Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

Cabot tried to focus his mind, tried to come up with some sort of plan.

Where would the kid have gone? He had lived somewhere in this gutter, only he was never particular as to where that had been. And what had happened in the truck? Had he been planning this all along or had the sight of the place just unhinged him?

He couldn’t have known we were going to Mattawan. Nobody calls it that anymore. Ever since it died it’s just been the ghost town.

But there was no time for that.

Cabot decided right then and there that all he could do was sweep around the general area, be quiet about it, then make for the truck before he became lunch. If he couldn’t find the kid-and he was starting to feel pretty sure he wouldn’t-then he’d make up some story, anything to throw him in a good light and shade the kid in a bad one.

Sound thinking.

Cabot moved down a street that was crowded with rusting cars and trucks. Some were smashed up against trees, others had popped the curb and died on lawns. Many had bird-picked skeletons behind the wheels. The town was wild, hedges and bushes consuming lots, ivies engulfing garages, yards lost beneath uprisings of weeds and straw-yellow devil grass. Tree limbs had fallen everywhere.

He kept moving, keeping a wary eye out for anything alive…at least, anything moving. The mist distorted everything. Turned trees into stalking figures, shaped fire hydrants into crouching forms.

He stopped.

Behind him there were footsteps…slow, measured.

He whirled around, tucking the flashlight into his pocket, both hands on the shotgun now. He waited behind a hedgerow, ready, ready. A warm stench like spoiled pork wafted through the air and sweat ran down his face. He caught a momentary glimpse of a hobbling stick-like shadow melting into the fog.

The footsteps faded into the distance.

Cabot waited another few minutes, then he was moving again. Stealthy, alert, his muscles drawn taut like piano wires, his blood pulsing hot in his veins. He moved over grassy lawns, frost-heaved sidewalks yellow with rain-plastered leaves. The mist was damp and chill about him, moving, swirling, encompassing. His heart was pounding in his throat, his temples.

Off to the left, a branch snapped.

He froze, unsure whether to go forward or go back.

There was a scraping sound now…like something sharp dragged over the hood of a car.

He smelled a sweet and high odor like rotting hay. It grew stronger by the moment. He brushed sweat from his face, licked his paper-dry lips. The world around him was painted gray by the mist. Tree limbs creaked together in the breeze. He looked around, peering through blankets of fog, terrified at what he might see coming at him.

The stink was overpowering now.

He turned, ready to run, ready to give up his position by making a mad dash for the truck and then Someone was standing not ten feet away.

At first, Cabot was not even sure that he was looking at a man. Dressed in a black coat that was feathered with moss, his back twisted and body contorted, he looked like a dead, gnarled tree growing up from the weedy soil, his skeletal hands reaching twigs, his face corded like pine bark. “Please, friend,” he said in a rasping tone. “I am so hungry, so very hungry…”

Wormboy.

Cabot just waited there, the shotgun in his fists. “Get the fuck away from me,” he said.

The Wormboy dragged himself forward, grinning happily. His face split open with it, tissues tearing and tendons popping like dry roots. His eyes were blank and white, rimmed with red, his mouth hanging open to reveal pitted gums and black teeth. A dark slime oozed from his lips like running sap.

Cabot shot him.

He caught him in the belly and nearly tore him in half. But what was left, like stringy pink and gray meat, kept crawling in his direction.

Cabot ran.

Off into the shadows, trying to find that little park but what he found were shapes, long-armed shapes, dozens of them moving at him out of the mist. They were coming from every direction. He was in a nest of them. Grinning faces bloated with putrescence swam out of the fog. Spidery fingers clawed out for him. Gurgling voices called out. They were ringing him in, gliding forward like swarming insects.

Cabot turned and fired, ran to the left, fired, to the right and fired again. Fingers tore at his jacket and he swung the shotgun like a club, felt it smash into something soft and pulpy. More were coming and he needed to reload, but there just wasn’t time.

He dove through a knot of Wormboys, hammered his way clear. He leaped over a hedge, crawled on his hands and knees through the grass. On his feet again, across a yard, around a house, down an alley. Behind him, they were coming, screaming and squealing, the stench of their numbers gaseous and revolting.

He cut through another yard, paused and fumbled shells into the shotgun.

And then a voice said: “Hey, mister! Over here!”

Cabot felt his heart gallop to a stop, lurch painfully, then start beating again. He turned and there was a little girl standing there in what looked like a white dress that had gone dark with filth. It hung in rags. Her face was as pale as the mist, her eyes huge and black and glistening with wetness. She held a finger like a skeleton key to her lips, said, “Sshhh!”

She began backing away between two ruined houses, arching a finger at him to follow. His breath lancing his throat, Cabot listened to the Wormboys gathering out there, sniffing out his trail. The girl could have been one of them and then, maybe not.

“Hurry! Or they’ll get you!” she said.

He followed her, some electric instinct telling him to run, that this was a trap, a trap, but he was too scared to listen.

He followed.

The girl kept backing away, through the grass, around bushes and trees. Without even turning, she vaulted a heap of dead leaves. Cabot went after her, praying under his breath. He stumbled through the leaf pile and there was a sudden, unbelievable explosion of white agony in his ankle.

He went down, screaming, fighting, the shotgun going one way and he going the other.

The girl turned away, made a high whistling sound like a wind blown through catacombs. And as she did so, Cabot saw in his pain that the back of her head was mostly gone. Strands of dirty hair fell over a gaping, rotten chasm that boiled with meat flies.

She whistled again.

Dear God, she’s signaling the others, calling out to them…

Cabot thrashed, trying to break free.

The pain tossed his mind into darkness and then yanked it back out again. His eyes irised open, blinking away tears, and he saw the girl. Just standing there, giggling softly, looking very pleased. Her eyes were larger than ever, oily and moist, filled with a raw-toothed hunger. A fly ran over her threadbare lips and she caught it with a gray tongue, sucked it into her mouth. Then she ate it, gums shriveled away from teeth that were black and overlapping, filed sharp.

As her insane laughter echoed into the night, Cabot reached down to his ankle to see what held it. The pain made white specks flash before his eyes.

A trap, oh yes, a trap.

A bear trap. The spikes were buried in his ankle, buried deep like the jaws of a tiger. He tried to force them apart and he nearly went out cold from the pain. His hands came away dark and dripping.

Two more figures came out of the darkness.

They stank like tombs.

Cabot screamed, but a pulpy, moist hand squeezed his mouth shut. Somewhere during the process, he fainted.

*

He woke later to the sound of humming.

Humming.

A woman’s voice, but cracked and dry-sounding like her throat was packed with dirt and dead leaves. His eyes opened, shut, opened again. He was in a room that stank of old blood and rancid meat, a shocking rank odor. Candles were flickering on a mantle throwing greasy, wavering shadows in every direction.