Tim Curran - Resurrection

They moved on, hoping beyond hope that Wanda Sepperley hadn’t led them on a wild and deadly goose chase. The stink was not only pervasive, but palpable. Growing stronger the further they went. It was a flyblown, squalid odor…excrement and piss, rot and wet decay, surely, but something else, too. A living smell like what you might smell at the bottom of a rotting pile of leaves or under a green, mossy log. There was a rich, almost heady vitality to that stink. The odor of something that wormed through the bowels of corpses or perhaps its breath, the breath of something low and vile that chewed on putrefying carcasses.

But really putting a name to it was impossible.

For this was the stench of the resurrected. Things rotting, yet animate.

“I’m not seeing any bus,” Tommy said, the fear so thick on his voice it dripped.

“A little farther,” Mitch said. “I think…I think the street turns just up ahead.”

He pushed on ahead of Tommy, like a knife cutting through spoiled loops of viscera. And as that smell worsened, became impossibly acrid and sweet, he waited for something misshapen with long yellow teeth and bleeding eyes to rise from the muck and take a bite out of him. Now and again, the chill water would become infused with a warm stream like somebody had just emptied their bladder into it. But then it would pass.

Mitch felt it before he saw it, as he’d been feeling it for some time now: the sense that they were not alone. He brought his shotgun up, gripped the stock with his hand.

“Oh, shit,” Tommy said.

Not even ten feet from them, a grotesque and angular form rose up, caked with leaves, its face hanging like gray ropy moss from the yellow bone beneath…if you could even describe it as a face, for it looked more like some morbid fungi that might web the corners of a sunken tomb. Mitch could see its white teeth and the black holes where its eyes should have been. It was holding out its hands as if it wanted something.

So Mitch, feeling all the badness and madness filling him, gave it something.

He gave it a round of birdshot at point-blank range, steadying the Remington with his flashlight hand. The boom sounded like a missile erupting from a silo. It echoed off the faces of houses and buildings, went rolling over the rooftops like distant thunder. The round blew a hole in its belly big enough to hide a cantaloupe in. But the thing did not fall. It jerked from the impact, made a screeching sound, and a great quantity of flesh and meat sprayed into the water behind it.

But that was it.

It swayed back and forth, smoke rolling from the hole in its abdomen. There was a mucid, slushy sound that was infinitely repulsive, reminding Mitch of what a diseased placenta expelled from a womb might sound like. There was that sound and then the thing’s bowels fell out of its belly in a mutilated tangle, like snakes peeled raw, dropping into the water along with a gush of black slime.

Still, it did not fall.

It stood there, a watery sound coming from its mouth as if its throat were filled with soft, soggy things. It was trying to talk and God only knew what horrors it might tell them of were such a thing possible.

Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.

He stuck his flashlight inside his jacket and brought out a fistful of salt. And without further ado, he took two, uneasy steps forward, said, “Here, have some seasoning, you ugly sonofabitch.”

He tossed the salt at it and right away the thing began to cook, to shrivel and smoke and sputter like bacon fat on a hot griddle. The thing coiled and clawed and made a sharp hissing sound that was probably not its voice at all, but the sound of that salt dehydrating it. Its flesh went soft and plastic, as did the tissues below, and then they literally melted from the skeleton beneath, pissing into the grimy waters. And the most ludicrous thing of all, was that skeleton, the framework still stood. It was a horrible thing ribboned in tendon and sinew and mats of bubbling flesh. But it stood, smoking and trembling, and then it simply collapsed into the water, steaming, sinking from view.

Tommy made a gagging sound.

Mitch was glad his belly was empty.

Trying to blink it away, he hooked an arm around Tommy’s elbow and dragged him on forward. They had to reach that bus and they had to goddamn well reach it now. There was no time to freak out, no time to puke or try to make sense of that which was utterly senseless.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

They splashed forward and Tommy seemed to understand that, suddenly, time was of the essence. They had to get it done and get it done now. Sure, they’d only encountered one zombie. And that was enough, thank you very much, but Mitch had this wild idea that they were like rats: when you saw one, the rest of the pack wasn’t very far behind. And maybe it was something more than that, like maybe these things were like wasps or bees. A hive mind. When you did something to one, they all knew it. When one was injured or killed, maybe the others knew it, too.

He was soaking wet and smelled like a rag used to wipe out a public toilet, but his throat was dry. Just as dry as he was inside, filled with dust and time and memory, maybe understanding that one invariably leads to the other. They came to the end of the street where the road split into a Y. They took the right fork and simply because Mitch was going purely on instinct here. Wanda Sepperley’s directions were fairly vague, only saying that the bus was down Coogan Avenue, at the bottom. And when it came to two diverging roads, Mitch had read somewhere that when lost, people almost always chose the right fork over the left.

They came around the corner and there was the bus. The front end had sunk down into the water right up to the hood, a flatbed truck right in front of it. Carefully, Mitch and Tommy moved along the side, hoping that those kids were still inside. Mitch thought he could hear a few muffled voices, but wasn’t sure. He came up to the bifold door and hammered on it with his flashlight.

“Hey, you kids! Open up!” he called out. “We’re here to get you out!”

“Anybody in there?” Tommy said.

A few faces appeared in the rain-specked windows and you could see by the way they did it?very cautiously?they were maybe afraid of what they might see. Tommy flashed his light at them and pretty soon they could hear feet thumping around in there. The door swung open and a flashlight caught Mitch directly in the face.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Sorry,” Bobby Luce said to them. “We thought you were normal, but…but we weren’t sure.”

“All right, c’mon,” Mitch told them. “We’re getting you out of here.”

The kids, seven or eight of them, came scrambling out, not minding the water, just glad to be out of that coffin, glad that the waiting was over. And Mitch could see it on their faces, that the waiting had been the very worst part. The water came up to their chests and he and Tommy led them away from the front of the bus to the rear where it dropped down towards their bellies. Quickly, Mitch formed them into a daisy chain, made them hold hands. Tommy led the way out and he himself watched the back door.

It was a scary, tense business wading through the soup, making for the hill and the van above. But they did it. They actually did it, ignoring the splashing secretive sounds all around them.

And when they reached the top of the hill and Tommy moved them into the back of the van, Mitch stood there with his shotgun and flashlight, guarding them. Before he got in, he looked down the hill to the rising, black water.

And they were down there.

Dozens of distorted forms had risen from the water and they just stood there like wax statues.

The walking dead.