Tim Curran - Resurrection

Oates thought that was pretty amusing, too. “Hey, Mrs. Brown,” he sang, “you’ve got a fucking ugly daughter.”

They both broke up over that one. Oates was wracking his brain, trying to remember who sang that song. Was that Herman’s Hermits or Paul Revere and the Raiders? Jesus, Oates just couldn’t remember. But he knew he had owned the 45 back in the days of his carefree youth. Back before he’d become a soldier and then a National Guard den mother.

“Neiderhauser, I’m thinking our girl here is having one of those not-so fresh days, you copy on that?”

“I copy. I’ve smelled some gnarly pussy in my time, Sarge, but this bitch needs to Fabreeze her gee-gee or soak it in Palmolive or something.”

Oates laughed, realizing that was exactly the sort of thing he might say. So he liked it. He liked this “new” Neiderhauser. This boy was a man now. He’d popped his cherry and dipped his wick and he was going to be okay.

Oates kicked the mattress and the dead woman jiggled like about a hundred-and-fifty pounds of green Jello that just hadn’t set right. A mist of flies rose from her. “Ooo-la-la,” he said, “wake up, Little Susie…”

Which wasn’t the sort of thing you really wanted to be saying to dead people in Witcham these days. You were just asking for trouble. And Oates learned that quick enough when a wave of motion passed through the dead woman and she opened her bleary, yellow eyes.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” she said with a voice that was watery and thick like oatmeal dumped into a bowl. “Lookee, lookee, lookee! Well, it’s your lucky day, boys, because Long Tall Sally is open for business and I do mean open!”

Neiderhauser wasn’t a tough guy soldier any more. No, he was a little boy in a dark bed cowering from the shadow of a tree limb the moon had thrown against his wall. He took two stumbling steps back and fell on his ass, a choking sound coming from his throat.

Oates for once found himself without a comment.

The dead woman sat up with a tearing, moist sound like moldering, wet laundry peeled from a basement floor. Most of the skin of her back remained stuck to the mattress, ropes of tissue connecting her to it as she sat up. She grinned at Oates and Neiderhauser and it was a hideous sight. Not a smile so much, but more like her face had suddenly sheared open. Something dropped off her left cheek and a yellow mucus oozed from her eyes. She belched out a cloud of flies.

“What’s a matter, fellas? You afraid of a real woman? Oh, take those cocks out for me so I can suck ‘em. Mmmm. You’re seeing a girl what likes a good piece of meat. One I can suck and chew and bite off at the root…”

She stood up with a slushy sound, those ropes of tissue snapping like elastic cords. She licked the puckered hole of her mouth with a black tongue and spat out a couple of teeth, shaking herself like a wet dog, rank fluids running from her vagina and ass. The flies lifted from her and then settled back down, nearly covering her in a droning, crawling mass.

“C’mon, boys,” she said, swiveling those swollen, spongy thighs that were a disgusting purple-black from blood lividity. “Don’t you boys want a blowjob? I’ll suck your cocks so hard yer fucking toes won’t straighten out for a week! I’ll suck your balls right out the ends! See if I don’t? See if I don’t! C’mere, soldier-boy, suckee-fuckee you little faggots! Me so horny! Me so horny!”

Oates almost fell over Neiderhauser getting out of that room as that horror shambled in their direction, shaking her rancid tits at them. She squeezed one bulbous, discolored breast at Neiderhauser and a stream of yellow goo squirted past his face and struck the wall with a stench like the drainage from an infected wound.

Oates shoved him. “Move! Move! Move!” he shouted.

He could hear that thing slopping along behind them with a juicy sound and a rising noise of buzzing flies. Oates heard something snap inside his head. It seemed like everything got really tight behind his eyes, his brain encased in crushing bands, then something just gave up there and part of him, maybe, suddenly ceased to exist.

“Hey, boys, here come the toys!”

Oates shoved Neiderhauser forward, spun around and dropped to one knee. He opened up on that putrescent old whore on full auto. His first volley of shots blew two or three fingers off her left hand as it again squeezed that bulging sack of tit and the breast itself imploded and deflated, a gush of black fluid and meat running from it. The second volley stitched her from crotch to throat, each individual hole freeing a storm of trapped flies and a pissing green bile.

The zombie whore screeched at that. “Look what you did to my beauty, you rotten fuck! Look what you did to Long Tall Sally’s lovely, lovely tit! Now I won’t be able to squirt my milk into your mouth when I catch you!” She cackled at the idea of that, rotting teeth clattering together, and threw her head back. “Go run off, I’ll catch you in the end! Then I’ll take your meat down my throat and give you a sweet taste of what I’ve got brewing down below! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A sweet taste of my naughty parts? I’ll ram ‘em in your mouth and make you suck the blood out of ‘em! Go run and hide, Henry T. Oates, because when I catch you, you’ll get the fucking of your life?”

Oates grabbed Neiderhauser by the scruff of the neck and pushed him along, hoping beyond hope that there was a stairway leading up or down because they had to get out of there. There was a hot sharpness at his bowels like he badly needed to fill his pants, but he wasn’t giving in. He wasn’t going to drop and sob and suck his thumb, no sir! Not Henry T. goddamn Oates. For he was the baddest motherfucker God had ever seen fit to set loose in any war zone, walking dead or no walking dead. He was one bad-ass, life-taking, ball-busting, throat-slitting death machine and he did not give up or give in!

“Stairs,” he said, sighting them just ahead. “Neiderhumper, move your poo-nanny ass up while I cover your behind! Get going, you leg-humping sonofabitch! You don’t move and that cream-queen is going piss her ovaries right down your throat!”

Neiderhauser mumbled something and started up the stairs. He climbed them on all fours like some sort of half-ass monkey until Oates told him to stand up and act like a goddamn man…if such a thing were possible. Had he the time, he would have kicked him in the ass and kept kicking him until his rectum was under his tongue, but there was no time for that.

Long Tall Sally was coming and she was in the need of male companionship.

Oates followed Neiderhauser up the stairs, listening to Neiderhauser whining out some prayer he’d learned in Sunday school. Behind them, the dead whore was saying something about little boys tasting like snails and puppy dog tails. They made it up to the top and Neiderhauser was the first one into that dim hallway.

And that was a lucky thing for Oates.

For Neiderhauser waltzed right into a carefully prepared booby trap.

When Oates was with the 101^st, he’d attended a little seminar on booby traps, learned all about the amazing variety of anti-personnel devices the enemy can fashion from just about anything?unexploded ammunitions to household items. Everything from grenades and bullets to wooden stakes and tin cans. Ingenuity being the mother of invention and all. And people got real inventive when it came to killing other people. But the people that engineered the apparatus that took out Neiderhauser had not been schooled by any army this side of the grave and their idea of raw materials was a little more than shocking.

Oates saw Neiderhauser get it.

About ten feet into the corridor, he tripped some kind of wire and something huge and dark that had been tied off to the ceiling came swinging down on a cord and hit him, impaling him instantly.