Mark Rogers - The Dead

Something shattered up on the first floor. There was a powerful slam, and footsteps thudded. They approached the cellar-door, then halted, just on the other side by the sound of it. Then they headed away.

But Gary’s attention was fixed on the other thumpings now.

The ones that had started inside the utility room.

What the fuck is in there? he thought.

“Steve,” he heard Sally whisper, “oh God, Steve.”

“Just shut up,” Steve said.

The thumping grew harder-then came a soft and horrible mewing sound, and a spate of scrabbling, like rats in a wall.

“Steve, she’s getting loose,” Sally said.

“Who?” Gary asked.

Neither of them answered. Steve had a strange smile on his face. He shrugged.

Gary knew now he had to look into the room. Turning the knob, he pushed the door open with his shotgun barrel, his gaze going immediately to the middle of the floor.

Coated with grey dust, a mummified hand protruded through a crack in the concrete, rising slowly like some hideous flower, leathery wrist rasping against the sides of the fissure.

“Max,” Gary said huskily. “Max!”

His brother was already at his side.

“Don’t shoot,” Max said. “You’ll bring ‘em all down on us.”

Floorboards creaked above.

What are they doing up there? Gary thought desperately, watching the mummified hand reach higher and higher, fingers clenching and unclenching now, the joints popping and squealing.

“Who is that in there, Steve?” Max asked.

No answer.

“You know, don’t you, motherfucker?”

With a ragged grate, a large slab of concrete tilted upward. Another ashen hand locked around its lip, pushed it aside, leaving a two-foot wide gap.

“Steve,” Max said, “Tell me who that is, or I’ll push your face down that hole.”

“Tell him, Steve,” Sally said.

“What good’ll it do?” Steve asked.

Max went for him.

“It’s Ginger!” Sally cried. “ It’s his first wife!”

A raw shriek pealed out of the opening in the floor. The hands whipped back down into the darkness. Dust and chips of concrete shot into the air.

“Sally Sally SALLEEEE!” screamed the voice from the pit.

Above, footsteps hammered toward the cellar door. With a boom the door flew off its hinges, bouncing end over end down the stairs, landing flat against the floor. Two corpses clattered behind, both wearing sweatpants and muscle-T’s.

Gary twisted toward them, squeezed off his chambered round, pumped and fired. Ragged ratholes blew open in the t-shirts. The corpses smashed sideways into the paneling. Gary pummeled them till the wood was spackled with their flesh.

The back door banged open. He heard Linda shriek, and whirled.

Jaws distended by a plug of hardened concrete, a corpse was striding toward her. She and Father Chuck started in with their guns.

Sally lifted her pistol, but the hammer wasn’t cocked.

Bullets biting chunks from its face, the corpse waded forward, straps of scalp whipping straight up from exit-wounds in the back of its skull. Linda and Father Chuck jumped out of its way. Shaking her gun, swearing at it, Sally caught a taloned uppercut and staggered back across the room.

Gary reloaded. Max and Steve stepped forward, pouring fire into the corpse, battering it to the floor. Bones pulverized, the cadaver lay on the carpet flopping spastically, unable to rise.

Gary looked round at the steps. The fragments of his victims were wriggling blindly down the stairs.

Over by the utility room, practically on the threshold, Sally was sitting with her back to the door, shaking her head, blood welling from the gashes in her cheek and chin. If she heard the shrieks of Ginger Jennings reverberating from the room behind, she gave no sign. Gary and Steve started toward her, yelling.

Like something squeezed from a tube, Ginger came squirting up from the hole she’d clawed out.

Gary aimed for her head, but caught it only with the fringe of the shotgun blast, spattering her cheek and temple with pellets. Dust puffed from the impacts, and her head jerked to one side; then her hands were on Sally, hauling her up. Unable to get a clear shot, Gary and Steve stopped short.

Ginger spun Sally around. Looking into the fury’s wizened face, Sally began to struggle, shrieking, tossing her head, hair whipping.

“Ginger!” she screamed. “It was all Steve’s-”

Steve and Gary closed in to blast Ginger point-blank, but were too late to save Sally. With a movement almost too quick to follow, Ginger raised the struggling woman further, thrust her head forward, and bit Sally’s throat out. Blood spewed onto Ginger’s face and all over the doorjamb.

Gary shoved his gun barrel into Ginger’s dripping brow, pulled the trigger-

Click.

Ginger hurled Sally to the carpet, chewing the bloody flesh in her mouth, she stepped over her victim. Gary retreated. She went for Steve.

Gary tried to pump a new shell into the Mossberg, but the action was jammed. Steve backpedalled furiously, blasting away with his.45. Star-shaped pits cratering her blood-painted face, black against red but Ginger kept coming.

Max’s H and K rattled. Ginger sailed backward into the utility room as if an invisible fist had struck her in the stomach.

She tried to get back up. He raked her across the legs.

“Out!” he bellowed. “Out!”

In the scramble for the back door, Father Chuck tripped over the lashing limbs of the corpse on the floor, dropping his pistol. He managed to disentangle himself, but not before a hand ripped deep into his calf. Max had to help him up the stairs, out into the back yard.

Sounds of pursuit from within; was Ginger crippled after all?

They staggered away among the bungalows to the north. Bringing up the rear, Gary noticed Father Chuck was leaving a bloodtrail. The priest’s black pantleg clung to his leg, plastered against the shredded drysuit, shiny and sodden.

They paused. Father Chuck leaned against the side of a canary-yellow bungalow as Max took off his own belt and wrapped it above the priest’s wound, tightening it fiercely to choke off the blood-flow.

Steve and Gary stood guard. Gary had scooped Father Chuck’s.45 off the floor on the way out.

“Sorry,” Steve panted. “I thought she would’ve escaped already. But I buried her in solid concrete, and she must not have had enough lever-”

“Why’d you do it?” Gary broke in.

“Kill her?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it to you?” Steve asked, apparently puzzled that he was being pressed about such trivia.

Gary was stunned by his manner. If anything, it seemed more shocking than Steve’s crime. It was a few moments before Gary could speak.

“I mean, was it an accident?” he asked. “Was she cheating on you? Or was it just cold-blooded murder?”

Steve flashed him a smile. “Hey, you know me. What do you think?”

“Tell me,” Gary said.

“It was because of Sally,” Steve replied, after a pause. “Ginger found out about us. She wanted to cut me out of her money.”

“So you just killed her?”

“It wasn’t just that,” Steve went on, as if he’d left out some genuinely mitigating circumstance. “She started screwing someone else. A little tit for tat. ‘Sauce for the gander,’ she said. She was going to dump me over for him. But nobody walks out on me, Gary.”

Gary stared at him, dumbstruck. Steve returned the stare, still smiling. There wasn’t the least hint of guilt in his expression, or even a trace of insanity. He looked as he always did, handsome, good-natured, intelligent.

“Just imagine,” he went on. “The nerve of the bitch.”