Mark Rogers - The Dead

He took several deep breaths, pressed a hand to his aching temple. Gradually he rose. The gap between curtain and casement was still open; he chanced a look.

There were no corpses nearby now. They were watching the burning bodies, or the last feeble throes of the man wired to the corpse, which had finally revived. Once the victim went still, the corpse ripped through the wires and rose, grinning down at him. Then, as if it couldn’t quite restrain itself, the cadaver bent and thrust its hand between the man’s lips, set its foot on his chest, wrenched his tongue out, and stuffed it into its mouth.

The trooper got into the truck. It tried several times to start the motor. Finally the engine turned over, coughed to life. The giant signaled, and his followers began to gather up the as yet unresurrected corpses on the grass, piling them in the vehicle. The ones who’d been “executed” were left to burn.

Presently the loading was done. The truck doors banged hollowly shut. Gary guessed the trooper and its followers were about to depart.

But leaving the truck running, the giant got back out of the cab and faced the church, standing rock still, hands over its face. Then it loosed a ringing wail, flung both his arms out, and beckoned.

Gary heard a great shifting and rasping from the floor above; some huge mass seemed to be moving across the stone. There were crunching, shattering sounds. Bits of lead framing and stained glass showered the grass outside.

Black things began to land among the window fragments. Some sort of hipbone landed in front of Gary’s window, followed by a cow’s skull. Like something tugged by a string, the skull moved toward the giant in jerks and starts, the hipbone bouncing end over end behind it.

A rain of bones fell, totally obscuring Gary’s view.

The flow continued unabated for at least a minute. When at last the clattering avalanche ended, Gary saw the trailing edge of a carpet of bones dragging over the grass, gathering itself at the base of a dark pile, the cairn from the church reassembled.

The giant’s head and shoulders were still visible behind it; the trooper raised one arm over its head, fingers outstretched. The surface of the cairn stirred, bones rising on end like hackles. The mound heaved, its peak moving this way and that, as if the mass were straining against gravity, trying to pry itself up from the earth. The cairn settled back again.

The trooper raised its other arm. The cairn rose up from the ground on four huge legs, a vast bulk studded with projecting ribs and points. Hundreds of skulls were jumbled among the bones, but there was no recognizable head.

Visible between the legs now, the trooper flung his arms downward. Out from the cairn’s underside in a kind of obscene birth fell two showers of scorched fragments. Striking the grass, they knit instantly into two wolf-like shapes, solid and massive, not skeletons; snouts low as if they were sniffing the ground, they slunk out from under the cairn, then paused, looking toward the trooper.

The giant climbed back into the U-Haul and drove slowly back to the street. Behind came the cairn, a rattling creaking mountain on legs; then the bone wolves; then the rest of the dead.

“They’re gone,” Gary called at last.

The others came over to him. He described what he’d seen.

“This trooper’s not your ordinary stiff,” Steve commented, and laughed. “Maybe he’s Legion, Linda. “

“Still skeptical about demons?” she asked.

Steve scratched the back of his head. “Maybe not as much as I should be. Anymore.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Hell no. If I can imagine a dead body coming back to life, I can imagine it with all kinds of powers.”

“Touche’,” Gary said.

“Why are you always siding with him?” Linda demanded.

“You may be my wife,” Gary answered, “but he’s making a lot more sense. If you ask me you’re doing everything in your power to drive us all right out of our minds.”

“I think you lost your mind a long time ago,” Linda snapped. “And that SOB had a lot to do with it.”

Steve made a smooching noise. “I love you too, Linda,” he said.

As dawn approached, Max’s group, unable to find a hiding place amid the ruins on Bayside Shore’s southern side, took to the storm sewers, bringing two small propane heaters they’d found while hunting for ammunition in an unburnt section of a sporting goods store.

The heaters were a godsend. The cold had gotten bitter after midnight; even though Max and his companions had been on the move constantly, they’d never managed to warm up. Now, gathered around one of the heaters in a junction where a half-dozen pipes intersected, they took up the question of how to cope with the temperature once they went topside again.

“Maybe we’ll hit some houses that weren’t touched.” Dennis said. “We could search them for extra clothes.”

Max rubbed his hands in front of the heater. “If there are any unburnt houses, yeah. We might not be that lucky.”

“Well, do you have any ideas?”

“As a matter of fact,” Max said, “yes. My father used to take me and Gary diving…” He went on to explain about dry suits.

“But where are we going to find some?” Father Chuck asked.

“There was a place down in Matahawking,” Max answered. “It’s about two miles from here.”

“Wouldn’t it have burnt like everything else?” Dennis asked.

“They put up an annex last year,” Max said. “All cinder block, I think.”

“The inside might still have gone up.”

“Maybe. But they seem to have been concentrating on the houses. Anyway, it’s worth a try.”

“Max?” Camille asked, “What are we going to do if we don’t find a boat?”

They’d searched the bay side of the peninsula, but so far they hadn’t discovered any usable craft. Max had theorized that most of the boats had been taken by people fleeing the peninsula; the remainder had been staved in or sunk, apparently by the dead, to prevent anyone else from escaping. Dennis had suggested building a raft-but they’d seen boats patrolling out in the bay, and slipping past them on a raft would be difficult, if not impossible.

“Well,” Max said, “there’s always the bridge.”

“And if they have it blocked?” Camille pressed.

“They might not. If you ask me, they seem to have pretty much decided that the peninsula’s been flushed out, at least the northern part.”

“Then why are they patrolling the bay?” Dennis asked.

“This is the head of the inland waterway. They probably expect all kinds of action through here. Folks trying to cross from the western side, or coming up from the south. I bet they’ve caught quite a few slipping out in canoes or rowboats.”

“So why not stay on the peninsula?” Father Chuck asked. “If they’re all someplace else, why leave?”

“Because there’s not much of anyplace to run,” Max said. “Or hide. And if we could join up with a larger group, we might have a better chance, provided we could stay on the move. Especially if they had heavier firepower.”

“But aren’t all the guns going to break down eventually?” Dennis asked.

“Things seem to be going that way,” Max admitted. “But what choice do we have?”

“We could give up right now,” Camille said. “Turn the heater off, just go to-”

“No,” Dennis said.

“There’s no hope at all,” Camille went on. “Why not just die as painlessly as possible?”

“And wake up as one of those things?” Max asked.

“It’s going to happen whether we surrender or not. The sun’s dying in the sky. It’s rotting. Everyone’s going to die,”