Tim Curran - Resurrection

So many white and wriggling fingers that it looked like a nest of slinking maggots in busy, industrious action.

Boards broke, others were yanked free of the nails that held them.

Eyeless faces swam in, faces that were made of dozens of converging white sacs like the floats of jellyfish. Faces that were melted wax and writhing carpets of flesh. A white face that was speckled with mold leered at Mitch with oyster-gray eyes, gouts of black blood hanging from its mouth. Another pushed in next to it, this one like a watercolor painting that had run…everything oozing from the bone beneath in a fungoid mass threaded with red worms.

Mitch and others had fallen back, but now they came forward, not with their guns, but with roadflares. They popped the caps and brought the flames to bear on the evil dead. The flames ate into hands and blackened fingers and vaporized eyes, the room filling with a thick and oily smoke of cremated flesh.

But there were always more faces and more hands.

The dead were pressing in in vast numbers and the boards were all snapping, breaking free. Bloated and fleshy hands looked for something to grab. Scabrous faces screamed and howled. More and more faces all the time, most of them ruined and puffy from immersion in the water.

The flares were just not enough.

The shotguns came out now and the night turned into a thunderstorm of shrieking voices and booming guns. Triggers were jerked and pumps worked, the muzzle flashes blinding and the chamber explosions deafening in the confines of the classroom. It was a blazing, hammering, flashing storm of pyrotechnics.

And the dead felt the sting of the rock salt.

They began to dissolve and steam and sizzle, faces sliding from skulls and hands withering. They fell into slops of mucus and flesh and jittering bones. But more came and more after that and soon enough, they had made it into the classroom over the remains of the others.

It was war to the knife now.

Mitch dropped three zombies and battered at the face of a fourth. He saw one fall apart at his feet and keep moving, a creeping plexus of meat that dragged its bones behind it like it was trying to free itself of them. He hopped away from it and right into the arms of three others. They threw him down and he brought his shotgun up, blasting two of them away that almost comically smashed into each other as they began to burn, melting into one another and fusing together, falling in a skittering, slimy heap. Smoking and steaming, they tried to pull away from each other but were tangled in each other’s anatomies.

The third zombie reached down for him and he gave it a round dead in the face that pulverized its head in splatter of tissue. It waltzed around, blind and thrashing and fell into a couple others.

And then he noticed something incredible.

Some of the dead had grown together. Two and three of them were sometimes stuck together in a central mass. At least, that’s what it looked like. But he soon saw that was not entirely the case. They were dividing. A huge and fleshy mass was actually dividing and becoming two or three separate entities.

He reloaded and kept shooting.

There was nothing else to do.

Tommy fired his last rounds and then grabbed a board and started swinging with everything he had, smashing heads that sometimes just collapsed and others that exploded in sprays of meat and tissue and black blood. Blood that was acidic and stinging when it struck him.

He saw more things come through the windows, but these were not men or women or children exactly, but something else. They looked like infants or fetuses, crawling things with too many coiling white limbs and huge bulbous heads. Some were conjoined like Siamese twins. Connected at the head or neck or waist. One of them had a face on both sides of its head and another had three faces stacked up on top of each other. Some were eyeless and some had but a single black, serous eye. Others had just too many. They hopped and skittered and slithered. One of them with no less than two heads and what might have been a dormant third, dragged itself in his direction. It had the requisite number of limbs. Though while those on the left side of its body were withered sticks, those on the right were massive and muscular, the globular white flesh set with thick purple veins.

When it got close, it tried to leap at him, but he swung his board and smashed one of the heads open. Worms and filth bubbled out. He smashed the second head the same way and that morbid thing still lived, hopping about in a crazy circle and spewing black fluid from its wounds.

Another of the freak babies came at him.

Its head was huge and misshapen, eyes the size of golf balls, a yawning mouth filled with overlapping serrated teeth that were blackened and rotting.

Tommy grabbed another board that was sharp as a stake and ran the thing through as it lunged at him. It vomited out black bile and shook like a fish out of water. Its flesh was bloodless and pulsing. Letting out a shrill, piping cry, it did not try and pull itself free from Tommy’s sharpened board…it did just the opposite. Possessed by a stupid, maniacal hate, it began to push itself up the shaft of the board, impaling itself further, but only concerned with getting at the man that had speared it.

Tommy tossed the board with a cry and the thing tried to move still.

More freak babies were coming through the windows, some of them attached together like paper dolls. Others crawled up the walls and some just wriggled about like squids or worms.

Tommy kicked at one that made for his legs, felt another creep up his back. He tossed it to the floor and it actually splattered into a convulsive stew of flesh and black fluid.

And then one grabbed his arms with wiry white fingers. Its bloated, waxy face grinned up at him and then its black teeth sank right into his forearm. He let out a cry and tried to grab the top of its head to toss it free. Its skull was not bone, but some rubbery and gelid material that came apart in his hand. His fingers plunged right through the crown of its skull and pierced the wormy gray matter within.

It let out a wild, whooping cry and fell off him.

And as if answering some unknown call, the freak babies retreated.

Hubb kept firing and reloading, firing and reloading.

He made a pretty good show of himself for a man who’d already suffered two minor heart attacks and was on the verge of a third. His left arm was burning, his chest tight and corded. Sweat ran down his face and he could not seem to breathe. But true to form, he wailed out a string of profanities and fired his last rounds until a burst of pain in his chest made him nearly black out.

He dropped his gun.

His eyes fluttered closed and when he opened them, there was a little girl standing there with a hatchet in her hands. Her hair was black and lustrous, stuck to her white face with blood and snot.

“I brought you something, mister,” she said.

Hubb just shook his head.

The hatchet came down again and again and Hubb was beyond defending himself. It split his head open, severed his left hand at the wrist, dug into his throat, chopping and cutting and slicing until he fell over dead.

The zombie girl kept hacking at him until she was splashed red with his blood. Then giggling, she picked up his hand and went back out into the night.

Chrissy and Deke worked in unison with road flares in each hand, jabbing them into faces and clawing hands, driving the dead away. But for everyone that fell back, three more took their place.

A dozen of them surrounded the couple, then at some unspoken moment, lunged. The first few got flares jammed into their faces, but the others got what they wanted. Two of them dragged Deke to the ground and he fought like a wild cat, punching and kicking and slashing until he worked himself free.