Tim Curran - Resurrection

His first sensation was the stink it brought with it: a high, almost yeasty smell of fermentation like apples that had gone bad, gone to a soft decaying pulp. That was the smell. Only amplified a thousand times into a low, black stench that got down in his belly and tried to yank his guts out. His second sensation was its size. How it seemed to literally absorb the dead that waited in its path. And his third was when it struck the building: everything shook like a train had just tried to bash through the wall.

Chrissy was actually pitched onto her ass.

“What is it? What is it? What is it?” she kept saying.

But they all saw soon enough. It was a great wave of gray-white jelly, an immense creeping mass that filled the windows, pulsating and oozing and horribly alive. It struck the building, great blobs of itself pressing through the windows like moist, greasy dough forced through holes with incredible pressure. It spilled into the room, fleshy and convulsing, its outer skin transparent so that you could see things like coiling roots and thick red and green arteries that throbbed beneath. Its surface was set with great pustules and trembling mounds, a ropy cobwebbing of white and undulant fibers growing over it like a net.

Somebody screamed and Mitch was pretty sure it was himself.

Though they couldn’t see outside because it blocked the windows, they did not doubt its colossal bulk. For the walls were creaking as was the entire orphanage. That thing could maybe have swallowed it alive.

“What the fuck?” Tommy said.

As it came into the room, it fell over the worms and vacuumed them right up into its mass. Whatever it was, it would absorb and assimilate anything that it came into contact with. Anything of flesh and blood.

“It looks…it looks like that thing in the pit,” Mitch said. “At the base.”

And it did. That quivering mass of shapeless flesh that Osbourne had shown them. That massive undulating horror that they had grown from Weerden’s tissue. Perhaps it was that very thing, Mitch thought. When the dam broke, it probably flattened Fort Providence like everything else. The base would have been right in its path. The research compound there was probably stripped away and this horror was set loose, to devour and consume and engorge itself. Maybe this wasn’t that thing, but it was something pretty damn close.

“A fucking blastema,” Tommy said.

It poured into the classroom, massing in front of the windows. It did not flood forward and overwhelm Mitch and the others. Instead, it began to grow, to divide, to do something. White pulsing tendrils emerged from the mass and began snaking over the floor, up the walls, spreading over the ceiling like albino rootlets as seen via time-lapse photography. Yes, the walls, the ceiling, the floor was thick with them. But before any of those seeking growths reached Mitch and the others, something else happened. It looked like the thing was germinating. All those great pustules and lumps and cancerous looking mounds began to split open and out came…people. Or parts of them. Perfectly white hands erupted and clutched at the empty air. Arms came out, fingers wiggling at their ends. And then faces. A hundred faces, a thousand faces. So many albino faces that they crowded in for space. All of them were a ghastly white like the walking dead themselves. All were hairless. Most were fetal and unformed. None had eyes, just contorted, gasping mouths. And everyone of those mouths began to scream with the high, agonized wailing of the damned.

More limbs sprouted.

Not just faces now, but entire heads.

And then entire bodies, marble-white mockeries of men, women, children, even infants. They began to emerge from the central crawling mass, screeching and moaning, trying to pull themselves free with their hands. They were not just white, but perforated with tiny holes and grotesque nodules that popped and spilled that black blood. Their skins were set with a pale green and blue vein tracery. More of them sprouted all the time. Some growing from the bellies of the previous or sheering others asunder as they flowered with a moist, ripping sound. Bodies divided into two and three and four, single heads split into twos and threes with sprays of gray slime. Faces were overrun by other faces. Embryonic things like mutant babies emerged. Multi-headed things. Things with dozens of limbs. All of them connected to the central mass.

And all along the flowing, rippling mass of tissue, more things were born and more and more and more. A forest of reaching hands and thrashing limbs and sightless screaming faces.

It surged forward and Mitch pushed the others toward the doorway.

Better to face off against the dead than be absorbed by this hideous mutation, to be pulled in by those hands and feel those puckered mouths on your own. Tommy threw open the door, the sound of those screaming mouths just absolutely deafening. Mitch knew they would not escape. There was just no way. And out in the corridor, more of that surging tissue was rolling in their direction with a million faces.

“Mitch…” Chrissy said with absolute desperation.

And then something happened.

Something incredible.

Something that they would not have believed if they had not been there to witness it.

It started to rain.

Not worms and not water, but something else. A violent lashing storm as if the heavens had been split open and the orphanage and everything for miles around it was deluged in its blood. It poured and poured, hammering down so loudly that Mitch could not hear what Tommy was saying.

But then he didn’t have to.

He could smell what it was: the yellow rain. The same sharp, acrid stink that Tommy and he had smelled when the rain killed those cops outside the Sadler Brothers Army/Navy Surplus.

Tommy jumped up and down. “VVK!” he shouted. “IT’S THE VVK!”

Deke and Chrissy had no idea what the hell he was talking about. They were dumbfounded and confused. Was this a good development or a bad one? Yes, they were stunned and horrified and just beside themselves, but mostly they were dumfounded. The smell was so bad, the air so thick with the pungent odor of that toxic chemical rain, that the lot of then could barely breathe. Their eyes watered and their stomachs heaved. Holding onto one another, they staggered away down the corridor.

But they could all see the effect the yellow rain had: the fleshy mass was retreating. It was pulling itself back outside and that was the very worst thing it could have done. It thrashed and pounded and rolled and surged, those voices screeching and then it was gone. Out into the rain.

Through the open front door of the orphanage, Mitch and Tommy and Deke and Chrissy saw it happen.

Saw the reign of the mutant dead come to a crashing end.

They couldn’t see what happened to the mass of tissue, but what happened to the dead was all too apparent. There were hundreds of them out there, from the bottom of the orphanage porch out into the courtyard and to the woods themselves, all lit in that phantasmal yellow illumination of the rain itself. They were all twisting and screaming and falling, contorting madly on the ground. Their skins scorched and blistered, ran like superheated wax, popping and sizzling, running from the polished white bone beneath. Eyes bleached and fell in. Flesh bubbled. Limbs curled up. An oily brown smoke rose into the night. And out there, for a few impossible moments like something from a Halloween cartoon, there were hundreds of skeletons dancing a grisly jig out in the rain, then they simply collapsed into a sea of bones and carrion.

And then nothing moved.

Nothing at all.

The rain faded to a drizzle and then ended.

One of the undead made it up the steps and fell to the cracked tiled floor. But only one. Weerden. He was blackened and blistered, squirming in his death throes like a dying, blackened worm. His hands clawed out, his mouth roared. Things like great whipping red tentacles rose from his remains and snapped at the air and then crumbled away. And then there was an eruption of that viscous black blood that pooled around him. Worms boiled out of his skeleton. Then a buzzing, whirling tornado of flies and beetles and roaches, thousands of them spinning in a frenzied cyclonic storm…and then they too fell into the smoking, steaming mass of corruption. Weerden’s flesh clung to his jerking skeleton and his skull rose up, screaming and then fell into the liquitious, bubbling stew of charnel waste.