Tim Curran - Resurrection

Mitch wasn’t even really paying attention. “Yeah,” was all he could manage.

He had his ear to the door, listening to the unnatural quiet out there. It was a smooth and almost liquid sort of silence that just did not sound right. But then…

“Wait,” he said. “Somebody’s coming.”

Hubb just grunted.

Footsteps. Several pairs of them were coming down the corridor. But they didn’t sound soggy and dragging like those of the dead things, they sounded oddly quick and light.

They paused outside the door.

Mitch barely breathed.

A fist pounded on the door and he brought up his shotgun.

Then a voice: “Mitch? Mitch, you in there?”

Tommy? Holy H. Jesus! Mitch pulled the lock open and as he did so, he was wondering if he’d just made a real big mistake. What if Tommy was one of them now? Wouldn’t that be a real ass-kicker? But the way Mitch was feeling, what did it matter? If Chrissy was dead and Tommy was one of the living dead, his world wasn’t worth a damn anyway.

Mitch pulled open the door and Tommy was standing there. His hat was gone. His raincoat missing. His shirt and pants were torn and filthy like he’d wiped out a barn with them. A real bad odor came off him. His face was peppered with red marks that might have been burns or bites. There had to be some kind of story there.

But at least he was still normal.

“C’mon already, get the hell outta the way so we can get in,” Tommy said.

We?

Oh yes, Tommy came in, smelling like he’d been dancing a jig at a morgue, and behind him…Deke and Chrissy.

Chrissy?

Oh yes, Chrissy.

Dumbfounded, surprised, floored with happiness, Mitch just stood there while she came to him, melted into his arms. She fit right in there, felt perfect as she’d always felt perfect ever since she’d been a child. She was sobbing, shaking, and Mitch was, too. He could barely catch his breath. It had started yesterday morning…or was it afternoon?…when he’d gone out to look for her. When Lily had started to worry. And now…Christ, he could not even wrap his brain around what was happening.

“Are you okay, baby?” he finally managed.

“I am now,” she said.

“Me, too.”

They just stood there looking at each other and finally Chrissy wiped her eyes, said, “What about Mom?”

Mitch shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry…”

An hour later, things were still silent in the orphanage. They could still smell the odor of smoke, so they figured parts of the building were still burning. And if that fanned itself into a three-alarm blaze, there was going to be trouble. Real trouble. Because maybe they did not know where the legions of the dead were, but they were not kidding themselves that they had simply gone away. They were out there, somewhere. But for now, there was nothing but the five of them to do but wait.

And wait.

After Chrissy got over the initial shock of her mother’s death, there was plenty to say. Plenty of stories to be swapped. And listening to them, they all sounded equally as insane. Mitch knew he had Tommy to thank for Chrissy’s life. God willing, there’d be time later to thank him properly.

He was over at the row of windows now. All of them were boarded, but you could see easily enough between them.

“You better get over here,” Tommy said.

Mitch did. He peered out there. The rain had not started again. There were stars out in the sky and a huge full moon had risen over Witcham, turning night to a surreal, almost luminous sort of day. Mitch could see the grass out there, the road coming in. The trees behind. But he wasn’t paying much attention to any of that.

“Shit,” he said.

The dead were out there. And not just twenty or thirty, but hundreds. An immense wall of them standing out there waiting at the edge of the orphanage grounds. Mitch could see that their numbers went on and on, as far as he could see. The road leading through the woods was thick with them. They were all congregating here. Perhaps every last one of them.

Everyone was at the boarded windows now.

“What do they want?” Chrissy said. “Why are they just standing there?”

“They know we got to come out sooner or later,” Hubb said. “You smell that smoke, honey? Goddamn place is burning. Sooner or later, that fire is going to force us out.”

Mitch did not say anything.

There was nothing to say. The dead had vacated the orphanage for reasons known only to themselves. Now they were gathered out there in an army along with what must have been hundreds if not thousands of others, just waiting for the right moment. And that bothered him. Were they this organized? Or were they of some weird communal mind like on a science fiction movie? Or, and worse, had somebody managed to gather them together like this? A leader or something.

“What do you think?” Mitch finally said.

“I’d say we better make ready…I think they’re coming,” Tommy told him.

They were.

They were marching at the orphanage, moving slowly, not breaking ranks. And as the first wave neared, wave after wave after wave pushed in to take their places. And out front, interestingly enough, a single form leading the way.

“Who the hell’s that?” Deke said.

He was moving faster than the others and it wasn’t long before everyone in the classroom could see him just fine. He came within twenty feet of the building and stopped. Stopped dead.

Chrissy swallowed. “He…he was in the chapel.”

“Oh boy,” Tommy said. “You recognize that ugly face, Mitch?”

Mitch did and he didn’t. Who the hell was this? A tall man, almost regal in some way, dressed in a long black coat that might have been hide with a graying shroud beneath, soiled and dirty and set with spreading stains. His face was a leathery skull, the eyes huge, a brilliant yellow like alien moons. That face…yes, Mitch had seen it somewhere. Despite the apparent mummification, he had seen it somewhere before.

Yes, Fort Providence.

In that pit of slithering matter that Osbourne had shown them that had been grown from the finger bone of that German warlock. All those heads and faces rising from it and all of them looking exactly the same.

“Alardus Weerden,” he said.

“Who’s that?” Deke wanted to know.

But there was no time to explain any of it.

Weerden had something in his hand. A mask. He pulled it over his face. Yes, a death mask, stripped from a corpse. The scalp still intact with flowing black hair. Weerden did not move. He stayed put as the dead thronged forward like soldier ants, massing and malefic and creeping. Tommy ordered everyone away from those windows.

But Mitch did not move.

He was transfixed by what he was seeing. The dead. The walking dead of Witcham, grotesquely bloodless and rotting and infested by vermin. His eyes saw them, took them in, looking over that advancing charnel wall of death. Yes, inside he recoiled, but he was no less fascinated by what he was seeing. Skull faces and waxen faces and oozing faces and faces that moved on the bones beneath. Fishlike, blubbery mouths sucking in air and exhaling corpse gas. Fungous things and leprous things, mottled and perforated and leaking a black silt. They came forward with hands raised and fingers hooked. This was it. A human wave attack of the inhuman.

He pulled away just as the siege began.

They hit the outside of the orphanage with a great thud as if they thought they could walk right through walls. They were hissing and gibbering and making slobbering, wet sounds.

“Here we go,” Tommy said.

Hands came through the windows, shattering what glass was left in them. Fingers snaked around boards, pulling and pulling. Fists hammered and voices screeched and shadows wavered. There were raving, insane shrieks, the sound of fingers and teeth tearing at the planks. There were five windows lining the outside wall of the classroom and they were alive, alive with pale hands wrenching and twisting and clawing. Skeletal hands and gray hands and white hands set with numerous dripping black sores. Some fingers were webbed together and some had flesh hanging from them in ribbons and others were throbbing with the motion of the worms that burrowed beneath their skins.