The Living Night (Book 1) (23 page)

"Where's this door go?" Danielle
asked.

"Oh, that. This here's the door to
th'hangar
, but don't you be
gettin
'
eager. We're here to prevent you two nice folks from goin' down there an' if
you make a fuss I'll call the other brothers in Mass an' you'll
git
more'n
ya bargained
fer
."

"What's down there?"

"If you were to know, we wouldn't be
guardin
'
th'door
, now would
we?" With a quick snap, he chambered a round. "Now clear out 'fore I
git
meself
worked into a
tither
."

"How do we get to the roof from here?"
Ruegger said.

"Ya don't."

"We're going to the roof."

"Can't have that, now. An' if ya try for
the door to it, you'll find some more brothers
waitin
'
for ya. Now ya'll go on, say
yer
prayers an' retire.
Feel restless an' ya might wanna try out
th'library
on the third floor." He leveled the shotgun at them. "Ya'll go now,
an' God bless."

The odd flock moved away, down a series of stark
rat-tunnels. Danielle paused, studying a large round bulge in the wall.

"What do you bet this is the bell tower
shaft?" she said.

"Probably is."

"Why does it run straight through the building
like this?"

"I guess Hauswell thought it would be more
aesthetically pleasing if the tower was located in the center of the mission,
and he always did like his secret passages. But the way I remember the mission,
there was access to the bell tower on every floor and stairs that ran in a
spiral along the inside wall leading up to the bell from the first story. It
looks as if Laslo had the entrance to it on this floor walled up. Probably did
the same for the other floors."

"Baby, I think it leads to the hangar. I
bet if we broke through this wall we'd find it goes straight down. Why don't
we? It'll get this mystery over with."

"Let's wait till sunrise when most of the
zombies'll
be out fetching blood for Laslo."

"But the sun—"

"Don't worry. All the windows have iron
shutters, which they close during the day so that Laslo can walk around."

"What about the bell tower itself? It's
open at the top and the sun can come right in."

His frown deepened. "Then we wait for first
dark."

"I want to go now."

He debated. Really, there was no point in
putting it off, other than his reluctance to endanger Danielle. Then again,
every moment they were here was one of danger.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

As quietly as possible, they began to break
through the stone, setting the pieces on the floor so they could replace them
later. The repair wouldn't pass an inspection, but that was the chance they
took. Once they'd removed enough stones to create a hole big enough to slip
through, Ruegger stuck his head into the bell tower and was immediately
assaulted by a terrible reek. He knew that smell, knew it very well.

“You sure you want to do this?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

He began to crawl into the bell tower
head-first, looking for the staircase he remembered, but it had been removed. In
fact, there was nothing here—no bell, no floors, just an empty hole above where
the roof should be (and where a half-moon now hung instead, partially obscured
by clouds that flung rain down on him) and a bottomless pit below. A pit that
stunk horribly. Something down there
glistened
…

Hands seized his leg.

“What the—?”

They yanked him back out of the hole. For a
moment, he thought it had been Danielle pulling him out for some reason, but,
then he saw Tommy and a dozen other zombies standing over him, their weapons
drawn. Ruegger lowered his hands and stood slowly.

“Sorry, babe,” Danielle said. Two zombies held
her. “They came up on me too fast.”

Tommy smiled, revealing corroded teeth.
"Thought ya might be up to
somethin
'. An' here
ya are,
causin
' trouble an'
makin
'
me in my condition comb these damn halls an' wear
meself
out. A shame and a sin, neither of
which're
likely to
go unpunished 'round here. Now come peaceably an'
mebbe
the
Lord'll
be gentle with ye."

"Mind if I have a smoke?" Ruegger
said.

"Be quick about it, man. I ain't
overbrimmin
' with patience,
y'know
."

Ruegger thrust his hands into his jacket and
came up with two enormous Colt .45s, which he fired directly into the zombies.
 
Tommy's head exploded.

Danielle broke free of her captors and fired,
too.

The zombies surged forward. Several flung Ruegger
back against the wall, but still he kept shooting. One fell, then another,
their rotting bodies unable to keep up the pretense of life.

They were overwhelming Danielle.

“Go!” he said. “Into the hole!”

“I can’t leave you!”

“Go! I’ll be right after you.”

She resisted another moment, but they were all over
her. She leapt into the hole and was gone.

When he ran out of bullets, he turned to the
opening, gritted his teeth and flung himself in. A few dry hands scraped at his
feet, but not fast enough. He plunged down, and down, and he had enough time to
register a light patter of rain on his face and the vile stench of whatever he
was approaching coming up fast. He passed through the spot where the lowest
floor should be—but was not—and next he was flying through the empty space of
the hangar ...

He landed with a gruesome
plop
. For a
moment he thought he was drowning. Fighting his way through the wretched liquid
substance he'd fallen into, he clawed past a forest of dismembered body parts
floating in the goo. A severed arm, a decomposing head, there the remains of
some poor man's torso, the putrid flesh and the bones underneath, a
free-floating liver ...

Ruegger broke the surface, gasping, not for
breath but in shock. He realized he was covered by a slick, bloody grime, the
same grime that Laslo had been covered with. The zombie overlord had gone for a
swim before crucifying himself. Ruegger reached for purchase, found the edge of
the basin and hoisted himself up out of the pool, then fell to the cement floor
of the hangar. It was a good drop, and he winced in pain as he cracked the
cement.

Danielle, spitting and cursing, helped him up.
She’d already emerged from the slime.

“Fucking great,” she said, shaking her
gore-coated hands.

He fumbled for his guns but couldn’t find them.
Shit
. He’d lost them in the pit, and he
wasn't going back in there, not for all the mushrooms in Morocco. He patted himself down,
finding the weapons that hadn’t been dislodged and examining them. The goop in
the pool had clogged most of them up. Snarling, he hurled the pistols to the floor.

“What now?” Danielle said.

“The bell tower must have been cleared so Laslo
can jump through it to this pool,” Ruegger said. “The platform on top’s nothing
more than a diving board.”

“Jesus.”

Backing into something in his effort to distance
himself from the pool, he knocked an object over with a metallic bang. Turning,
he noticed a cluster of metal barrels. The one he'd turned over was leaking
some oily substance—an anticoagulant for the pool so the blood there wouldn't
clot. Damn, but Laslo was a sick bastard. And, if Ruegger had his way, a very
dead one.

“Holy
God
,”
Danielle said, and such was the horror in her voice that Ruegger felt the hairs
rise on the back of his neck.

He turned, and suddenly he saw it all, the whole
hangar ...

Hastily, the walls rose in his head, putting
distance between himself and the reality of the situation. Despite that, he
sank to his knees and retched.

The pale moonlight shooting down the bell tower
cast the scene in an appropriately gray hue. Giant chains hung from the
ceiling, hooks on the end of them that, one and all, were pierced through the Achilles
tendons of humans, most of which looked dead and all of which were naked. Wall
to wall corpses, and along the walls life-size crosses.
Occupied
crosses.

Ruegger and Danielle approached a woman who hung
upside-down from a hooked chain and saw that she was in fact still alive … in a
manner of speaking. Most of the bodies seemed decayed, some no more than
skeletons with a little skin left, but horribly, some of them were moving,
though surely most of their brains were so rotted that they weren't really
human anymore—

Get a grip, old son. You've seen worse. WHERE,
for gods' sakes? No, this is just about as bad as it gets. I knew he was
insane, but even so how can Laslo justify this?

"Come … here …" the woman wheezed.

Cautiously, Ruegger and Danielle obeyed. As he
drew nearer, he could see that the woman was past death, along with the rest of
the hangar's occupants, but she was perhaps the freshest one.

"Hang on," he said, grimacing at the
choice of words.

He leapt up for purchase on the chain, finding
that his hands were so greasy they almost didn't stay on. As delicately as he
could, he removed the hook from the woman's tendon, grabbed her ankle and hopped
to the floor. He eased her to the ground, where she lay panting.

“Poor thing,” Danielle said.

Ruegger removed his grime-coated jacket and laid
it over the woman’s wasted frame. She coughed her thanks, and he nodded, trying
not to show his horror.

Laslo and the zombies would be on them soon.
While the woman recovered, Ruegger scanned the room. There were the stairs that
led up to the door that Tommy
O'Connel
and his gang
must have been guarding. Ruegger knew it would burst open any moment.

Where was Hauswell?

The woman smiled weakly, but she was obviously
scared, probably frightened that Ruegger would hurt her or that she would have
to return to the hook, like living meat in a meat freezer.

"Laslo did this to you?" he asked.

"They call him the Lord ..." Her voice
filled with mocking rage. "He calls himself the Son of God."

"How did you get here?"

For a long moment he didn't think she would
answer. Then, in a creaking and painful voice, she told her story:

"My husband and I were taking our son to
Vegas for his birthday … and we stopped for a hitchhiker, oh we were so stupid.
He tore us up—he killed my boy, he was
dead
!—and nearly killed me. I
passed out … woke up hanging in this …
place.
They left me to rot, my
husband was gone, and then
I
was dead, no water no nothing, and I woke
up and was still here … and the Son of God was standing over me ... he can make
the dead rise, just like a god, but he's no god he's the devil and he or his
demons killed everyone here and he keeps them alive so he can ... he can ... he
can cut holes in them and put his ... and put his ..." She couldn't go on.

Ruegger didn’t need her to.

“Sick
fuck
,”
said Danielle.

“But why?” Ruegger asked the woman.

"He says he must cleanse our sin … through
the fire of his seed. Sometimes he'll let one of us die and tear his victim
apart afterwards … just to raise them again and watch them struggle to move …
and he laughs. Oh, he
laughs
..." She looked up at Ruegger and her
eyes were wide; she’d felt his strength. "Oh, my God! You're one of
them!" She screamed and struggled out of his grasp, scrambling backwards,
but not far.

"No," he said. "I'm here to help
you." But she was no longer listening. She was shaking her head and
muttering, transported into a wave of terror.

The zombies would be here any second, Ruegger
knew. Where was Hauswell?

His eyes were drawn upwards to the ceiling,
where he saw a cross hanging high in the air, and on that cross was the
headless body of a
sixtiesh
white male …

Danielle followed his gaze. “I’m so sorry,
honey.”

“No,” he said. “Wait. I don’t think … ”

“What?”

He breathed out in a sudden rush of relief.
“That body’s
decomposing
.”

The door burst open. A horde of zombies—the
whole congregation—swarmed down, blades and guns in their hands. Ruegger reached
for a long knife, really more of a dagger.

“Give ‘
em
hell,”
Danielle said, pulling out a blade of her own.

They zombies flew at them. Ruegger tore into the
creatures with teeth and knife. He jammed the blade into his attackers until
one of them sunk to the floor, the knife in its skull. Too far away for him to
reach. He fought on with teeth and fist. A splash of
corpseblood
sprayed his mouth, and he nearly retched.