Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (70 page)

Their first impulse at this early stage was to run. In a few days they would turn predator, savage. But for now they fled. The first rotter twin finally spotted Harley in the brush and took off into the trees, her startled twin remaining behind to watch the other run.

Before the girl could react and chase after her sister, Harley pounced, knocking her on her back. She snarled at him—language was the first thing to go, it seemed—and tried to bite, to claw at his face. The abnormal strength that would inevitably come was also not quite there yet, so her struggles were manageable.

He hog-tied her hands and feet behind her back and muzzled her before chasing after her twin.

The second girl hadn’t gotten far and was attempting to burrow her way into a rabbit hole. Harley grabbed her ankles and pulled her out of the ground and tied and muzzled her the way he had her sister.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, kid,” he said, lifting her up and returning to the spot he’d left the other girl. He then picked up the second girl as well—both children struggling furiously beneath each arm—and carried them back to his truck, carefully laying them in the covered flatbed.

Yeah
, he thought.
Just swell
. “Everything’s fine, Homer. I’m in the woods behind junction three. You sure my location’s all you wanted?”

Static hovered in the air for several seconds before Homer finally replied. “The captain wants to see you as soon as possible. You need to come in.”

His house wasn’t far from junction three. Sarah’s car was gone. Odd. One of them was always home; it was what they’d worked out. What they’d agreed to.

Harley unlocked the front door and poked his head inside. “Sarah?” No reply. He left the door open and went back to the truck to retrieve the twins, hoisted them beneath each arm and carried them into the house. He slammed the front door shut with his foot.

When he opened the basement door, the pungent odor of decay burned his nostrils. He’d never get used to that smell, like sulfur and rotting fish, like gangrenous flesh baking in the midday sun.

He took a deep breath of hallway air before plunging into the fetid stench that waited for him a few steps away. In the basement, he carefully laid Molly and Melissa on the dirt floor and prepared their spots.

This was getting worse, much worse. There was no denying that this was a progressive disease.

In the far corner of the room, the little boy once known as Jason Wheeler was developing into something unrecognizable. What had been pockets of pus sores were now runny leaks, consuming his limbs in ebola-like fashion, distorting his face into a mass of spongy tissue. His nose was missing, the cartilage having dissolved into his cheeks. Black holes filled his mouth, nubs that had once been teeth gnashing and snapping at Harley. That little boy, all of eight years old, was now a misshapen mess, a caricature of his former self.

Around the room, more of the same. The children he had brought home to take care of and feed and love, the ones he could not bring himself to destroy, were evolving around him. Quickly developing into terrifying things without rational thought, becoming creatures intent on killing and eating and nothing else.

He prayed daily that a cure would be found, that if he held onto these children they might be saved. And Sarah had agreed to this since the beginning, several months earlier, was worried about the poor children that the rest of the world seemed to have given up on.

Even though what they were doing was against the law.

Even at risk to their own safety.

He wondered where Sarah was, why she had left the house unattended when they had agreed they never would, that it was a dangerous risk. And he suddenly wondered why Homer had sounded so uncomfortable on the radio.

“Oh, shit….” Quickly he chained Molly and Melissa to their new spots in the basement, working carefully, then untied and removed the muzzles from the terrified girls.

Around the room, the other rotters reached for Harley, and for each other, tried to claw and chew their way out of their restraints. He knew they would settle down after he left. They always did.

He wondered why he hadn’t asked Homer about Sarah. He thought maybe he didn’t want to know; that if there was bad news he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it over a dispatch radio. Not that Homer would have told him. Not over a blasted radio. Like last time there’d been bad news, it hadn’t been delivered over a radio, it had been delivered by three officers who were like brothers to Harley and who could catch him if he fell hysterically to the floor. But that hadn’t happened; Harley had retained control. And then he threw himself into his work to keep his mind away from the horrible accident. Keeping himself busy around the clock prevented him from having to think about his own life.

The warm summer air blasting his face as he drove didn’t help with the queasiness in his stomach. Half an hour later he arrived at the police station. Despite driving with the siren and doing sixty along the back roads, he was too far out of town to make it there any quicker. When he pulled up in front of the station, he spotted Sarah’s car.

The relief he felt when he raced inside and saw his wife sitting on the bench was enough to make him break down and sob like a baby.

Harley sat, unsure his rubbery legs would have supported him much longer. Little specks of white light danced before his eyes. He’d never felt faint before, not even when Patrick had died in the car accident, not even when he’d had to identify his little boy’s dead body. Not even at the funeral while viewing his four-year-old boy in his tiny blue suit. Not even then. Control. That was what it had been about. If Harley had lost control—if Harley had been forced to think about these events, which were impossible for a parent to think about—he would have lost his mind.

But now, somehow he knew what Mellner was about to say, and now the specks bobbed and flashed before his eyes like the Aurora Borealis.

“It’s not just the living children who are developing this disease. It seems to be reanimating … the … uh, deceased.” Mellner sat on the edge of his desk and leaned forward as if prepared to catch Harley before he tumbled out of his chair and on to the floor.

“The caretaker at the cemetery called earlier”—(Digger, that’s his name, aren’t all cemetery caretakers named Digger?—“and Patrick’s grave had been dug up. His and several other children’s.”

Mellner wasn’t exactly the comforting sort and gingerly patted Harley’s shoulder. “We called Sarah in. We wanted you both here. In case Patrick …”

In case Patrick comes home.

Harley looked up sharply, his hands dropping into his lap. “I gotta get home.”

“No, Harley. I’ll send a car to your house.”

Oh, Christ
. That was all he needed. He’d just heard the second worse news of his life and didn’t think things could plummet any further. But if those officers went inside his house, and opened the basement door … hell, his entire house stank of rotting children. They wouldn’t have to step much further than the front door to know something was dreadfully wrong inside.

“Captain,
please
. If it was Aaron, wouldn’t you insist on going?”

The captain winced at the mention of his son’s name. So far, Aaron hadn’t caught the disease. “All right. Ride with Tompkins.”

Harley returned to the hall and Sarah looked up at the sound of his footsteps connecting with the tiles.
Sarah
. He’d forgotten about her.

“What’s going on?” she asked, clutching Harley’s arm, digging her nails into the flesh.

“It’s okay, baby. I’m going with Tompkins back to the house.”

“Oh, Harley,” she said breathlessly. “
The house
? Oh, no …”

“It’ll be okay. I’ll think of something.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, baby, you can’t. This is a police matter now. Why don’t you go on over to your mother’s? Don’t drive, Sarah. One of the guys will take you there.”

“Call me, Harley,” she cried, eyes wide with terror. “The minute anything happens, you call me.”

“You know it, babe.” He kissed her softly and caressed her cheek, trying to comfort her but knowing he wasn’t successful.

Tompkins’ attempts at pleasantries and sympathy were appreciated but ignored. Harley knew the procedure, knew what Tompkins was attempting, and he didn’t want any part of it. The forty-five minute drive back to his house—Tompkins driving the speed limit, the moron—was interminable.

“This bucket go above forty-five?” Harley snapped, breaking his silence.

“Sorry, Harley. We’ll be there soon.” And Tompkins broke into another soliloquy about how sorry he was, how he’d want to
die
if anything like this should ever happen to little Ginny.

“No, man, it’s more than that. I don’t mean to sound like a heartless bastard, ’cause I do know what’s happened to you today. But Harley, man, you’re acting like you’re hiding something. And you know the law, okay? You know you can’t do what I’m pretty sure you did. But there’s still time to fix this. I don’t have to tell anyone I found him inside the house. Okay, Harley?”

The blazing sun wasn’t helping matters. Harley felt clammy and chilled at the same time, and his bowels clamped up the same instant his testicles crawled inside his body. “Tompkins,” he croaked, “you don’t understand. It’s not like that. Patrick’s not inside. I just found out about it in Mellner’s office.”

Tompkins started walking toward the house.

Something was stumbling toward them from the woods beside the house. Something small, very small, something human-shaped but not quite human, something pitching and reeling and trying desperately to climb over deadwood and saplings.

“Holy sweet mother,” Tompkins said, undoing the snap on his holster and releasing his sidearm.

Harley came up behind him and pressed his gun into the back of Tompkins’ head. “I swear, you have no idea how sorry I am. But I can’t let you do this.
I can’t
.”

“Don’t, Harley,” Tompkins pleaded. “Don’t do this. You know what this means, man.”