Mark Rogers - The Dead

“Got to get out of here,” Steve whispered.

“Can’t,” Gary said.” They’re coming up all around us. And Max is still lying on the grass out there. They haven’t spotted him-”

There was a second thud, and a scrape of metal against stone as a casket shifted in its niche.

Gary looked back out the door. Some of the corpses nearby had extricated themselves and were crossing the road. Others were only halfway out.

“We’re dead,” Sally whispered to Steve. “They’re going to tear our faces apart, and…”

“Shut up, dammit!” Gary said. “They’re heading across the road. If we can wait a bit longer, we should be able to make a dash for the hearse…”

A coffin jounced up from its niche, struck the top of the alcove and banged down again, the impacts thunderously loud in that enclosed space. Three of the caskets remained perfectly still; the rest shifted and jerked, several perilously close to dropping from their ledges. Finally two crashed to the floor, one landing upside down.

Gary looked back outside. The last cadaver in front of the mausoleum clawed its way clear, leaped to its feet, and crossed the road. Max started to get up-

And at that moment, Gary heard a tremendous wrenching sound behind him, and turned to see the upside-down coffin tilting up off the floor, the front section of its lid swinging open, two wildly lashing arms shooting out from the box, dark against the lid’s lining. The casket dropped back down; then the arms propelled it off the marble once more. Heeling up on end, it banged into a wall as the frenzied thing inside struggled to open the other section of the lid. Canting sideways along the wall, the coffin tipped upside down again when it struck the floor. The corpse howled with frustration.

“Max’s signal,” Steve cried. “Come on!”

They raced across the lawn toward Max and the hearse, leaping over open graves. In moments they were inside, slamming the doors shut. Max found the ignition key, blew dirt off it and started the engine. The motor revved raggedly, but Gary thought he’d never heard a more wonderful sound; Max pressed down on the gas, and the hearse started away from the curb just as the corpse came screaming out of the mausoleum. The cadaver sped after the car, but couldn’t catch up; ahead, the road was clear.

Gary looked over at the corpses assembled by the hill. Even as he watched, they knelt; he shifted his gaze to the top of the slope.

A lone figure stood there, arms upraised, beside the cross; even at that distance, heGary could tell the figure was very large, almost a giant. It turned toward the cross, set its shoulder against it and pushed; the cross went over, and the figure set its foot upon it, lifting a single defiant fist skyward. As if in approval, the assembled corpses cried out in a deafening chorus. Gary clapped his hands over his ears, turning.

Ahead, two corpses were rushing up the road, directly toward the hearse. Max plowed right into them, the Caddy’s massive bulk tossing them like ragdolls. Sailing straight back, one landed in the car’s path yet again. It sprang up, and tried to jump onto the hood as the hearse closed in; but the front end struck it before it could clear the grille. It flew head over heels high into the air, clipping the roof, rolling over the trunk to the road.

Max swerved around a tree-lined left-hand jog. The cemetery’s southern gate appeared. It was shut, a pair of bodies impaled on the spikes at its top, five corpses standing before it.

Max floored the gas pedal, ramming three of them at seventy miles an hour, smashing them back against the gate; a chain snapped, and it swung wide. The Caddy roared through the arch before the other corpses could grab it. Max steered wildly to the right, skidding onto the street beyond the wall, then raced forward, leaving River Rest Cemetery far behind.

They arrived at the house to find Buddy’s car sitting out front, and Buddy and company waiting in the living room. That came as no surprise- Max had given Dennis a set of keys before the funeral.

But Gary hadn’t been expecting to see Father Chuck, Mr. and Mrs. MacAleer, and their son Jamie. The priest had wound up in Buddy’s car during the panic; the MacAleers had been unable to reach their house on the south side of town, and hadn’t known where else to go. The center of Bayside Point had been overrun.

“Corpses must’ve come from those emergency morgues,” Max said. “And the old graveyards.”

Dennis was looking through the picture window at the hearse. “How’d you get that bullet-hole in the windshield?” he asked Gary.

“There were some River Rest escapees on the Squankum Bridge,” Gary answered. “A police car was stopped on the divider, and the cops were blasting away at them.”

“They shot at you deliberately?”

“Slug came through one of the corpses. Made a hole the size of your hand in its back. Just missed me. Sprayed glass all over the front seat.”

“One of the cops had a riot gun, for Christ’s sake,” Steve put in. “Didn’t slow those fucking things up at all.”

“Should’ve aimed at their legs,” Max said. “Can’t walk without kneecaps, even if you are a zombie.”

“You said the downtown was burning?” Father Chuck asked.

“Sure looked like it from the bridge,” Gary said.

“They had Molotov cocktails,” said Mr. MacAleer. “That’s what they hit our car with.”

“I think we should go down into the bomb shelter,” Aunt Lucy said.

“Just what I was about to suggest,” Max said. “But a couple of us had better stay up here to keep watch. There’ll probably be some troops through here soon. We’ll want to go with them.”

“Why wait?” Uncle Buddy said. “I say we should get off this damn peninsula right now. We’re going to be fucking trapped here.”

“We’re already trapped here,” Max said. “We want to link up with some heavy ordnance before we do any travelling.”

“ That’s heavy ordnance, if you ask me,” Buddy said, jerking a thumb toward the guns piled on the couch. Besides the two retracting-stock Heckler and Koch assault rifles, there were twin Remington 870 pump shotguns with magazine extenders, and a pair of Beretta 92 fifteen-shot automatics, all with ammunition. “We should arm ourselves to the teeth and take off.”

“If we had some grenade launchers and an APC, I might agree with you,” Max said. “We don’t. Didn’t you hear what we said about those cops on the bridge?”

“We can shoot ‘em in the knees,” Buddy answered. “You said so yourself.”

“You gotta shoot ‘em in the head,” his son Dave added. “That’s the only way to kill zombies. Any idiot knows that.”

Buddy shot him a ferocious glare.

“We don’t want to tangle with them at all,” Gary said.

“Fucking A,” Max added. “And there’s no way we can get off the peninsula without doing just that. If you go north from the Squankum bridge, there’s River Rest-”

“I wasn’t talking about going that way,” Buddy said. “We already tried Rt. 35. They had it blocked. That’s why we headed down here.”

“Well then, there’s the Route 88 Bridge, the one over the canal. But there’s another big graveyard out that way.”

“Me and Lucy already reminded him,” Dennis said.

“And I shouldn’t have listened to you,” Buddy answered. “Maybe they’re not waking up there.”

“And maybe they are,” Lucy said.

“You’d have to be out of your mind to try it,” Max went on. “So what does that leave? The Route 33 bridge, down at the bottom of the peninsula. But you’d have to go through the southern part of town. And as we know from the MacAleers, that area’s crawling with them. So why don’t we just go down in the shelter and listen to the radio? Maybe things’ll blow over somehow. Maybe the Air Force’ll napalm the whole goddamn town. We’d come through that just fine.”