Tim Curran - Resurrection

Several others took Chrissy and tried to drag her to the windows. She fought in their grip. Her nails dug into eyeballs and her fingers slid into pulpy faces. Others joined in, fighting for possession of her. One of them had a face of trailing flesh that looked like a squashed jellyfish, another had a tiny set of mutant arms coming out of its chest. She screamed and fought and then Mitch was there.

He put his last two round into the lot of them.

Several died, smoking and shuddering. Two others made for the window.

What was left behind was a woman who was hideous beyond words. She looked like the others, save that she had been pregnant. Instead of being born, the child had simply been absorbed by its mother’s flesh. It had now erupted from her belly, a thing with flesh like grease, heads thrashing and limbs rising out of the mass like it was trying to escape the bondage of its mother.

Tommy came up and tossed a flare into her lap and she crept away, burning and making a snorting, guttural sound like a suckling pig.

And that’s when they all noticed one thing.

The dead had now retreated.

They were outside the windows, hundreds of them, but they were not coming in.

And then it started raining again.

Raining damn hard.

But this was not water falling from the sky. It was something solid. Something that came down in a violent, lashing crimson torrent. Mitch and the others stood there, not knowing what to think or what to make of it. This was a red rain. It struck the walls of the orphanage with thudding, splatting sounds that were disgusting and meaty. Then that red, liquid rain poured right through the windows.

It was filled with falling, ropy shapes.

Not rain.

But worms.

A rain of red worms.

The first deluge of them were squashed by the fall, breaking open on impact. But they kept coming and coming and coming until the floor near the windows was a foot deep in thousands of looping and twining red worms. They were tangled together in a single mass of brilliant red undulant motion that began to break apart.

The worms were coming for Mitch and the others.

They uncoiled themselves from that squirming mass and began dropping to the floor. The first few just laid there, almost sluggishly like grass snakes waking up after a long winter’s hibernation. Almost like they were dazed. But others followed and they were very active. Some of them were easily a foot in length, segmented and violently red, obscenely thick and excreting a transparent jelly. A few of them rose up and tasted the air with tiny puckering mouths.

There was no getting beyond the absolute revulsion they inspired.

Mitch and Tommy, Deke and Chrissy…they were all feeling it. Some macabre and self-destructive part of their brains wondering bleakly what it might feel like to have one of those things slide up your pant leg or get under your shirt. Maybe slide across your belly or put that puckering mouth against your lips. You could not look at things like that without being offended almost atavistically. The human mind recoiled at the idea of worms in general and when they were profuse like this, it was appalled to great depths. For mankind had a long association with squirming, serpentine shapes and hated them on sight. For Mitch and the others, they were seized by a primal instinct which told them to stomp those things, to crush them under their boots. To exterminate them. Because if you didn’t, they’d breed and infest and you just couldn’t have that, now could you?

Mitch didn’t know about the others, but to him worms were just worms. Until they gathered in numbers like this. And especially since he had seen these very same worms slithering in and out of the walking dead, infesting and feeding upon them. And now they had come down in a rain. An actual rain.

Not good.

Not good at all.

“They’re coming across the floor,” Chrissy said. She was a long-time detractor of anything crawly or slinking and these things filled her with horror.

More worms unknotted themselves from the central mass. No less than fifty or sixty of them were moving at Mitch’s group.

“What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Deke wanted to know. “They’re worms. Worms don’t hunt people.”

“It’s that fucking Weerden, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is one of his little tricks, you know? A funny little game to him.”

“Grab the last of those flares,” Mitch said.

Chrissy refused to do anything but press herself up against the wall. She knew that fear of such things like these was a cliched female thing, but she honestly did not care. Let the men handle it. She just didn’t do worms.

Tommy, Mitch, and Deke popped the flares and guttering red flames shot out, spraying sparks and lazy clouds of smoke.

“Come on, wormy. Got something for you,” Tommy said.

Maybe the worms were driven by Weerden, but they were still essentially worms, regardless of their apparent mutation. And worms did not understand fire. They did not understand what it was like to burn. Not until they got too close. Then they understood, all right.

Tommy gave them the first taste.

Not that Mitch was surprised. Even as a kid, Tommy had been practically fearless. The first kid to step on an especially large and ugly spider. The first guy to shoot some growling, strange dog with his slingshot. The first one to pick up a snake or swing a dead rat around by the tail. The first guy into a fistfight and the last one out. He was in his element here. Maybe it was not especially smart under the circumstances, but he figured that if clowns from hell didn’t scare him, worms weren’t about to.

Two or three got within range of his boot and he put the flame to them. The flare burned especially hot and it sliced them right in half. Their severed bodies writhed on the floor.

“Just fucking worms,” Tommy said.

Mitch and Deke were at it, too, by then. On their knees, they passed the flares before them in wide arcs and the heat drove most of the worms back. Those that didn’t retreat, were fried. Within five minutes, there had to be a hundred smoking, blazing worm carcasses.

“God, that stinks,” Chrissy said.

Mitch laughed almost automatically.

“This works good,” Deke said, seeming to enjoy himself.

“Sure, until you guys run out of flares.”

Then what? Then what happened? The worms kept coming and Mitch and his little crew tap-danced around, trying to squash as many as they could before the little buggers got up their pants and started biting, started tunneling like borer worms? Because if those things got them down, they’d be buried in their numbers.

“Hey!” Tommy called out into the night. “This ain’t working, Weerden, you fucking scab! Try something else!”

Mitch was going to tell him that you didn’t challenge something like Alardus Weerden, something dead yet alive, something that was practically immortal if you believed the regeneration stories they’d heard at the Army base. You didn’t go and piss off something like him that had been on both sides of the grave and many times. Jesus Christ, he was a warlock for chrissake. What if he could call up a storm or raise a demon or something like that?

But he didn’t do any of those things.

And maybe Weerden had nothing to do with what came next, but nobody believed that for a moment.

The dead were still out there, but there was something with them now. Some huge, amorphous shape that crept up to the windows like a spreading hood of shadow. Maybe crept wasn’t the right word, for this moved like a wave, a great dark wave heading ashore and when it hit the building, the classroom shook.

And Mitch thought: Oh good God, what is that coming at us? What is that?