World Memorial (38 page)

"Better get a fuck on," he said, rushing back to the window. A few of the corpses moved off of the rack. It sprang up with tremendous force, the spikes breaking many of the corpses to gory pieces. One spike speared a corpse through the neck. The corpse's head came off and the rest of the plank slammed into it. The head whipped up and into the air. West predicted its trajectory.

"Shit pieces!" he yelled, backing away from the window. The dead head smashed through it, sending shards of dirty glass across his floor. The head bounced and rolled across the wood. It was a fat man's head, with wiry hair protruding from his rotting scalp. It gnashed at nothing, attempting to groan with no voice box.

"Yeah, don't think so, son," said West. He picked up the dead head by the hair and carried it to the window. It blinked its pus-filled eyes and chewed at nothing. West flung it through the broken window, watching as it fell and bounced across the snow. The mob came closer still. His racks were spent and the copses kept coming.

There was one defense left. He raced to one last set of levers. He pulled one forward and shoved the other one back. The motion sent chunks of rust to the floor. He cursed himself for not taking better care of them. They moved, though, and he felt each one snap into place. Gears turned underfoot.

He rushed back to the window and looked out. It was working. Two large wooden posts were on each side of his property, about fifteen feet from his walls. Smaller posts and metal tubes ran from each one, angled down into the ground. Razor wires ran down each of these and spread between the two posts. The wires were slack, hidden under the snow. As the gears turned underfoot, the wire grew taught. A tight grouping of razor wire snapped up from the snow, right in the path of the corpses.

The corpses reached the wires. They tried to stumble through them. The wires sliced into them as they pushed blindly forward. They fell apart in grey wet chunks on the other side, dark slimy organs spilling across the snow. The corpses kept coming, shoving themselves dumbly through the wire. Chunks of them spilled out the other side as they fell apart.

"Damn right!" West said, slapping the dusty window sill in glee. "Keep coming, you dumb fucks!"

And they did. Many fell to pieces as they passed through the wire. But there were many more. Many, many more. They crushed together on each other as they tried to press through the wire. Soon there were so many the spaces between the wires were clogged with gore and meat. The corpses behind kept crushing forward. The gore falling out the other side slowed.

"Fuck."

The wires bowed outward as the corpses kept pushing. They clogged more and more space between the wires. The sheer amount of them, the weight of all of them, was overtaking the rate they could be sliced.

The wires became so clogged the gore stopped altogether. The corpses behind the wires kept stumbling forward, slipping in the mounds of rotten meat underneath them. The wires bowed further and further outward, then finally snapped. The ends of each wire whipped backward, drawing thin lines in the snow as they flew aside. The corpses pushed toward the wall, now unimpeded.

His defenses were spent and they kept coming. Still too many to count. Too many to understand. Where the holy hell were they coming from? He had an old rifle set next to the window frame. He snatched it up along with a box of ammo he'd kept in the attic so long he wasn't sure there was anything in it. There was.

The rifle loaded, he pointed it out the hole in the window. The cold air blasted his face. He ignored it and fired. A corpse dropped. He cocked and fired again. A second corpse dropped. He kept cocking and firing. Corpses kept falling. He got several. Many. It wasn't enough. There were far too many. He ignored the creeping, looming truth of it as long as he could. He kept firing and cocking, pausing only to reload. He got corpse after corpse, but there were still so many. So many he couldn't see the ground beneath them. So many he couldn't see the ground all the way back to the hill they'd come over. They filled the entire view.

They reached the walls, pounded and clawed at them. The sheer number of them made the walls shake. He fired once more, got one more corpse, then ran out of bullets.

Then something different came over the hill. A blonde woman, walking among the corpses, her black dress flowing behind her. A group of people followed her. West could tell from their movements that they were alive, but they looked worse than corpses. They looked crazed, manic, smeared in blood and what looked like shit. Some of them cut themselves with long knives, and were licking the shit and blood from the wounds.

The blonde woman smiled up at him.
At him
. It was impossible from this distance, but West had no doubt she saw him. She was smiling at him. Something about it scared West more than the corpses. More than wild animals howling in the night. More than just about anything he'd seen in his whole life.

He rushed out of the attic and down the stairs, navigating the things stacked on them easily in the dim light.

He could hear his walls starting to give outside. Could hear metal bending and crates smashing. He knew he didn't have long. He had to get to the trap door he'd installed in the dining room. It led to tunnels he'd dug under his property. He wondered if the corpses he'd dropped down the trap doors could dig their way into his tunnels. He resolved it was best not to think about that.

He reached the kitchen just as a door behind him smashed in. A hissing corpse was already inside the walls. Inside the house.

He spun around, knowing his gun was empty. The corpse was a woman with a bent and crooked spine. Her dried withered skin cracked as she tried to pull herself through the hole in the door. A shard of wood caught her stomach. She strained past it, driving the shard into her torso and ripping a large gouge. Her belly split open and black organs spilled to the dingy tile.

"Shit on a rotten skunk!" West yelled, stumbling back. He cocked the rifle and fired it at the woman. It clicked, empty. He knew that. This wasn't like him. Had the smile from the blonde woman shaken him that hard?

He cocked the rifle again. The woman pulled in further, black blood running down the wood. The wood splintered around her and she was inside, staggering toward him through her own slimy organs.

West fished around his pockets, hoping against all sense he'd find a bullet "Shit," he muttered. "Shit twice on Tuesday!" he fished around as she staggered closer. He tried to calculate how long it would take him to unlock and open the trap door with her closing in on him. There wasn't enough time. He struggled to think. All he could bring up were images of that woman. Her smile. Her eyes. She was too far away, how the fuck could he have seen her eyes?

His hand closed on a bullet. For a moment he paused, not believing his luck. "Fuck me backwards and make me breakfast," he said, slamming the bullet into the rifle. The woman was close, groaning and gasping. She slipped in the gore. He cocked the rifle as she reached for him. She leaned in to bite. He swung the rifle towards her, ending with the barrel in her mouth. She groaned and bit at the metal, spit and black blood dribbling from her mouth.

He fired. Her head exploded backward, sending dark glop and rotten bone across the far wall and what was left of his door. She slumped on the gun, pulling it from his grasp. He let it fall and rushed from the room.

He hurried into the dining room. He was almost shaking. Fuck that, he told himself, he
was
shaking. He'd never been as scared as he was in that moment. The image of the smiling woman was burnt into his mind. Outside, he heard his walls give way and crash to the snow. He heard the corpses that had already reached the house. They pounded on the windows and walls. They groaned and scraped. More were coming. More were clawing at his walls.

He heard Peacock snarl from the room behind him. He heard her strain against the bonds that held her in place. She barked and grunted, trying to pull herself free. The groans outside grew louder as more corpses reached his window. He did his best to ignore it all, focusing on moving the junk he'd stacked on the trap door. He couldn't remember why he'd put it there. All he could see was the woman, smiling up at him.

One of his windows smashed inward. Dead arms reached inside, grabbing at the wallpaper and curtains. Shards of glass dug into dead skin, tearing it off in long grey strips. The arms kept coming. More windows broke open. The door was shaking so hard West knew it would give at any second. He kept digging through the junk piled over the trap door.

He finally found the handle, a rusty metal ring that he hadn't used in ages. He pulled. The trap door didn't budge. He pulled again, to no avail. There was still too much on the trap door.

His front door gave, crashing open and sending shards of wood across his living room carpet. Corpses poured in, too many to count. Corpses pulled themselves through broken windows. They groaned and reached. Peacock snarled and pulled at her chain. It rattled and creaked as she pulled.

West struggled to clear more things from the trap door. Boxes, pieces of metal, old books. So much stuff. Too much stuff. The corpses staggered across the carpet, nearly to the dining room. The ones coming through the windows inched nearer, dragging their rotting bodies across the glass. West shoved items aside. The woman smiled at him from the depths of his brain. The corpses groaned and Peacock strained at her bonds.

West pushed one more item aside. He reached for the handle, his hands sweaty and shaking. The corpses groaned. The woman in his mind smiled up at him, her smile scraping at his insides. The trap door shifted, almost opening. Just a few more seconds.

With a loud snap and clatter, Peacock broke free of her bonds. West didn't look behind him, focusing on the trap door. He pulled. The door was almost open. The corpses drew near. They groaned and reached for him, their dead, rotting fingers grasping. He heard Peacock race up behind him, snarling and barking.

He almost had the door open when Peacock hit him from behind. She knocked him over, rolling him onto his back. The trap door slammed down, shut.

"Peacock, no!" he yelled, both scolding and pleading. She snarled and buried her face in his stomach. She tore into him, sending jolts of pain across his whole body.

"Oh shit girl no!" She dug further into him, snarling and biting. He felt his blood, hot and wet, run across his torso and onto the floor. It soaked the carpet, running under his back. She growled and bit, pulling out chunks of meat and pulp. He screamed as she tugged, each pull sending waves of pain through him. He tried to push her away. His hands closed on her fur, wet and sticky with his blood. He was too weak. He'd already lost too much. His hands slipped off her, useless.

He laid his head back, crying. Open and honest tears he hadn't cried in years. "Fuck, girl," he said, twitching and growing cold. "Just fuck." He gurgled out the last words more than spoke them.

The corpses drew close around him, moaning and reaching their dead hands. He faded to nothing as the first one laid hold.

Maylee ran through the woods, dodging around trees and mounds of frozen brush. She hoped she remembered the way back to town. She thought she recognized the terrain, but kept finding herself confused, distracted. The image of the woman clawed at her brain. She tried to push the memory away. She couldn't. It was like the image was trying to get deeper inside her. To eat her from the inside. She tried to ignore it and focus on her way through the woods. She almost succeeded.

The sun had started coming up a while ago. She should have been back to town by now. Long before now. She couldn't focus.

She could hear moans echoing around her. She could see shadows moving through the trees around her. Flashes of dead, stumbling shapes. They were headed elsewhere. Following whatever call had pulled the others. There had been so many massed together before, when Maylee had first fled. How many where there now?

And where the hell was she?

From what she could make out of her surroundings, the corpses were heading somewhere other than the church. Either a second group was gathering elsewhere, or the one group was on the move and growing as they went. Either option was bad.

She forced herself to focus. To fully decide where she was. She finally did, and realized the corpses were headed toward West’s house, but she doubted that was the goal. At the angle the corpses were heading, it was a straight line from West’s house to World Memorial. Which meant it probably wasn’t a second gathering. It was one big mob, growing and moving toward the town.

She cursed under her breath. Corpses moved slowly, but her fastest way to town was blocked. She’d have to go around, and hurry her ass up doing it.

She devoted part of her already broken attention to keeping track of where the corpses were. Tried to keep herself far away from them while still moving as quickly as she could. She knew they were heading away from her, that they had a more pressing concern than her. Still, she didn't want to risk getting too close to one.

She darted around a close grouping of trees. Three corpses loomed into view, before she had a chance to dodge or react. Two fat men and a short, thin woman. All three were grey and covered in black, frozen scabs.

"Whoa!" said Maylee, skidding to a halt. Her proximity shook them from whatever pulled them away. They noticed Maylee for the first time. They groaned and reached for her.

Maylee stepped back hurriedly, nearly slipping in the snow. She tossed her bat from her right hand to her left. The trio staggered forward, the two fat men on either end and the short woman in the middle. Maylee swung her bat upward from the left and slammed it into the left man's cheek. A nail punctured the skin, spilling black blood down his shoulder. The force of the blow carried the man's head to the right, slamming into the skull of the other fat man. A squelching crack sounded as their frozen rotting heads collided.