Mark Rogers - The Dead

Fists thumped on steel; the beating on the front door had been getting steadily louder, but there was no sign the barrier was weakening.

Yet, Gary thought.

“One last thing,” Max went on, slipping a small pair of binoculars around his neck. “If we’re separated, head south. Try to get off the peninsula somehow. Find a boat, or use the 33 bridge if it isn’t blocked. We need room to run, to hide. The peninsula’s too narrow.”

He went to the back door, laid his shotgun down and took up the grenade, producing a cigarette lighter.

“Father Chuck?” he asked.

The priest stationed himself at the door. “When I nod,” Max said, “slide the bolt back quickly and open the door, just wide enough for me to lob the bomb through. Then bang it back shut. Okay?”

The priest nodded, wiping sweat from his pale brow.

“Here goes,” Max said, striking the lighter up. Just before he touched it to the fuse, he nodded to the priest. Father Chuck slipped the bolt, and with a powerful effort, opened the door.

Instantly a liver-spotted claw armed with long crimson-lacquered nails lunged through.

Father Chuck grunted as the door slammed back against his shoulder. Dennis and Gary hurled themselves against the steel on either side of him; Max tossed the grenade through the crack beneath the flapping, twisting hand.

A chorus of deafening shrieks sounded outside. Despite the efforts of Gary and the others, the door was forced open wider, inch by inch.

Max grabbed up the shotgun, fired into the mummified wrist protruding through the door. Ignited by the point-blank blast, bits of burning flesh streaked like little meteors, and the severed wrist whipped back into the blackness trailing flame. Shoving the Remington after it into the crack, he loosed two ringing blasts.

The pressure on the door vanished. Gary and his companions slammed the door shut just in time to feel the jolt of the grenade-blast through the steel. Gary stepped back, panting.

And felt something crawling up his leg.

He looked down. It was the severed hand, scrabbling like a giant spider.

Gasping a curse, he knocked it off with a sweep of his rifle. It rolled across the floor into a corner-only to come scuttling forward again.

Max blew it apart with his 870. Red-nailed fingers scattered.

“Okay!” Max cried, pivoting, kneeling before the door. The men with guns took up their positions. At a signal from Max, Father Chuck swung the door wide.

The tunnel beyond was filled with grey, hot, sweetish-smelling vapor. Even smokeless powder put up quite a cloud when burned by the pound. The miasma glowed with the beams from Max and Dennis’s gun-mounted flashlights.

Indistinct through the haze, a corpse on the floor jerked up into a sitting position. Its face lifted toward them, jaw swinging open to let out a scream.

Guns roared. The body flopped back down headless.

“Shit,” Buddy said. “Holy shi-”

Two others rose convulsively behind the first, leaping to their feet. One was a hag in a water-stained strapless evening gown, her breasts withered flat against her chest, her right wrist a burned stump. Gary thought he recognized the other corpse, even though the dead man’s eyes were stalks, and his cheeks were stretched tight over his bones, and his mouth bulged with dirt.

Dunk?

The others opened up. Gary jumped, automatically joining in.

The dirt in Dunk’s mouth burst out in a brownish puff laced with teeth. Scraps of cloth flew from Dunk’s trouser-legs. His head disintegrated. He and the hag toppled together, arms whipping and flailing.

“Dunk,” Gary whispered, stung by guilt, but grateful at the same time that his reflexes had given him no time to think, to hesitate. Surely he’d done the right thing.

“Come on!” Max cried, straightening. “Go for their hands, so they can’t grab us!”

They pressed forward firing, but halted after a few paces; Gary came up short behind Max, who was reloading feverishly.

Ahead were six or seven more. Smoke curled from their clothes, and their faces were scorched; Gary guessed they’d been slammed back up the tunnel by the blast, and were only now striding to the attack.

Flame belched from gun barrels. The tunnel reverberated with shrieks and blasts, ceiling and walls painted with flashing red light. Shell-casings rained to the floor.

But in a matter of seconds the guns were empty, and there were still two corpses closing on the smoking muzzles; jaws clacking, clawlike fingers raking the air, they wobbled up the tunnel on all-but shattered legs. And behind them came a tangle of dismembered fragments, crawling and flopping and struggling blindly.

Trembling hands shoved clips into slots, shotgun shells into traps. Bolts clicked back; pumps chambered cartridges. Barrels dropped, training on the dead once more.

Cries from the women and teenagers in the darkness behind; the corpses back there were scrabbling after them with whatever remained of their limbs.

“MacAleer, Steve!” Max cried. “Cover the rear!”

They scrambled to obey.

The corpses ahead closed in.

Dennis, Max and Gary opened up. A wall of lead sent the oncoming dead sailing back in shreds. Turning their fire on the sprawl of fragments, the three advanced, pumping, blasting, spraying out buckshot and bullets till there was nothing left to fear from the squirming parts. The guns went silent, but the tunnel still resounded with screams shrilling from ragged throat-stumps; ears ringing, the group sprinted through the smoke-laced darkness.

Momentarily they reached the junction with the storm-sewer, jumping a full yard down into the huge pipe. There they stopped, but only long enough to reload. Once that was done, Max led off to the right at a trot.

“You sure you know where you’re going?” Gary asked him.

“Dad showed me around,” Max said. “We’ll come out in that big grate that empties on Lake Heloise.”

“Think we’ll run into any more down here?”

“Maybe.”

“Wonder if they’ve broken into the shelter yet?” Dennis panted.

“Going to be hard telling,” Max said. “Won’t be able to hear much, with the ones we totaled still screaming like that…”

They approached a manhole shaft. Max slowed and stopped-then leaped suddenly under the opening, shining his flashlight up into the hole, ready to shoot.

“Nothing,” he said.

They pushed on.

Light-beams revealed a culvert ahead, emptying on the main pipe, some five feet up the left-hand wall. Max slowed again and searched the tube, then pressed past it.

“They’re going to be waiting for us at the grate,” Gary said.

Max said nothing, forging forward.

“They’ll bottle us up if there’s enough of them…”

“Might not be any there,” Max said. “Not if they thought the ones by the door would surprise us.”

“Hey!” called Uncle Buddy from the rear. “We’ve gotta stop! My wife’s dying back here-outta shape.”

Max paused, saying: “One minute, that’s all. We don’t want to be down here when they bust through the shelter door.”

The group drew together. Gary noticed that only Max seemed still to have his breath.

“Anyone hurt back by the shelter?” Max asked.

“Sally got a bash on the leg,” Steve told him. “All those severed limbs flailing around.”

“I’m all right,” Sally said.

“Anyone else?” Max asked.

“We’re fine,” said Mr. MacAleer.

“Okay,” Max said. “I’m going to take a look ahead.”

Turning, he headed up the pipe, rounding a sharp bend. But before long he came jogging back into view, face lit by the beam from Uncle Dennis’s flashlight.

“Coast looks clear up there,” he reported. “Could see all the way to the sewer-mouth. Let’s move.”