The Resurrected Compendium (48 page)

“Here’s the thing.” Kelsey sat back in her chair with a broad, empty grin of her own. “I’m not much of a joiner…what was your name again?”

She knew the kid’s name all right. Names had power, and nobody knew that better than a woman who’d chosen her own name to represent a new beginning. It worked. Maddy’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth pursed. She was pissed off.

Good.

“Madison! Maddy.”

“Well, Maddy. Why don’t you go on and roller skate somewhere else. I’m trying to eat.” Kelsey bent back to her tray, but before she could do more than lift the spoon to her mouth, Maddy had smacked it from her hand.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do!”

Kelsey turned slowly, slowly to face her. Nobody else in the cafeteria seemed to be paying much attention, and don’t think Kelsey didn’t notice that. How nobody even looked at them. How they all stared at the plates in front of them, slack jaws. Dull eyes. If she hadn’t seen the difference in people who’d been infected by those flowers, she’d have been convinced they were all dead.

“Next time you touch me, kid, you’d better get ready.”

Maddy set her jaw. There might be some strange shit going on around here, but she
was
still just a kid.
 
“Like what?”

“Like you ending up being very, very sorry.” Kelsey said this in a soft voice, not whispering or trying to hide her words.
 

It was stupid to agitate the kid, who belonged here, when it meant possibly getting tossed out. But she didn’t care. Shelter and supplies, who cared, she and Dennis would be able to survive the winter someplace else. There were more important things than safety, she thought, watching Maddy’s lip curl back from straight teeth that looked like the kid hadn’t brushed them in weeks. This place was fucking weird, the kid weirder.

Something moved inside Maddy’s mouth. Something dark and wiggling peeked from her gums, disappearing before Kelsey had time to see it. When the kid opened her mouth to laugh, more things wriggled in the dark cavern of her mouth. Kelsey recoiled.

“What the fuck?”

“Language!” Maddy screamed, and punched Kelsey in the face.

Kelsey ducked as the blow came, so that Maddy’s fist skidded off her cheek instead of getting her full in the nose. It hurt, a lot, because of the still aching bruises and scrapes from being attacked by that freak who’d come after her on the road a few days ago. But the pain was far from the worst she’d ever had, and Kelsey grinned, spitting a little blood from the corner of her lip as she turned back to face Maddy.

“Go on,” she said. “Hit me again.”

Maddy swung again, but this time her fist connected with Kelsey’s palm. All around them, not a single person turned or stirred. Kelsey’s fingers gripped hard on Maddy’s, twisting, but damn, if the kid didn’t have a poker face. She didn’t give an inch. Even on roller skates, she held her ground.

The heat of anger was not an emotion Kelsey wasn’t used to, but now it rose within her so fast and hard it took her breath away. She’d been mildly annoyed before. A little concerned. But now, now, she was in a rage, molten with fury. Suddenly, she was so angry that her vision blurred, a red haze creeping around the edges as though she was going to pass out.

She was not going to pass out.

“Let go of me,” Maddy muttered.

“Fuck you, kid.”

Maddy’s eyes widened. Then narrowed. Her lip curled back, and even in through the haze of her anger, Kelsey knew enough to be horrified by the sight of black threads swarming in Maddy’s gums. Blood dripped, coating her teeth. She gave a low, guttering growl as her eyes rolled to the back of her head, showing the whites and also more of those black, wriggling things.

Kelsey jumped out of her chair, away from the girl, but now Maddy’s fingers were clutching her. Not letting her go. Kelsey’s feet skidded on the tile floor, but then she was standing tall and straight, ready to fight. She twisted her arm, getting under Maddy’s until she had the kid’s arm bending the wrong direction. She’d break the fucking thing, if she had to.

With another of those growling cries, Maddy launched herself toward Kelsey. The skates slipped, pitching her forward. Her fist connected with Kelsey’s temple, opening the wound that hadn’t yet healed. Blood gushed. Turning, Kelsey swept a foot to knock Maddy to the ground. The kid hit hard, knocking her head and rattling her teeth.

Blood squirted from her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue. Black things wriggled in the crimson, and the smell…oh, god that smell. That fucking rotten meat perfume combination. Kelsey gagged on it, not letting go of Maddy’s arm. Maddy kicked upward and out, the skate hitting Kelsey in the gut and knocking her back. Chairs scattered. Kelsey went down.

Maddy was on her a moment after that, hands around her throat. Mouth open, dripping that disgusting blood. She aimed for Kelsey’s mouth, but no matter how badly Kelsey wanted to scream, she kept her mouth shut. Lips sealed tight. She brought up a knee, getting the kid right between the legs and sending her back with a howl.

Then, they really went at it.

Teeth and hands and feet.Ripping, tearing, biting. Kelsey didn’t hold back, not even though the kid was half her size. They knocked over a table, and the clatterbang of it didn’t even turn a single head.
 

This was wrong.

Something was wrong.

This anger wasn’t right, it wasn’t natural, and though Kelsey tried to stop herself, there was no ceasing the hatred and loathing pouring out of her with every blow she struck. With Maddy on top of her, hands squeezing into Kelsey’s throat, all Kelsey could do was whistle in and out of breath for a moment or so while her brain tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Kelsey rolled until Maddy was beneath her, using a swift motion to get the girl’s hands away from her throat.
 

It wasn’t the first time she’d been choked, but there was never a good way to recover from it. Head whirling, she batted away Maddy’s hands and sat on her to keep her still. “Stop it. Stop!”

If anything, Maddy squirmed harder. Spitting and biting, she lunged toward Kelsey, who did the only thing she could think of to put the kid down. She punched her in the face.

“Stay down!”

Maddy’s head rocked back. Her mouth opened. Another of those awful, low groans sputtered out of her, but this time, something worse happened. Some kind of weird humming. Kelsey got off the kid and stood, backing away.

Every single person in the room had stood up. Heads tipped back. Jaws agape. That humming issued from every open mouth, and all the people swayed in unison.

Maddy got to her feet, strangely steady though the skates threatened to send her spinning. Her grin was hot and wide and full of blood. She spit out a solid hunk of something black that squirmed and writhed at Kelsey’s feet.

“We are becoming other,” the girl said. “We are becoming other we are becoming other we are becoming other…”

Kelsey didn’t want to get any of that shit on her hands, but she slapped the girl away from her anyway. “Other what? What the hell are you talking about?”

Maddy’s eyes had become blank, black pits overflowing with black and crimson ooze. That smell was back, the rotten meat stench of it making Kelsey gag. The girl went very, very still. Her mouth opened, as though she meant to speak, but before she could the door to the cafeteria opened and a woman burst through. Kelsey had met her once, just briefly, during a tour of the place when she and Dennis had first been welcomed inside. Her name was Candace, and she was also new to the shelter.

“Oh God, it’s happening again,” she screamed. “Anthony and Lira became those things!”

Kelsey knew the people she was talking about, had met them just as briefly. She grabbed the woman by the upper arms, trying not to shake her too hard but desperate to get some sense into her. “What’s going on?”

Candace gave Kelsey a wild-eyed look. “Before we got here, all the resurrected that were being pushed by the army out of the city —”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about --”

“They exploded into vines and flowers,” Candace cut in without giving an explanation. “They became those flowers!”

So that was why they’d found that bridge covered in dead vines and flowers. “The resurrected did that?”

“Yes, and just before they did, they all started doing this same thing…Oh, God, oh God, I don’t want to die!”

Kelsey offered her no comfort. There was none to be giving. All around them, the room throbbed and pulsed with that sickening noise. Something was definitely happening, and she wanted to get out of there before it did.

“Becoming other,” Maddy said from behind them.

The humming stopped.

A high pitched whine came next, higher than any human voice should have been able to go. Kelsey clapped her hands over her ears. She took a stumbling step back, the anger and fear that had prompted her to go to battle with Maddy rising again. Something surged inside her, deep in her lungs, making her cough.
 

Blood hit her palm when she tried to hold back the gasps. It spattered the floor, bright red, untinged with the black wiggling things that had come out of Maddy. That didn’t mean anything, Kelsey thought. She’d breathed in those things before. They might’ve grown inside her, taken root, just remained hidden for longer than they did in everyone else.
 
Swatting at her face, she shook her head like a dog trying to rid itself of a snout full of porcupine quills.

“All of us is other.” Maddy put out her hands, tipping her head back the way the rest of them did.

Kelsey broke and ran for the door. Just as she reached it, everyone in the room around her exploded into a mass of red tendrils, blue and purple flowers. The stink of made her want to puke, but she held it back. She covered her mouth and nose, remembering the other times she’d been around infected people. The flowers sprouted out of ears, noses, mouths, they burst through shredded skin and ran along the ground, taking root even in concrete and metal.
 

From behind her, Maddy let out one last long, garbled cry. “I thought I’d be the boss!” And then fell silent.

Kelsey slammed open the cafeteria door and ran for her life.

69

Maggie swiped the hair from her face. She stunk of sweat and gasoline and mud. She had spent the last few days in the basement of the grocery store where once upon a time she’d bought birthday cakes and eggs and diet cola. She’d been taken there with twenty others; only she was left.

Numbed, drained, incapable of doing more than putting one foot in front of the other, she pulled herself through a fallen wall of concrete rubble. There’d been an explosion. More than one, actually. Fire and smoke. The sprinkler system had not yet been disabled, and the water had turned everything into a sea of filthy, thick mud.

Someone had drowned, face down in the mud, crushed. The others had gotten out the best they could, fighting for access to the stairs and the barricades that had been meant to keep them in. Maggie had made it out, pushed ahead of the crowd, unable to stop herself from stepping on the hands and backs and faces of anyone who fell in front of her as mass of panicking people behind her refused to stop pushing. The crunch of bones would be loud in her head for the rest of her life, though not as loud as the sound Bill’s voice saying her name over and over the way he had just before he’d died.

So many had died.

Maggie was alive. She thought she was. There was pain, all throughout her arms and legs, her lower back. Her jaw ached. So much pain had to mean she was still alive, didn’t it? Surely whatever greater force there was in the universe would not suffuse the afterlife with agony. She stumbled over another pile of fallen concrete and twisted her body to get past a freezer case that had been pushed onto its side. Scattered glass glinted in the light from the big plate glass windows at the front of the store, all of which had also been broken. Only empty frames stood between the store and the parking lot. One large, jagged piece that remained was the final resting place of some poor asshole who’d tried to get in or out and ended up falling, instead.
 

She didn’t want to pass that body.

Didn’t want to try to sidle past it, to wait and see if it would shiver and grunt and come to life. Maggie had always been the first to go into those October haunted houses made from old barns. Fearless in the dark, knowing that whatever was going to jump out and startle her, it wouldn’t really hurt her. But that body might not be dead, it might indeed writhe to sick and vicious life. It could hurt her, very much. It could kill her.

Death might be a blessing, actually. The world shimmered and blurred in front of her. Tears or imminent unconsciousness, she couldn’t be sure. She reached and found the support of a candy rack. It had been emptied of its contents long ago, but at least it was upright and hadn’t been knocked over. Maggie’s fingers gripped the metal tight enough to turn her knuckles white. She could not let herself fall. She might not get up. And still she went to her knees, trying to breathe through lungs that feel coated in mud. The floor was cool on her cheek.

There was darkness.

Maggie closes her eyes and holds her knees close to her chest. She is in the shed, tucked behind a wall of stacked lawn chairs and cushions that reek of mold and rodent. Stuffing falls from a chewed hole in one of them, and something rustles inside. She doesn’t care anymore about the mice living in her expensive lawn furniture, but she will scream if one runs across her face again, the way it did last night while she slept. She will scream. And scream. And scream.

It had been Bill’s idea to build this shelter in the shed. He’d meant it for camouflage, building up the inside space behind a bunch of junk that wouldn’t attract anyone. Not when the house was full of good stuff. Better to be alive with less, than dead with more. It had been a good idea. Impressive. Maggie had been proud of him, thinking so clearly and quickly. For the first time in years she’d remembered how it felt to love him.
 

Maggie can’t keep herself from drifting, though she’s desperate to stay awake. She needs to be on her guard. There is nobody else to protect her. Bill is gone. Jake, too. The men who killed her husband might’ve done the same to Jake; at any rate, both of them are gone, but the men come back at regular intervals. They sweep the neighborhood, looting and raiding and looking for whatever they can take, and not just food or supplies.