Tim Curran - Resurrection

They started seeing bodies floating in the water.

Mostly soldiers, but some civilians as well. They were all bloated up and reduced to a mush like they’d been full of oatmeal. It was like that…their bodies had been reduced to a slushy, semi-liquid slop. Globs and streamers of the stuff floated around in the water, the driving rain breaking them apart into a slimy goo. They passed a Hummer and a soldier was hanging out the door. He looked almost melted, his flesh hanging off the skeleton beneath like plastic that had superheated, then cooled. They saw another vehicle with two men in it melted together. Another soldier was stuck to the side of a truck…adhered to it by his flesh which had gone gummy and gluey.

“They got caught in the rain,” Tommy said.

He pulled the truck to a stop suddenly, everyone jerking forward in their seats. Something ran right out in front of the truck and quick. It looked like a naked woman swollen to obscene proportions and bleached white. One that had been carrying another in her arms. Except that hadn’t been the case at all…that other woman had been growing from her chest.

“Another freak,” Harry said. “Like at that mannequin place.”

Tommy got the truck rolling again and there was one terrifying moment in which the tires just spun. But they caught and onward went the truck. They were making for the white building on the hill. That was where they needed to go and nobody had to tell Tommy that.

They started climbing the hill and another mutant dragged itself across the road. It was half-crawling and half-swimming. It was either a dog that looked like a rat or a rat as big as a dog with something like trailing, fleshy ropes behind it.

“Boy, my nerves are going to hell,” Tommy admitted. “This is worse than the dummy factory, this is just plain?”

Something hit the roof of the truck.

Something big.

Tommy let out a little gasp and Mitch and Harry just tensed right up. Whatever was up there, it was heavy, the roof popping with metallic sounds as it moved around like it was trying to get comfortable. Tommy had slowed, but now he sped up a bit, not really knowing what else he could do. It was too dangerous with all the vehicles and what not around to try any fancy TV sort of maneuvering.

“Just keep us moving,” Mitch said, his voice dry and cracked like he’d been chewing on salted peanuts and needed something to wet his whistle. He brought up his Remington auto-loader, but mainly to have a weapon in his hands. He wasn’t about to play hero and shoot through the roof; he could just about imagine all those pellets bouncing off the roof and tearing into them.

More popping sounds and then something else that rose above the constant murmur of the falling rain: a squealing, almost mewling sort of sound that made everyone tense, brought out the gooseflesh at the backs of their necks. It was quiet up there after that and they had no true way of knowing whether their guest was still present or had gone elsewhere. Which put them in an awkward position, for sooner or later they would have to get out and the idea of that was frightening to say the least. Mitch just hoped it was gone, because although it sounded like something from a bad movie, he was firmly of the school that there were certain things sane eyes should not see.

And especially at this place.

About that time, Tommy realized his window was open a crack. He closed it real quick, his Adam’s Apple bobbing up and down as he tried to swallow something down. All three men were sweating now. It was growing moist and warm in the truck cab. Tommy thumbed the AC button and it cooled off right away, but that hardly solved their problem.

They were starting up the hill to Doc Frankenstein’s place, as Mitch began to think of it. Problem with the old doc was that he had gotten senile and forgotten to latch the cages of his pets. Now they were wandering everywhere.

Their guest was still present.

A thudding sound from overhead proved that much. It came again and again and the roof dented in slightly.

“Holy shit,” Harry said.

And then it showed itself…or part of itself. Something long and serpentine came sliding down the driver’s side window. It looked almost like a tentacle, but there were no suckers or anything on it. It was perfectly smooth and mottled gray and pink like it was shedding its skin. Tommy pulled away from the window. It coiled at the glass, about as big around as an arm, smearing the rain and leaving bits of itself stuck to the glass. Then it retreated and several more limbs spilled over the outside of the window. Some of them were jointed like the legs of a cricket and at least one of them looked something like a human arm but with no hand at the end.

There was another thudding and their guest took off.

Mitch caught a quick glimpse of it…something huge and bulbous with a hundred trailing appendages. It veered off into the rain, but he could not say it flew off, just maybe drifted away like it was filled with helium.

“I’m for getting the hell out of here,” Tommy said.

Harry nodded. “I second that. Take me back to Slayhoke. It’s too scary out here.”

Mitch found himself laughing at that. It had to be the most absurd thing he’d ever heard anyone say and being Tommy Kastle’s friend all these years, he’d heard some pretty damn absurd things.

Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine with the third nipple?”

Mitch laughed nervously.

“It’s true,” he said. “My cousin Kathy. Kathy Dolin. When I was ten I spent the summer with my cousins in Streator, Illinois. Goddamn hot, I remember that. One night, my cousin Joe said, you wanna see something and I said, sure. Kathy was taking a bath. There was a coat closet on the other side of the tub and you could see through a crack in the caulking, see somebody in the tub. I saw that nipple, swear to God. Kathy had some pretty big pillows on her, but right in-between them, there was another nipple, looked like maybe it hadn’t really took.”

Harry was giggling.

Mitch said, “And what’s the point of that story, Tommy?”

“Pretty obvious, ain’t it?” he said. “There are certain things man was not meant to look upon. Like what’s inside that building ahead.”

He drove them up to the fence, but the gate was locked.

“I guess we walk from here,” he said.

They got out into the water, that building looming up above them. They took their guns, a couple flashlights, and two Coleman lanterns they had taken from Mitch’s garage. The main gate was locked, but they slipped in through a smaller gate that wasn’t. They huffed it up the drive and to the main entrance. There was a little guard shack out front. A soldier with an MP armband was sitting in there, slouched in his chair. His flesh had oozed off him like hot cheese, was stuck to the floor and walls in a webby mess.

At the door, they paused.

“Go ahead, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is your party.”

Of course, the front door was locked.

They’d gotten through too many entrances already, so there was bound to be one that wouldn’t let them in. This was it. All of Fort Providence was high security, but this place, this building, was especially so. Just a steel-faced door with a small slit of thick one-way glass at the top. There was a slot where you could insert your ID card if you happened to have one, but other than that, you weren’t getting in. And there was not a single window that they could see.

“What now?” Tommy said.

“We just go around the side,” Harry explained. “Where the fire was. Should be open there.”

It was a plan.

At least they were out of the water now, that was something. Though it wasn’t like they were going to dry out any time soon with the rain pelting them. Mitch leading, they moved through the wet grass, the rain running down their faces. Patches of groundfog blew around them. But other than the rain, there was no sound to be heard. Just that same dead silence that was eerie and unearthly. They could tell themselves that they were alone, but they knew better than that. Maybe there weren’t any people around as such, but there were other things. Awful things that they just did not want to meet up with.