Authors: Alan Spencer
“There’s not many of them left,” Billy sighed in horror. “This isn’t going to work. I have to reach that tent and those corpses.”
“What are you talking about?” Jessica met his eyes. “We’re not stepping out there.”
“We won’t have any choice soon enough. They’ll rip through this barricade in no time flat. So what if we torch the store? We run outside, and there they are, and there we are.”
Jessica clutched onto him. “We’re not surviving this, are we?”
“If we die, I’m not taking it lightly. Andy Ryerson has contacted me twice through dead bodies. I need to be around corpses, damn it. He said to wait. He said he'd help me when it really counted.”
“I’d say now is the time it counts.”
As Billy glanced out the window again, seeing the battle continue, he wouldn’t have to wait a moment longer for Andy Ryerson's help.
Stan blasted his shotgun at the woman whose face split in half to unveil a living brain beneath. Its chest erupted, and she faltered dead. Their skin was so soft, so easily destroyed, he thought. They weren’t human—obviously—but almost a half-way replication of human.
His shotgun was empty, and his belt had run out of shells. He crouched to his feet and picked double-edged axe from a severed arm. He plucked each finger from the handle one by one.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph…
He ducked when the pavement kicked up shards, damaged by gunfire. The steamroller was headed in his direction. The gunner had murdered half his men and flattened them into the pavement. He checked the remaining stores. The people inside were safe for now.
“Die, you greasy pig!”
A cute girl in pigtails of blonde hair and a checkered black and white flannel skirt—the total package the equivalent of a Catholic schoolgirl—drove a knife in his direction. She missed. He kicked her in the stomach, but she rolled to the side and returned a kick to his balls. He landed on all fours shrieking in pain.
“Your manhood must be removed!”
He wheezed, “What are you talking about?”
She let out a girlish shriek of attack, but she slipped in blood, spilling backward. He forced himself to keep fighting, and he was about to land the axe into her back when an automatic weapon delivered thirty bullets into her body.
The machine gun fire continued, this time pushing Stan up against a hatchback and pumping his chest full of bullets.
Officer Paul Richards picked off the monsters from the rooftop. He was a marksman in the military. The Browning 240 with a Pathfinder infra red scope shot out the skull of another split-faced demon. He caught the silver glint of the eyes embedded in the brain all turn to red and yellow pus once the hollow point round was delivered into its cortex.
“Take that, you bastards!”
He blasted six more rounds, this time preventing the schoolgirl with a mace from landing it on Officer Luke Greenwood’s head. Luke came alive with relief and shot the schoolgirl point blank in the face. Everybody on the force had seen enough to forgo procedure or mercy in order to save their asses.
He adjusted his sights to the person driving the steamroller. The face was literally a skull with a layer of blackened flesh, crusted with putrefaction. The man was dressed as a construction worker, hardhat included.
Your hardhat won’t save you from my bullet.
He tightened his aim. Teased the trigger. Waited two seconds for the best moment.
And then he couldn’t focus. All he could hear was vicious slurping and sucking sounds. His field of vision tilted, spun, and then his sight blanked out altogether.
The morgue vampire tramp sucked from the torn neck stump in her clutches as she flew back into the crowd for another victim to attack.
Adam Briggs wasn’t a cop, but he stayed on the frontlines with two six-shooter replicas crafted after Jesse James’s pistols. He kept them clean and workable for years for show, but now he finally got to use them. He was currently trapped against the wall of the Maine Dock Eatery, a seafood joint. The walls were closed up within, and he couldn’t hide inside. He pounded against the boarded-up door, but nobody came to his rescue. What surrounded him were flannel-wearing, chaw-chewing farmers. Their eyes horrified him. Fourteen of them aimed their pitchforks at him, ready to impale him.
He was good at counting the bullets he’d fired—if he was good at anything at all—and knew only one remained in each gun. Adam had no time to reload. Seconds, they’d be upon him.
“SOMEBODY PLEASE LET ME IN!”
Maybe nobody’s in there.
No, they’re just not going to open the fucking door!
Adam fired at the closest one, a farmer with sun-baked skin and a five o’clock shadow of grizzled gray and black. The forehead split open in a V-shape from the bullet entry and spat out neon green ooze. The farmer fell forwards, somehow landing on his own pitchfork.
“Take that you dumb bastard! YEAH! FUCK YOU!”
More of the farmers in the background were hoarding dead bodies. They were stacking them—forming them into bales of human corpses. Baling wire held the mess together. Mangled and terror-stricken faces glared back at himliving or dead, he couldn’t look them in the eye.
He dropped one gun, now empty. The last gun he clutched with two hands. He stared from the gun, to the farmers, the gun, to the bobbing pitchforks, the gun, to the beads of blood dripping from the jagged points, the gun, the bits of flesh caught between the jagged points, to the gun, then the second wave of farmers, and Adam finally swallowed the barrel and pulled the trigger.
Wesley Hooper had manned the wrecking ball for his entire career, demolishing a variety of condemned buildings to create new space for industrialization, but this job was the most exhilarating. He swung Becky—the biggest ball breaker he’d known in his life—into a flying demon. The ball broke half the bones in her body, and the demon flapped with the use of only one wing and crashed into the harbor.
“This is a no fly zone, bitch!”
The ball had enough momentum to swing back down onto the dock and punch through a legion of schoolgirls—three of them completely exploding into bits of gory matter. “School’s in session, bitches!”
The ball lost its momentum. Wesley prepared another attack when he was thrown from the crane. A body latched onto him, its legs wrapping around his hips, its arms around his arms. “You crazy fucker, let me go!”
The corpse counted under its breath, “Five, four, three…”
The body clutching him was ice cold. Purple-gray-blue flesh covered him. A corpse.
“…two—ONE!”
Exploding bones and shrapnel pierced Wesley’s body.
Detective Kelly Odentag’s waist was wrapped by what appeared to be a rope, but it was not rope. An inch thick, purplish-pink, swollen, pulsing and breathing, the coils were very much alive. She was being dragged on the street, pulled forward. The lasso had wrapped around her as she was lighting another car on fire via the gas tank. She crashed into dead bodies as she was propelled forward, her back bruised and bleeding. She was coated in the blood of her fallen co-workers and fellow citizens.
Kelly was lifted up and over a mashed vehicle and landed back down on the street. She was semi-conscious now and wished she was dead when she saw what dragged her. The viscera squeezed around her belly so tight her innards spat out both ends of her body.
Ernie Rivers led the team that had been hiding in Salty Big Pretzels. He wouldn’t listen to another person die—cop or second-class citizen. The pretzel shop had a surprising number of useful weapons, and he clutched a dough cutter in each hand. Adrenaline guided the five of them from the shop.
The monsters were now approaching the docks.
Salty Big Pretzels was surrounded by an unspeakable army. Naked women crawled from their perches. They were pregnant, he realized, their bellies extended, covered in a slimy sweat. Then their eyes lit up a blazing red. Within the confines of their belly, a red glow revealed an outline of a strange creature with a hydrocephalic head and eight arms, insect in appearance. The creature within pressed and yanked on innards to force the woman to perform their bidding. The cold and clammy hands of one pressed against his throat. Ernie froze up, the dough cutters useless. He dropped them, shaking and gasping to breathe.
The woman wouldn’t release him. The grip continued to strangle him. The red pulsing eyes were road flares, phosphorous and melting. He was pressed up against the woman’s body, and he could feel the creature within her shift and it made a
tick-tick-tick-tick
noise of a crawling beetle.
He clenched his fist and drove a punch into the belly with a squeak and expelling of gas. Between the woman’s feet, the alien was coughed out of the womb. The baby looked like a giant wet ant, three sections for the body, but its legs were those of a crawfish. He stamped the shriveled form to death, brown juice spilling from it as he kept smashing and grinding it with his heel.
Ernie couldn’t save the other two couples from the pregnant women. They surrounded them, pounding them with their fists, choking them, slamming their faces onto the dock, doing anything they could to snuff the life from them. It was too late for Ernie too. He was kicked from behind the knees. He collapsed forward onto the pavement.
A charred face stared back at him, the wax globules of flesh and blackened skull forming an interested expression.
“It’s all about early prep…once you reach the oven the pie could already be doomed.”
The baker had picked up one of Ernie’s dough cutters and sliced down his abdomen through his clothing. The other cutter in the baker's hand was dragged across his throat, hot crimson spilling down his chest. A bucket was on each side of him. The man worked expediently, dredging up his organs and slopping them against the dock. Before Ernie died, he was stuffed with blueberry filling.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Nelson woke with blood crusted on the inside of his nostrils. Dr. Aorta was at the control panel. Screens displayed scenes outside of bullets tearing up the fronts of stores along Navy Pier, destroying and loosening barricades. The clatter of shells and the burst of fire were deafening. He cupped his ears, the
whah
,
whah
,
whah
,
whah
tunnel effect a throb in his ear drums. The screens also showed the carnage of ruined police cars and corpses on the ground. They were losing the battle, and Dr. Aorta was no longer a hero.
He wasn’t much for hand-to-hand combat, but the element of surprise was on his side. Nelson acted. He seized Dr. Aorta’s throat and wrenched him to the floor. He shoved his fist into Dr. Aorta’s mouth and drove it into the back of his throat. Dr. Aorta coughed and thrashed, but no air was passing through the man’s lungs. He wasn’t sure if he could murder a ghost in a movie-character’s body, but he was shocked when Dr. Aorta’s face turned blue, and his resistance weakened. After minutes of thrashing, the man went altogether still. Nelson dislodged his fist, covered in a mucous-thick saliva.
“And I wanted your autograph…”
Nelson stepped over the body and manned the machine guns on the Boxer.
“Don’t shoot them!” Billy demanded. “They’re on our side.”
“The hell with you, they’ll kill us all,” a man in his fifties in a black business suit shouted, stepping out of the crowd. “They’re zombies.”
“Yes, but they’re trying to help us. They’re on our side, damn it.”
Jessica joined in on the effort. “He’s telling the truth. Just watch.”
Another woman joined the argument, a younger girl in a sheath dress splattered in brains. “Listen to yourselves. Zombies aren’t good in any situation. I watched my boyfriend get beheaded by guts, for God’s sake! None of them out there are on our side. They’re all dangerous.”
“I say tear down the barricade and let them in,” Billy yelled. “You have to trust me.”
“I’m not trusting anyone who wants to throw us in harm’s way,” the business suit shouted. “If they try to break through, we have to hold them back.”
Jessica hugged Billy before he could say another word. “How do we know they’re on our side for sure?”
“They’re coming out of that tent,” Billy insisted, pointing between the boards of the front window. “They’re not from a movie. They didn’t appear out of nowhere. They’re real walking corpses. People you once knew.”
He pointed at the head of the crowd. “You see, that’s Stan. God rest his soul, he’s not from a movie. He’s real. He’s fighting for us from beyond the grave.”
Nobody cared for his point, and Billy accepted the defeat. He turned to Jessica. “They’ll tear through this barricade like it or not. I guess we’ll hold back until they do so. Andy better have a plan, or else we’re all dead.”