand ready…”

About the time Red Team announced they had found bodies, AD Silva was on the radio with Blue Team who’d come in the back way. Clark was in command of Blue.

“We got something here,” he was saying over his headset.

“What?” Silva wanted to know. “What’re you seeing in there?”

Clark was slow to respond.

Silva could hear him chatting with Platz, Tuchman, and Seaver. Their voices had an unpleasant, almost frantic edge to them.

“What the hell’s going on in there, mister?” Silva demanded.

Clark said, “We… we’re in a large room here, sir, looks… yeah, looks like some kind of old hospital ward or something… I’m not sure. Beds are lined up against either wall, bodies on most of ’em, covered in sheets.”

Standing there in the command van, Silva felt his throat constrict tight like a snake. “Bodies?”

“Yeah,” Clark said, his voice oddly thick. “Yeah… gotta be thirty beds here… most of ’em have bodies on ’em. Men and women… some kids, too.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah… yes sir, AD, all dead.” He paused. “I got… shit… I’m seeing bullet wounds, entry wounds to the chest, the vitals. All their throats, they’ve been slit ear to ear. Mother of Christ. Some of them, they’ve been dead for weeks, maybe months I’m thinking. Damn, that stink…”

“Any sign of Dade?”

A long drawn-out silence. “Yeah, he’s here with the rest—”

And he was.

Clark was looking on that face that he’d poured over for hours and hours in photographs. It was pallid as flour, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth hooked in a contorted gruesome smile. Like maybe Dade knew the punch line to a real funny joke, but he wasn’t ready to share it, not just yet.

“We got a live one over here,” Platz announced, pulling off his helmet and going to a woman who was sitting up.

Clark saw her face in his flashlight beam, in the beams of the others… but she couldn’t be sitting up. Her throat was slit ear to ear. And maybe Platz didn’t seem to realize that or maybe he was realizing it now because she made a hissing sound and took hold of his arm in one gray claw, drawing him closer before he could do much more than scream. Before the others could stop her, she produced a jagged shard of glass and slid it into the side of Platz’s throat.

And then the shit truly hit the fan.

Platz was on the floor, making a bubbling sound as blood washed down his throat and he vomited red to the floor, slipping and sliding in it.

Tuchman opened up on the woman with his MP5, gave her two three-round bursts to the chest. The rounds ripped holes through her, spattered the walls with her meat, but she kept coming, a toothy, demented grin on her face. The TAC unit watched in abject, stunned horror as she fell on Platz. As she pressed her fissured mouth against his own and came away, chewing on a bloody strand of tissue that had once been his lips.

Platz never screamed; he was way beyond that.

And then flashlight beams were flickering and bobbing, men were shouting and swearing, weapons discharging.

Because they were all waking up.

Sheets were sliding from ravaged faces and licking black tongues. Bloated hands reached out, teeth gnashed together.

The TAC unit was shooting and screaming for back-up, but it was simply too late.

A door slammed open on the far side of the room.

Shapes, forms, figures… they came hobbling through the doorway with a putrescent grave stench. The strangers were rotting and crumbling, sporting beards of mold and cobwebbed faces. Some lacked limbs and others lacked faces, but they were united for a single purpose and as Clark and the others watched, it all became horribly clear what that was.

His people started screaming and shrieking, drawing guns and trying to run, shooting and shooting, and on came their killers. He saw Tuchman smash the butt of his machine pistol into one decayed face and put two rounds into another. But like swatted mosquitoes, the dead were instantly replaced by others. Tuchman fought and kept fighting until a fleshless face darted in and tore out the soft meat of his throat. And then they had him and he disappeared in a noisome sea of fungus-covered bone and chattering, ripping teeth.

Clark could hear Silva shouting, demanding to know what was happening.

But there was no time to tell him.

Clark emptied his Colt carbine into a wall of deadwood faces, then fished a 9mm Steyr auto from his vest and fired on a gray and withered stickwoman who literally disintegrated as if she were made of dehydrated clay. And then skeletal fingers were on him and he was thrown to the ground. He saw Seaver—his face a drooling, demented mask—start spraying down anything that moved with his submachine gun.

And on it went, bullets ripping through the air and mouths screaming and everywhere the stink of cordite and violated tombs. It became a nightmare shadow-show of darting figures and slashing teeth, muzzle flashes and clutching fungous fingers, atrocities captured in the strobing flashlights. Yellow-eyed faces with flesh hanging in loops and mouths vomiting froths of black putrescent slime.

Clark fought bravely through that barrage of gnarled hands and chomping teeth, saw his men go down in bloody seas, saw them unzipped and eviscerated and divided by thrashing fingers and tearing red mouths. The dead yanked out ribbons of greasy entrails and fought like starving dogs over them, biting and chewing and sucking and slurping.

And then something looped around Clark’s throat and snapped tight like a garrote, collapsing his windpipe as lewd mouths bit into his legs and crotch and belly. But all he was really aware of was his mind falling into a coveting blackness as that cord strangled him.

Finally, ultimately, he went down.

Not knowing that a woman dead some three weeks had strangled him with a loop of her own viscera.

As the zombie woman woke up and stabbed a shard of glass into Platz’s soft white throat, Green Team, waiting up on the roof, got the word. They crashed through the skylights, rappelling down on ropes into that claustrophobic blackness. They climbed out of their harnesses and regrouped, prepared to deploy.

Oliverez was in charge. He said, “All right, don’t bother with the NV goggles. We need all the lights we can get. Red Team and Blue Team have made contact with unfriendlies, but they’re not armed.”

“At least not yet,” Rice said.

Johnson and Turner slid tactical goggles over their eyes, checked their weapons quickly, flexed their hands in fingerless gloves. Oliverez was going on about what Silva had said, the chatter from Red and Blue that he’d monitored.

“I don’t know what kind of clusterfuck this is, but be ready.”

They moved out, Rice taking point, his big Remington 12-gauge police shotgun held out before him. The flashlight attached to the barrel cut through that roiling tenebrous darkness, showing everyone an empty corridor.

They slipped single-file down a set of iron steps and came into another corridor which split off ahead to the right and left. They could hear the other TAC units crying out, opening up with their weapons, calling out for back-up… but Green Team did not rush to their aid. They had orders to proceed with extreme caution and they followed them.

They came to the T in the corridor and Rice spotted a form shambling in their direction. At first he thought the guy was drunk, but as he closed in, Rice saw he was dead. His face had been blasted down to meat and bone like it had been used for target practice and he was carrying what looked to be coils of linked sausages.

“His fucking intestines,” Johnson said.

The man kept coming despite being told to get on the floor and Oliverez said, almost too calmly, “Rice? Put that peckerwood down.”

Rice closed the gap between them, got a real good look at the man’s face… what there was of it. He had no eyes, no nose to speak of, his face hanging from the bone beneath in bloody tethers.

“Hey,” the mutilated man said in congested voice like his throat was full of wet leaves. “My sister’s going to love your ass… you see if she don’t…”

Rice said, “Sonofabitch,” and gave him a load of buckshot at point blank range.

The impact knocked the zombie over, nearly split him in half. But instead of lying down and waiting for a box and grave, he sat back up. His ragged shirt was smoking from contact burns, flames climbing up his collar. His guts were gone now, as was one of his hands. There was a gaping black hole in his abdomen and you could see right through it. Plumes of smoke were wafting from it.

The air was redolent with a stink of incinerated meat.

Rice made a funny, strangled sound and blew the dead man’s head to shards of bone that tinkled down the hallway like broken crockery. He fell over, his face missing from the nasal cavity on up. His jaws were still there, though, and they were snapping open and shut in rapid succession like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.

“Move out,” Oliverez said, not wanting the men to pause long enough to let any of this insanity sink in. Because if it did, they were done.

He led on to the left—the gunshots echoing louder from that direction—and the others fell in behind him. They came to an open door and saw candlelight flickering in there, throwing weird hopping shadows and bathing everything in a dirty orange light.

He came low through the doorway and saw a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed in there, the candle next to her on a little nightstand. She was humming. Utterly naked, she rocked back and forth, back and forth.

“Lady…” Oliverez managed.

She looked up at him, fixing him with a malignant leer… with her right eye, that was, because the left was just a blackened socket from which fed a moist pelt of yellow-green fungus that covered the left side of her face like a caul. She kept humming and rocking, flaking lips pulling back from narrow discolored teeth.

And it was bad, certainly.

But it wasn’t what made Oliverez’s stomach clamp tight like a vise.

What did that was what the woman was holding… an infant. It was gray and bloated and putrefied, like something pulled from a lake. It was sucking on her left breast with a sloshing, repulsive sound. The woman’s other breast was also moving, but that was because of the pockets of larva feasting within.

Then the infant pulled away from that gray nipple, looked over at the TAC unit and made a gurgling sound. Maggots were wriggling free of the woman’s tit and this is what the baby had been feeding on. Its face was distorted… bulging and sunken and eyeless, great holes torn in it and through them you could see the worms boiling within.

Oliverez never gave the order.

But everyone opened up.

Submachine guns and carbines and Rice’s assault shotgun were pumping lead in a lethal volley. They kept shooting until they’d emptied their magazines and the obscenity on the bed… and its offspring… were reduced to clots of glistening flesh. Bits of the dead woman and her child were plastered against the wall, dripping from the headboard, pooling in the sheets and the stink was revolting.

Oliverez ordered his men out of there.

“What… what… what in the fuck is this?” Johnson demanded.

“We ain’t here to figure that out,” Oliverez snapped at him. “Now lock and load, we’re moving out.”

They all had questions, yes, but they did not ask them. Maybe they didn’t dare to. Ten minutes into the compound and they’d already seen enough to give them cold sweats and nightmares for a lifetime.

And it didn’t get any better.

Two more zombies came out of a room to meet them. They were both large men with black boots and camouflage pants on. Shirtless, their bodies were of an almost phosphorescent whiteness and neither of them had a head, just frayed stumps. The one on the left was carrying the head of a woman by the hair. A living head. Her face was fissured and livid with purple blotches.

“There,” she said with a grating, airless squeak of a voice. “These are the ones, right ahead now… that’s it, straight on… bring me to them, bring me to them… yesssss…”

The TAC unit started shooting again, getting a little smarter this time around. They took the two men down at the knees, blowing their kneecaps to fragments. The woman’s head was dropped, rolling across the floor, hair whipping and voice grunting.

The headless men began crawling forward, dragging their shredded legs like bleeding confetti, but on they came. The TAC unit opened up with everything they had as the woman’s head shrieked and cackled and snapped its teeth.

Rice stuck the barrel of his shotgun in her mouth and she clamped down on it, biting and biting, trying to sink her teeth through the metal. He pulled the trigger and blew that hideous thing to slush. But still they could hear her voice… maybe in front of them or behind or maybe just echoing through the drums of their skulls… taunting them and telling them how they were going to die.

But there was no time to consider the madness of that or the two men who had been blasted to creeping slats of bone and tissue, for another zombie came down the corridor at them. It was a boy carrying a shoulder sack. He was giggling, digging into that sack and throwing things before him, like a girl tossing flower petals at a wedding. The TAC unit first thought they were spiders he was throwing… crawling albino spiders.

But then they saw they were human hands.

Living human hands severed at the wrists.

By the time they put the boy down, there were dozens of hands hopping and skittering and jumping. And pretty soon they were on the TAC unit and men were screaming, trying to pull iron fingers from their legs and ankles.

Johnson lost his mind as one of them ran up the leg of his coveralls. Followed by third and fourth and a fifth that found his crotch and gripped it with a crushing strength. Another got up his pant leg and others under his Kevlar vest. He jumped up and down, spun around in circles, slammed himself into walls like a man covered in nipping ants, anything to pull those grasping hands off him.

The TAC unit was shooting as they backed away, just white with a rolling terror now.

And though they beat off the zombies, the hands were something else entirely.

Johnson choked to death on one as it got in his screaming mouth and lodged itself in his throat, curling up there in a fleshy ball.

And the other TAC unit troopers let him die as the hands came on and flashlight beams cast dizzying flashes and weapons were discharged. And through it all, Oliverez forgot about the crawling heaps of bones. Until he fell down and they swarmed over him, that was.

Hell in a handbasket.

AD Silva had heard the expression, but until that fateful night at the compound he had no idea of the reality of it. His TAC units had been deployed and what he was hearing over the radio just could not be.

The living dead?

Zombies for the life of Christ?

It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be. He could not accept the idea that his men were being attacked by hordes of the walking dead. Every cheap, low-budget horror film he’d ever seen as a kid was coming back to him now, coming back to roost and his flesh was crawling and a buzzing whiteness was droning in his head.

The agents piled into the back of the comm van were all watching him now, their faces drained of color, their mouths hanging slack. Silva could not look at them. He clutched his headset in shaking hands and licked his lips and watched the monitors and wished to dear God he wasn’t in charge.

“Okay,” he said, “okay. Let’s get some back-up in there.”

Men started to scramble out of the back of the van, glad to be doing anything other than sitting there and imagining what must be going on in that lightless mortuary.

And that was when Silva started laughing.

You see, he’d finally gotten the joke. Finally gotten Paul Henry Dade’s little joke and it was a doozy, yes sir. The Divine Church of the Resurrection. Resurrection. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, it was a good one, all right.

And Silva just could not stop laughing.

Even when they finally took him away, he was still laughing his ass off.

What happened to Red Team was this:

Moments after Weston began to feel something building in the air around him, the dead began to wake up. In the panning lights of his TAC unit, the dead were coming to life… or some blasphemous semblance of it engineered by Paul Henry Dade and his crazy cult. It started with the crinkling of plastic and the squeaking of vinyl as the dead on the shelves began to make themselves known.

Corpses zipped in body bags sat up.

Corpses wrapped in plastic began to claw their way free… sheets were sloughed like snakeskins… long-armed shapes rose up… heads snapped their teeth and hands in buckets began to scratch and whisper and spill to the floor.

Chains began to clink and creak as the bodies on the meat hooks in the other room began to stir and fight, thrashing and writhing and trying to wrestle themselves free.

LeClere screamed.

Screamed and ran as the dead stepped off the shelves. He made it into the other room, running straight into that swinging menagerie of hanging cadavers. Bodies bumped into him, arms swatted at him, faces nipped and spit and licked at him. His light was bobbing and flashing, cold hands caressing him and finally he was locked in a tangle of clutching hands. All those arms hanging from the hooks had him, crushing him in an embrace of cold white flesh and putrescence.

The rest of Red Team had no time to help him.

They had their own problems.

It was pandemonium.

Becker fought his way from the clutching hands of two skull-faced assassins—their fingers coming away with him—and brought out a massive .44 magnum. Another cadaver shambled in his direction, hands held out like bailing hooks and Becker began jerking the trigger frantically. The slugs ate huge and gaping holes in the cadaver, making a sound like a hammer into dry kindling as they blew their way through. Even though much of the cadaver’s wasted anatomy was blown across the shelves, it crept forward. Becker stared into ruined eye sockets, saw black beetles congregating in that skull and then hands like raw, cold liver caressed him and began pulling him apart like a screaming gingerbread man.

Hookley kicked his way free of several corpse assassins and saw the bloody ball of a snapping head roll across his boots. Then he was up and wanting to run, but there were simply too many. A dark and hulking form of a large corpse with an insect-ravaged face tossed others aside to get at him. Hookley emptied his carbine into the monstrosity, then hammered the death’shead with the butt… the flesh falling away like sheets of balsa wood. It looked like termites had been at this one. His seamed face split in a sardonic grin, hating, hating. One eye was but a blackened, festering socket and the other housed a milky opal that glistened and cried tears of worms. Skinless fingers reached out for Hookley and that face of furry gray-green mold swam in for a kiss.

Hookley screeched and brought the stock of the carbine down in a powerful arc. It struck that bobbing skull with the sound of damp, rotting wood splitting. The puckered forehead shattered, the cranium collapsed and within was a nest of feeding maggots.

Hookley, cackling insanely now, brought the stock down again and again. And that graveyard face came apart like a moldy house of cards and the body stumbled blindly past him and fell forward stiffly.

Hookley fought through two or three others, could hear someone making a deranged, wet shrieking sound, but he never guessed it was himself. He fell to his knees, drooling and pissing himself, and then he saw his executioner.

A woman—or something that had once been one—slithered forward with a slime trail of moist soil. She had no legs, no nothing beneath the waist, just a few moth-eaten rags that might have been flesh and ligament once. She propelled herself like a slug, grinning with a moldering flap of face. The empty holes of her eyes found Hookley and the gray mouth smiled, the pitted stumps of teeth gnashed and chomped.

But Hookley was beyond it.

He held himself, rocking, discordant laughter belching from his throat as the woman swam in, that worm-holed face oozing slime and falling into itself like a rotting Jack-o’-Lantern.

And then he was wrapped in a blanket of putrefaction, those jagged teeth opening his belly and biting down on what they found there.

Weston was squeezed into a corner just beyond the shelves.

The room was on fire now. Maybe from stray rounds or a tossed incendiary grenade. It didn’t matter. Flames were licking up the shelving, throwing a wavering, surreal illumination.

It was light to die by.

A ring of zombies was pressing in closer, their threadbare hides punched with smoking bullet holes. Ravenous and ruined, they marched forward with skeletal fingers outstretched. Weston watched them come and wished he’d saved one round to use on himself.

The cadaverous sea parted and Paul Henry Dade stepped forward, his face hanging in fluttering tatters, gouts of black blood drooling from his lips in streamers.

Weston let that atrocity get in close, then he pulled his knife and sank it into Dade’s belly, slitting him to the throat. A tide of viscous ichor drained from the wound like puss from a festering boil. It splashed over Weston and he saw it swam with worms.

Then Dade’s cold hands were on his shoulders, tightening with a grave rictus. Weston cried out as he felt his bones snap, as his mind released itself in a whimpering tirade.

Dade was trying to tell him something, but all that came out was a bubbling, slopping sound, his crypt-breath sour and sweet and sickening.

Dade split Weston lengthwise like a sausage and fed on the hot, salty bounty within. He chewed and tore and ripped and sucked. And much later, painted red with blood, stepped away and held Weston’s bloody head high. The agent’s viscera decorated the shelves like Christmas garland. He was divided and scattered and mutilated, his bones broken open and leeched of marrow and stacked in a tidy heap on the floor.

And all was silent then, save for the crackling of the fire and the sound of bones being gnawed and bowels being nibbled. The floor was a bloody, stinking stew of flesh and meat. Some of it was still, but much of it moved and pulsed and hungered, unable to die as such.

Rice of Green Team was not dead.

Hell, no.

He was bitten and clawed, bruised and bleeding, but surely not dead. Problem was, he was mostly fucked and knew it. His helmet was gone, his assault shotgun history now. He’d used every last round putting down the mutiny of the dead hands, tossing the Remington when the hands were replaced by zombies that flooded down the corridor.

He’d been hiding ever since.

He did not know if anybody else was alive.

Right then, he didn’t really care. All he cared about was a quick way out. He was hiding in a closet with a Colt 9mm handgun clenched tight in his fists, trying to remember the TAC leader, Weston, going over the map of the compound that was tacked to the wall. Problem was, the map was World War II vintage and there had been a lot of remodeling since. Stairways were gone. Hallways sealed up. Walls knocked down. So, yeah, Rice was trying to think his way out, but it didn’t look good.

He hadn’t heard any gunfire for awhile now, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. He could smell the death in the compound… like pressing your face into roadkill, filling your nostrils with that rank green smell and swallowing it down in reeking rivers. He could also smell the cordite and something like wood smoke, which told him the complex was burning.

But who lit it up?

The zombies? The FBI? Helicopters buzzed the roof from time to time and loudspeakers were broadcasting muffled appeals for Dade’s people to surrender.

And that was pretty funny when you thought about it.

Rice thought: They ain’t gonna surrender unless you bring a hearse.

He sat stiffly in the darkness. He had a small tactical flashlight and his Colt nine, that was about it. But maybe he could just wait this out, maybe—

Footsteps.

Something like them.

A lumbering, heavy sound. Like a bull was coming down the hallway, smashing into the walls, grunting and puffing. It passed by the door, then paused and Rice was certain it was sniffing, making a wet snorting sound.

The doorknob jiggled.

Jiggled again.

Whatever was out there stank like an open grave and it was strong, God, very strong, because it was yanking on the door now, rattling it on its frame. There was a groaning, crashing sound and the door was ripped from its hinges in a rain of wood splinters.

Rice made a choking sound in his throat and put the flashlight beam on it. But what was he seeing? A man… or something like one, immense and distended… white and black, swollen and mildewed and rancid. It was grotesquely bloated with gases, its eye sockets fluid with maggots and yellow bile.

Rice emptied the Colt into it and it took hold of him, dragged him down the hallway.

It opened an iron door and tossed him through, slamming it shut behind him.

Rice had the flashlight, but he didn’t dare turn it on.

Because he wasn’t alone in there. He could smell the others, hear them chewing and sucking and licking. Something damp brushed his arm, something like a tongue licked the back of his neck.

He turned on the light.

Yes, they were all around him, the zombies. Disfigured, grotesque, rotted to mush. Some were missing limbs and others looked like they’d been burned. One of them had a meat cleaver instead of a hand and another—a woman—was pregnant, or had been at the hour of her death. Her blue-black belly was voluminous and heaving, split wide open. There was something like a wormy fetus coming out, pulling itself out in a wash of noisome jelly, a crawling gray carrion.

It splashed to the floor, inching itself forward like a leech, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. The others dropped the limbs they’d been chewing on and watched what was about to happen. Grinned with disfigured faces like raw beef.

Long before that undulating, boneless thing touched him, Rice had gone raving mad.

Turner was the last TAC member alive.

He crawled through a slick of blood, his eyes wide and staring, his jaws clamped tight. He still had his Colt tactical carbine, but he was down to his last magazine. On hands and knees, he peered through a doorway, crab-crawled over there, breathing hard, his face beaded with sweat.

He was doing everything he could not to panic, but it was no easy bit.

With what he’d seen, experienced, even all that rigorous training wasn’t enough to keep his mind from melting into slush.

But he would stay alive. Somehow, some way.

Dear Christ, he would not be like them.

He would not allow himself to become something that fed on corpses and human flesh, something that should have been zipped in a bag or slid shut in a drawer. No, dammit, he would kill himself first.

He’d been pretty much on the dodge since Green Team was attacked by those hands. He saw it now in his brain, like some nightmare one-reel cartoon that played over and over until it all became almost laughable.

But it was not funny.

Johnson had gone down under those hands and Oliverez had been inundated by the crawling remains of the headless men. But you could give that old, leather-faced bastard credit, for even knitted with a blanket of surging carrion that tried to engulf him like a pustulant jellyfish, he fought on. As Rice and Turner evaded their asses out of there, Oliverez stumbled along, fighting the abominations which covered his head and upper body.

Somehow, he’d gotten loose, tossed his attackers.

Screaming and covered in an ooze of corruption, he ran right past Rice and Turner, vaulted through a doorway and disappeared before they could catch him.

They found him, though.

He’d gone through a doorway, trying to make his way down a flight of emergency steps… and that’s as far as he made it. Something captured him there. Something that sent Rice running and burned a scar across Turner’s mind.

Even now, stroking his carbine and remembering, Turner could not believe it, could not stomach that poison memory.

At first, they’d thought Oliverez had stumbled into a spider’s web.

The sort of thing some gigantic arachnid mutation might have spun in a cheap 1950’s B-movie. But it was no spider. What Rice and he saw was an intricate network of knotted bowels, strung together in an oily web at the bottom of the steps. Oliverez had wandered right into it, got tangled up in those rubbery strands. Might have fought his way free, if something like a skinless girl hadn’t come racing down that network and chewed his face from the skull beneath.

Because that’s what was happening when Rice and Turner showed.

That skinless girl… maybe twelve or thirteen… was eating Oliverez. His face was gone and her own was buried in the cavity of his belly, pulling out coils of viscera and chewing globs of yellow fat with teeth that were not teeth, but shards of glass hammered into her jaws.

Turner stared at her in the beam of his light. She had eyes, but they were dangling out of her sockets by bleeding optic nerves. Yet, they moved and saw. She looked upon him with such a ravening lunacy, it made his guts slink in cold waves.

Rice ran off.

Turner gave her a few rounds, had been hiding ever since.

And the fact that he wasn’t laughing at it just yet told him he was not crazy. Maybe tomorrow or next week, but not now. Horror and revulsion and hot-blooded anger that God would allow a travesty like this… these things kept him hanging on, kept his edge polished and sharp.

He could hear sounds coming down the corridor, echoes of voices, dragging sounds, scraping sounds. But in that maze of corridors, it could have been around the next bend or upstairs.

Thing was, Turner was lost.

Even when he came to a room with a window, it did him no good: they were all barred like prison cells. But he could see that everyone was still out there beyond the blockade—cops and medics, journalists and the curious kept at bay behind them.

Wishing he still had his headset, Turner kicked open a door and plunged in there, flashing his light around with the sweeping motion of the Colt’s barrel. Nothing, nothing, nothing. He was in a little apartment with a bathroom off to the side.

He came around through the archway, saw a toilet that was filthy and stained brown with ancient rust stains. The sink. A mirror with jagged cracks in it. And—

Someone was in the tub.

At first he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, only that they were entirely red from head to foot, red and glistening, like a stick man (or woman) dipped in blood and bowels and decomposition, splashed down with a bucket of waste from a slaughterhouse. The tub was filled with human meat, the zombie chewing on a corkscrew of intestines, totally unconcerned that Turner was standing there.

He gave him—or her or it—two three-round bursts that splashed its anatomy off the bone beneath. Slowly, like a ship going down in a sea of blood, the zombie sank beneath the stinking, quivering sea of remains.

Turner got out of there.

He moved down the corridor, came to a room with a zombie splattered in the center of the concrete block floor. Splattered. Looked like he or she had been dropped from some great height, though the ceiling was only eight feet up. The body lay there, a gored plexus of meat webbing out in all directions, strands and streamers of it snaking about. And drowning in that still-pulsating ocean of pulp and tissue was a bleeding skeleton that trembled, seemed to be trying to breath.

It was too much.

Turner ran out of there, paused before another doorway, wondered if he’d ever find sanctuary in this morgue.

Then two slender hands reached out and yanked him into the room, threw him headlong to the floor. The door was slammed shut, a lock was turned. He brought up his carbine, training the light on his attacker.

A woman.

She was naked.

Tall and willowy, her hips nicely rounded and her breasts firm and jutting, she had a sweep of red hair falling down one shoulder. Her lips were moving as if she were trying to find words.

Turner eased his finger off the trigger.

“Please,” she said. “I… I was kidnapped… please don’t kill me…”

She fell to her knees, sobbing and shaking. Turner studied her closely. She was very pale, but not rotted or discolored. A scent of withered roses came off her in a sweet breath.

Turner lowered his weapon.

Jesus, she looked so much like Dierdre.

Too much like Dierdre.

He knew it was not because Dierdre had been dead seven years now. Leukemia. Turner had been with her through it all. Saw his love, his only true reason for getting up every day, slowly eaten away by the disease. And then she was gone and he turned his mind hard, tried out for the HRT so he could spread some of his pain around, give it back to bad guys and terrorists.

Turner felt cold and hot and confused, didn’t know what to say or even how to speak. It took time to fill his lungs with air, to wrap his mouth around some words that would make sense.

He licked his lips, said, “They… they’ll be storming this place, maybe they already are. I’ll protect you…”

Turner saw a candle on the table and lit it, loving the light and warmth it threw. He went to the woman.

She was still shaking and whimpering, all that lustrous red hair in her face. Turner set his weapon down, went to her. Was surprised… or maybe not at all… when she threw her arms around him, put her lips against his.

He felt her in his arms then, pressed up against him and she wasn’t dead and how could this possible be? She was cold and shivering under his hands and he felt his penis unfurl in his pants. Jesus, now and of all places. But the woman seemed to want it, too, for she was kissing him harder, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

Turned pulled away, said, “Not here, we can’t—”

“Please,” she said, kissing his face, his throat. “Oh please.” And then her tongue was at his ear and she was saying things and unzipping his Kevlar vest. Turner was helping her, pulling his coveralls off and growing dizzy then as she began to stroke his cock.

He took one nipple in his mouth, licking and tasting it and feeling a strange sort of warmth spreading beneath the skin. And it was exciting and liberating and, dear God, she had been right. In a situation like this, what better thing could a man and woman do for one another?

Turner pushed her onto her back and spread her legs. She hooked her ankles behind his back and guided him in, positioned him properly. But she wouldn’t let him enter her. She gripped the globes of his ass, teased his cock with her moist sex and then, staring into his eyes with a voracious appetite, she thrust him into her with a delicious force and—

And Turner screamed.

Screamed as his penis was impaled on something in there, ripped and gouged and slit. He tried to pull out, to push off her, but her legs were wrapped around him and she clung to him tenaciously. He saw the blossom of blood at their hips, saw that raging demented hunger in her eyes.

Like the others, just like the others.

Thrashing together, trying to fight and only succeeding in wounding himself further, Turner ignored the white-hot blades of pain and felt his fingers brush the stock of his Colt carbine.

She saw him bring up the weapon and fixed him with a raw, unflinching hatred. Her eyes oozed filth like infected sores. Turner brought the stock down on her face again and again and again until it split open like a knife-cut, until the skull beneath cracked open and what was inside, was exposed. Worms. Knotted, squirming lengths of blood-red worms moving in and out of her brain, slipping now from her eye sockets.

Turner fell off her, his penis hanging in shreds now, blood running down his legs and pooling at his hips. Shards of razors were still embedded in it. The woman had stuffed herself with them. Turner crashed to the floor and closed his eyes against the agony, the defilement.

He did not open them again.

Now that Silva was taken away in an ambulance, heavily-medicated because it was the only way to get him to stop laughing at the wonderful joke he kept trying to share with the others, Runyon was in charge.

He did not want to be in charge.

He had been in the comm van when the truth was told first by Red and Blue Teams, then by Green.

Runyon did not want to believe it, felt himself slowly going mad, but given the fact that the TAC units had not been heard from in nearly thirty minutes now, he had no choice.

Something had happened in the compound.

Whatever it had been, it was bad enough to take down twelve highly-trained, highly-motivated men. Take them down and silence them. And Runyon had a feeling, it was far worse than mere cultists.

So Runyon rallied his troops—two back-up TAC units, some thirty sheriff’s deputies and state troopers, and an infantry platoon from a local National Guard base. Armed, pissed-off, and scared, they moved in formation at the compound. Armored vehicles knocked the barbwire fences down and Runyon’s army followed in their wake.

The siege was about to begin.

And it was about that time, that the zombies started coming out of the compound. Zombies led by members of TAC units Red, Green, and Blue that still had their limbs. The living dead poured from the diseased carcass of the compound like worms out of pork.

And the real battle began.