Tim Curran - Resurrection

Then the sound came again.

Just a suggestion of something. But something that wasn’t quite right and laid bad in his belly. Unmarried and reclusive by nature, Styer was a man who liked quiet evenings by the fireside, book in hand. He was a man who knew the feel of his lodgings, his business below. Knew every nail and plank and tile. Knew how they felt and sounded day or night. And at night, they were generally silent as a tomb.

But not tonight.

Setting the book aside, filling his insides with something like concrete, he listened, knowing he would have to go down there. Knowing if he did not do it, there would be no sleep this night. He kept listening. Could hear the wind and rain outside rattling the eaves, making the sign out front sway and creak. The ticking of the clock on the mantle.

But something else, too.

Below, there was nothing really worth stealing. Nothing but the tools of the trade, chemicals and instruments. Nothing more. Just two bodies. And they did not move. He paid them no more mind than a stack of kindling. For, essentially, they were about as dangerous.

It was the flooding that concerned him.

The general disintegration of law and order. It brought the crazies out. The looters and thieves and God only knew what.

He went into his bedroom, pulled out his father’s Colt. 38, loaded it carefully and calmly, then went downstairs, flashlight in hand. On the fifth step, moving as quiet as a tomcat, he heard a weird rustling noise. Whatever it was, it ended quite abruptly as if they (or it) heard him coming. At the bottom of the steps, he pushed open the door. It led into the front of the funeral home where the office and lobby were.

He paused there, listening.

He could hear nothing but the rain and wind. But there was something and he knew it. And who knew, really, what the storm might bring out? Maybe nuts who were eager to desecrate a corpse. It happened. It was rare, but it did happen. Everything in him was electric, supercharged, alert to an almost supernatural degree.

He went down the corridor past the viewing rooms to the back of his establishment

Even with the door closed, he could smell the chemicals, the residual stink of putrescence now that the air conditioning had gone out. Quickly then, Styer threw the door open and stepped inside. He reached for a battery lantern on the shelf and turned it on. Quivering, elongated shadows rose up around him, shrank back into their holes as the light flickered, filled the room with brilliance.

The corpses were still on their respective tables, covered in sheets. Just an old man who’d had a heart attack the day before and a young woman that had overdosed.

He had been secretly fearing that someone had slipped in and stolen them. College kids from the University maybe. Sometimes, they got a little crazy. But both cadavers were still there. But there was something strange about the old man…the sheet was stirring slightly, moving with a subtle whispering sound.

It couldn’t be.

The flesh at the back of his neck crawling, Styer stepped over there and flung the sheet away. The body was unmoved…though one arm seemed to have slid down from the chest, the fingers open now. The chemicals, that’s all. But what was that-

Styer stepped back.

There were five or six beetles lurking in the shadow beneath the old man’s chin. Others were hiding in his hair. A few more crept across his belly. Styer brushed them away and crushed them underfoot. Like roaches, they made for the shadows. As he turned back to the body, there were more beetles. Two of them sitting on his nose, rubbing their forelimbs together, making an obscene clicking sound. Others came out of his frowning mouth, his armpits, his crotch.

Infested, that’s what.

Styer had never seen insects exactly like them. Maybe the flooding had brought them out. The insects were large, though. Black and glistening, the size of cigar butts. It was crazy, though. Plain crazy.

One of them crawled up Styer’s leg.

Another ran across his hand.

He let out a cry as one leaped into his face, tried to land on his cheek.

The old man’s supine cadaver was swarming with them now, dozens of them. They moved over him like ants on a mound. Like maggots massing on a dead possum. Moving and chittering and hopping.

Something landed in Styer’s hair.

Then a second and third something. He clawed wildly, ripping out locks of hair. More of them fell on him. His face. His neck. Down the back of his shirt. He started to scream, to shriek, to dance in wild, almost comical circles as they nipped him and hung on with spurred legs.

A huge clicking cacophony rose up and saturated the air.

Styer looked up.

The ceiling was covered in a lustrous, shining assemblage of them. Hundreds, if not thousands. You could not see the tiles up there, just that surging ocean of beetles.

Styer let out a scream and saw he was not alone.

A man stood there, a very tall man. He was dressed in something like a long black slicker, only it was greasy and glistening like leather. His face was cadaverous and perforated with holes, just gray and flaking and set very tight on the jutting bones beneath. It set off his eyes which were yellow and huge, almost phosphorescent.

“Jesus…” Styer uttered.

The man smiled and a stink came off him like wormy viscera. “Not quite.”

Styer pawed beetles off himself, wild-eyed and terrified now, his chest tightening unpleasantly. This guy was dead. He was…well, he was a zombie.

The man pulled the sheet off the young woman and the flesh had been chewed from her chest and throat right down to the musculature beneath.

“What?” Styer said, trying to make sense of it. “What…what is this? What are you doing?”

The man grinned and it was awful. “Doing? Why, I’m eating, of course. But I hate to eat alone.”

Then Styer looked up and that seething mass of beetles fell down on him in a hailstorm of biting bodies, covering every inch of him. On the floor, he writhed and twisted, but soon the waters of that hideous creeping sea washed over him and he went under for keeps.

“Desecration,” the dark man said, pulling long red worms out of the holes in his face with skeletal hands. “Desecration.”

He dropped the worms onto Styer’s corpse.

After a time, the beetles abandoned the remains of the undertaker and surged up and over the dark man, became him until you could not see his form, just that vague manlike shape sculpted of thousands of beetles, creeping and massing and chittering. Properly clothed then against the storm, he left with a distant sound of piping.

The last thing Mitch remembered was driving those kids to the precinct house downtown. Maybe they should have taken them to the hospital, but the precinct was a good bet. They pulled the van into the police garage and got the kids out. They were choppered about twenty minutes later to the National Guard tent camp outside town. No point in trying to find their families, not on a night like that.

Afterwards, while Tommy chewed the shit with George Lake, his cousin who was a cop, Mitch sat in the van. Smoked and brooded and…that was really the last thing he remembered.

And now he was awake.

And it was no gentle rousing from an afternoon nap here, he jerked awake, rattled with panic. That dream. That godawful dream. Tommy was nowhere around. He was still sitting in the van. Alone. Pulling off his water bottle and wishing it were whiskey, he had a smoke and began to remember his dream.

It was about Lily, of course.

He was dreaming that Chrissy was gone and they had the house to themselves and it wasn’t raining outside. They took a bath together in the garden tub Mitch had nearly broken his back putting in. Then they made love there with candles burning, lots of suds. That part had been good. He seemed to recall they spoke of the trip to the Rocky Mountains they’d always talked about taking. Other things he could not remember. Lily kept talking and as she did, the color drained from her face, her body, until she was perfectly white. Then she began to bloat up, bits of her dropping away and floating around in the suds until she looked like some horrible B-movie zombie.