Mark Rogers - The Dead

Max bashed its forehead open. A wing of skin dropped over its remaining eye. The corpse swept blindly about with its massive arms. One of its hands locked on the barrel of the gun, yanking the weapon from Max. Max ducked, grabbed the trooper by the boots, and upended it over the grille, into the flames boiling in the engine compartment. The gun went with it.

“ Like that ?” Max bellowed. “ You like burning? You like it, motherfucker ?”

The corpse tried to struggle out of the inferno, but was caught in the remains of the burning grub, a viscous semi-liquid mass; there was no escape. Max watched until the cadaver’s movements ceased.

“You all right?” Dennis asked behind him.

Max nodded, turning.

“Here,” Dennis said, handing him his machete.

Max caught a glimpse of motion, off to the side. Some yards away lay the corpse that had been caught by the grub, a tangled mass of skin and clothes, heaving slowly, the deflated face lying across a fold of fabric, mouth squirming.

Do they ever really die ? Max wondered. Fire seemed to finish them. But once the fire was out, what then?

He and Dennis went back to the office. MacAleer was standing beside his wife’s body; Father Chuck was in a corner, blood on his face, Camille was opening up a first aid kit to tend him. Max guessed flying glass had struck him. The air was thickening with smoke from the corpse burning on the table top, although most of the fumes were rising to the ceiling and pouring out into the garage through the gap in the front window.

“Lou Ann,” moaned Mr. MacAleer. “Oh my God, Lou Ann.”

Max turned. Tears streaming, MacAleer had knelt, holding his wife’s hand, shaking his head.

“Threw herself past me,” Max said. “Took me completely by surprise, and then… then she was…” He shuddered, recalling his last words to her. He felt despicable.

Fucking junkyard dog, Max. That’s all you are.

“It wasn’t your fault,” MacAleer said. “It was hers.”

Max wanted to be comforted. Was he being too hard on himself? It had been obvious even to MacAleer that her attack on the trooper had been sheer insanity.

Max said: “Seeing what happened to Jamie must’ve-”

MacAleer nodded. “Broken her faith.”

“What?”

“That’s why she died.”

Max almost shrank back from him then and there, disgust suddenly blotting out all pity for the man.

“Jamie never believed at all,” MacAleer continued, gesturing dismissively toward his dead son.

Max studied MacAleer’s face. His features were slack, horribly expressionless.

“Max,” Dennis said, “We have to get out of here. There are probably more of those things around.”

“What about my wife?” MacAleer asked numbly. “My son?”

“We’ll have to leave them,” Max said, eyes tearing over from the smoke. He wiped them, coughing.

MacAleer nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

Then he loosed a tremendous cry and slapped Lou Ann across the face.

“Married to me twenty years, and you learned nothing at all from me! Nothing!” He struck her again and again, knocking her head limply back and forth. “The fool says in his heart there is no God! The fool , Lou Ann. I taught-”

Max hauled him to his feet.

“Look,” he snarled, shaking him. “You snap out of it, okay?”

MacAleer pointed wildly at his wife’s corpse. “She didn’t believe!”

Max pulled MacAleer close against his chest, glaring into the man’s face. “Believe this, asshole. We’ll leave you here with them.”

MacAleer’s eyes were wide and crazed. His lips twitched.

Max grabbed him by the cheek, digging his fingernails into the man’s flesh. “Snap… out… of… it,” he said.

MacAleer put a trembling hand to his mouth, nodded. Some kind of sanity seemed to return to his eyes.

“Aunt Camille,” Max said, “you have the good Father patched up?”

“Yes, Max.”

“Okay then. Time to roll.”

They left the office, but Max paused before they got out of the building, remembering Jamie’s and Lou Ann’s packs. The group would need the supplies…

“Wait a second,” he said, and went back. He had to pass the burning corpse, and eyed it closely as he drew near, not sure if it was harmless even now. The flames had spread to the desktop itself; a plastic ashtray, half-melted, was spilling a stream of fire over the edge. The corpse’s face was turned full toward him, grinning blackly, scorched and fleshless. Max gripped his machete tighter, raised it-and stepped by.

Reaching Jamie and Lou Ann, he gently removed their knapsacks. Carrying them over one arm, he started for the door. Again he cocked his blade back as he passed the desk.

Going a few yards, he gave a last glance back toward Lou Ann and Jamie. “God have mercy,” he said under his breath, then-

Shrieked and staggered as a blazing form came leaping out at him from the desktop, flesh somehow restored, clothes burned away, body glowing and sparking. Its fiery glow faded an instant after it burst from the flames; all but invisible, a translucent shape reared up before Max, phantom arms flailing. The image of the fire behind it seemed to be passing though clear jelly.

He struck at one of the whipping hands with the machete. He might as well have been slashing smoke. The ghostly wrist knit instantly back together, and he felt the hand enter his jaw like water though cloth, sweeping into his tongue with a rotting fruit taste; penetrating the roof of his mouth, the ectoplasmic mass reached his brain, and his mind exploded in a shout of agony. As the hand passed out of the top of his head, he sagged to the floor screaming.

“Max!” he heard Dennis cry, as from a great distance, and turning on his hands and knees and looking up, he saw his uncle and Father Chuck.

All at once he was possessed by an urge to leap to his feet and charge at them with the machete. The very fact that they weren’t sharing his pain was unendurable, worse than the pain itself. He would hack them into pieces before they realized what was happening, fasten his mouth to their wounds and gulp their blood-

But no.

He must preserve as much of them as he could. The sooner they rose, the sooner they might serve the King of Spikes. If they were mangled too badly, His Majesty would find out. And as bad as the pain was now, there was worse. The King would hurl him back. Out of the numbing flesh. Back into the wheels…

They’d have to be strangled. It would be hard, with two of them. But if he cut a leg out from under one, the other could be throttled. And then the cripple’s turn would come.

Max got up, grinding his jaws, lifting his machete, feeling a tremendous grin of rage spread over his face. Seeing his expression, Dennis and the priest stopped as though they’d struck a wall, faces registering horrified bewilderment.

“Max…” Dennis breathed.

All at once, as if a switch had been thrown, the hatred and pain and soul-searing envy vanished from Max’s mind. He lowered the blade.

“Max?” Dennis asked, squinting at him.

“I’m all right,” Max answered. “Did you see it ?”

“What?”

“The ghost,” Max answered unsteadily. “From the one on the desk.”

“I saw something ,” Father Chuck said. “But it seemed to evaporate. Or fade out, like something projected on a screen…”

“No,” Dennis said. “It went down into the floor. Like it was being dragged. Caught in some kind of machinery.”

Max said slowly: “Its hand…the ghost of its hand…passed though me. For a second I knew what it was feeling…”

“Max, we have to get going,” Dennis said.