New Title 1 (21 page)

Oddy drew a Webley as one of the fleeter zombies made a stumblebum lunge for him. Oddy dodged left, cat-quick for his size, grabbed the thing’s outstretched arm—like grabbing a sausage casing filled with cold jelly—and tore it from its socket. As the zombie lacked eyebrows, eyelids, or a jaw, Oddy was unable to tell if the loss of its limb left it feeling surprised, or outraged, or blasé. He rendered all conjecture a moot point by jamming the Webley’s muzzle into its pus-slobbering nasal cavity and pulling the trigger.

When the gunshot died away, he heard shrill, horror-struck screaming.

Edwards.

Who was being eaten by the very small but very persistent deadhead. He writhed on the ground, kicking up puffs of powdery snow. The tiny zombie had clamped itself onto Edwards’ right eyelid; his skin stretched like salt taffy before tearing loose. Edwards’ lidless eye was horridly round and wide, cornea threaded with bright stitches of blood. The man’s screams felt like ice picks sliding into Crosshairs’ ears.
It’s the ultimate dead baby joke
, he thought wildly.
Except the joke’s on that poor fuck.

“Jesus—Jesu!” Edwards blubbered, swaying to his feet. “Get it off…get it
aaaawwwff
!”

The dead baby grasped Edwards’ ears as he flailed in a shrieking circle. Its toothless mouth was battened over Edwards’ eye socket like a leech. A sickening
pop
as it sucked Edwards’ eye from its cup. Edwards’ screams intensified, boots mashing the infant’s trailing innards into paste.

Its grip on Edwards’ ears slipped and it fell. But its descent was checked by Edwards’ ocular stalk, still attached to his eye, which resided in the dead baby’s mouth. Edwards spun in a pain-frenzied dervish. Blood gushed from his socket. “Ag!” he screamed. “Ag! Ag! Ag!”

The baby clung resolutely to its prize until the stalk broke, gummy red cord snapping back into Edwards’ socket like an overtaxed elastic band, the baby tumbling into the snow. Moments later, Answer’s booted foot came down on its head. Crunch.

Zippo looked around: bullet-riddled and blade-reamed bodies lay around the campsite. Arms and legs and heads were scattered akimbo, mouths still opening and closing. The syrupy-sickly smell of rotting and burning flesh. Organs dappling the ground like misshapen gemstones…

And a half-blind man clutching both hands over an empty, blood-jetting socket, screaming, “It ate my eye! The fucking thing
ate
my fucking
eye
!”

Tripwire retrieved the First Aid kit and knelt beside Edwards.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Lay still.”

“Take it
easy
? A fucking dead baby just ate my fucking—”

“Chill, son,” Oddy soothed. “Gonna be fine.”

“Boy doesn’t look so hot to me, Sarge,” Zippo said.

“Shitcan that lip.”

Tripwire pumped a syrette of morphine sulfate into Edwards’s chest. That quieted him down. Then he soaked a wad of gauze in Dextram and poked it into the empty socket. Edwards lay back, semi-comatose with morphine and shock.

Crosshairs summed up the group’s feeling: “No…fucking…
way
. That did not just happen.”

But the bodies and parts of bodies surrounding them stood as undeniable proof it
had
happened. As if to hammer the point home, a decapitated head near Zippo’s feet began to make gluttonous sounds through a mouthful of brown bile.

“Tell this one here nothing happened,” Zippo said, smashing at the head with the flame-thrower’s butt.

“But these people are
dead
,” Crosshairs said, steadfastly refusing belief. “The dead do not get up and walk.”

“Or crawl,” Oddy said.

“Or eat.” Tripwire.

“Yet here they are, defying all reason.” Answer.

Edwards moaned fitfully. Bloody petals bloomed through the gauze.

“You think it’s true, what he said?” Zippo hooked a thumb at Edwards. “No Overton, no prison? Then what the fuck are we doing here?”

“Perhaps I can shed some light on that, gentlemen.”

The voice came from behind them.

A smooth, buttery voice that turned their collective bone-marrow to jelly.

They turned to face the speaker.

Who was, of course, Anton Grosevoir.

— | — | —

War Zone “D,” South Vietnam

July 15th, 1967. 20:49 hours.

The central hut.

Wet ripping noises came from inside. A sound like waterlogged canvas splitting down the seams. Then a wretched scream, choked off in mid-stream. More noises: moist and sucking.

“Jesus Christ, Sarge.” Tripwire’s breath hot and ragged in Oddy’s ear. “What could it be—some kind of animal?”

“Not like any animal I’ve ever seen,” Gunner’s knotty, farm-strong hands trembled around the Stoner’s molded handgrips.

Oddy, who’d seen the hanging shapes inside the hut, shapes resembling flayed human corpses, was, for the first time as unit leader, unsure of how to proceed. On one hand, they had a clear objective: destroy the weapons shipment, kill every VC they encountered. On the other hand, he was possessed by a primitive and instinctive urge to flee, an impulse stirred by whoever or whatever was in that hut. He glanced across the clearing where the flanking team was hunkered. The pinprick glow of Zippo’s pilot light indicated they were ready to engage on his signal.

The VC officer arranged his remaining troops in a rough firing line. Eight AK-47’s were nocked on eight shoulders, eight barrels trained on the hut. Autofire and muzzle flash lit the night. Bamboo stalks shattered like brittle bones. Black blood, the blood of the dead, spattered from the hut’s mouth. Hut supports snapped. The soldiers paused to reload.

It was the last thing they’d ever do.

The moment before the creature emerged, Oddy was rocked by a feeling of complete and utter helplessness. He felt like a small child being pulled, kicking and screaming, to the dentist’s chair, or a puppy dragged by an incensed owner to have its snout smeared in its own shit. There was nothing he could do to stop what he was about to see. His limbs felt shackled, his eyelids pierced with fishhooks and tugged wide, his heart and mind forced to confront the dawning reality.

A form took shape, melting out of the darkened hut, revealing itself with aching slowness, inch by inch, limb by nightmare limb.

“Dear God,” Crosshairs whispered as every monstrous appendage, every unfathomable proportion, every heart-stopping dimension flayed themselves into his cortex with hellish clarity.

In its totality it was unlike anything they had ever seen, although portions of its anatomy were dimly recognizable. It was short and squat, capable of walking on two limbs, or four, or six. Some of these limbs terminated in cloven hooves, others webbed digits, or suction-cup discs, or nail-tipped claws.

The body was skinless, thick cables of muscle knitting together an alien skeletal structure. Bristly hairs grew through raw tendons crawling with black flies. The head was scooped inwards like a shovel’s blade; two flaps of skin rose from its shoulder blades to encompass the skull in the manner of a cobra’s hood. The eyes were huge and multifaceted, like a dragonfly’s, mouth spanning half its face, studded with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. A pair of tarantula-like fangs, long and black, curved below the creature’s jawbone, dripping venom that sizzled the moist earth. It regarded the VC soldiers with horrible understanding: like a malicious child peering at bottled insects.

I don’t believe this
, Oddy thought.
I’m not seeing this. Maybe I’m asleep and this is just a very intense dream. Maybe I’m dead and unaware of it. Could this be hell?

And yet he knew he was not dead, not dreaming, and this was as real as any event in his life had been. As a soldier, you had to trust your senses: sight, smell, touch, memory. If you could not trust them, you could not trust anyone or anything. And if you couldn’t trust, you would not survive. So Oddy was forced to believe what he saw, even if it meant questioning every truth of the world he existed in.

The VC soldiers fumbled to insert fresh clips into their AK’s.

Too slow. Eons too slow.

With a quickness defying the laws of physics and locomotion, the skinless creature advanced. Limbs whirling, it moved down the line of soldiers. None of them moved. None of them screamed. The tell-tale sound of cleaved flesh carried across the clearing.

The creature paused, a magician preparing to reveal a most bewildering sleight of hand. One by one, like deadheaded dandelions, the soldier’s heads fell to the ground. The killing slices were surgically straight: it would’ve been possible to center the bubble on a carpenter’s level by laying it across the severed necks. Solid columns of blood gushed from the stumps, high into the air, a horrific water ballet.

Eight men dead. That fast. A heartbeat. A
blink
.

The creature pounced on the terrified officer.

Tripwire, Gunner, and Crosshairs stared at their Sergeant. Zippo, Answer, and Slash waited for a signal.

Oddy was on the bubble. He thought back to officer’s training, the five cardinal questions an officer must address before engaging. Yet he knew this decision could not be made by following institutionalized guidelines. It had to be a gut reaction. And his gut said:

DO IT. FAST AND HARD.

DO IT
NOW
.

The creature slashed at the VC officer’s face and chest in the manner of a hen scratching the dirt of its coop. The smell of blood overhung the village like a cowl.

We have to kill it
, Oddy thought.
Kill it now or die trying
.

“Follow me if you want,” Oddy said. “No shame if you don’t.”

Then he stepped into the clearing.

Every heartbeat thundered in Oddy’s chest like a cathedral bell. He was hyperaware, moving quickly but silently. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zippo and Slash cutting across to rendezvous. Their eyes were wide and terror-filled. But they came.

Anytime. Anywhere. Anyhow.

I will die for you.

Oddy racked the Mossberg scattergun. He’d picked up the nasty habit of soaking the buckshot in rat poison and repacking the shells. It was a dirty trick, but he’d seen Charlie pull some doozies over the course of his three Tours. Factoring in the creature’s speed, the best he could hope was to get off two, maybe three good shots.

He felt something whiz past his right ear and, a fraction of a second later, a hunk of the creature’s cobra-like hood vaporized in a cloud of red. Oddy craned his neck to see Crosshairs reloading his sniper rifle. The bullet missed Oddy’s head by two inches, maybe less.

The creature let loose an ear-piercing shriek. Beneath it, the VC officer was a scattering of skin-rags that only a seasoned forensic pathologist could’ve identified as of human origin. Its jaws snapped. Oddy saw tiny white worms crawling between its teeth.

He raised the shotgun and unloaded buckshot into those teeth.

Zippo charged hard. The creature was flat on its back, its face buckshot-torn. Zippo pulled up at twenty feet and trained the nozzle.
Whoooosh
. A spiraling funnel of fire ripped across the night to engulf the creature’s thrashing form. Zippo swept the nozzle side-to-side, screaming, “Eat it! A–hooo–
yeah
! Eat it and
die
!”