The storeroom.
The coffins were still there, filed onto their iron shelves, the rest crowding the floor. Nothing had changed here either. Motes of dust and clouds of his exhaled breath filled the flashlight beam. He played the light around, looking for signs of…well, things that should not be while his skull echoed with a scratching black sound…like rats gnawing in the walls of ancient houses. He breathed in, breathed out, his lips moving soundlessly. The air was glacial, bitter, more suspended frost than oxygen.
His throat felt tight.
He wanted to scream.
He kept hearing sounds…whispers, sighs that echoed from concrete depths.
But it was in his head, it had to be in his head.
He
stood in the doorway, wound in a shroud of frigid stillness. His guts were shriveled yellow. For one insane moment he thought he heard a sound above, from the corridor. Like tiny, bare feet slapping stone. His mind twisted in on itself, full of screaming white noise.
Nothing. He was
alone. He knew it.
The storm, the dead,
the snow whispering at the hooded windows…there was nothing more.
He stepped into the room, the shotgun shaking in his gloved hands, the light bobbing about and creating clutching phantoms from the shadows. In his mind,
he kept expecting all those coffin lids to fly open and bloodsucking ghosts to come leaping out. But that didn’t happen. It took every ounce of strength he ever had to reach out and open one of the lids. He gripped the lip and raised it slowly, terrified that it might creak and announce his presence to…to anyone who might be around. He waited for a ghostly white hand to seize his wrist.
The lid did not creak.
And the box was…empty.
Nothing slept away eternity in that silken womb. There was only a depression of a head on the satin pillow.
He shut it.
He checked six of the caskets on the floor and five more on the shelves and every single one was empty as if waiting for an occupant. He knew empty coffins were not stored there, yet he kept clinging to the idea with false hope and rationalization that was worn thin as a wire. By
the time he stepped out of the room, his heart was beating faster and sweat was coursing down his spine. His senses were heightened, every muscle flexed and every nerve ending thrumming with electricity.
The fear he felt was leagues beyond simple terror. This was white-hot and burning inside him, drying the spit in his mouth and making his scalp pull tight on the skull beneath.
Those strange sounds kept echoing around…whispering, sighing, now and again something that might have been a moan.
Steeling him
self, Luke searched until he found the stairway leading below. He did not hesitate. He went straight down there, the fear thick in his throat like it wanted to suffocate him. His light picked out the storage rooms and what it found in them literally made his flesh crawl.
These rooms had been heaped with the unburied dead
before, all of them wound up in shrouds like mummies. The shrouds were still there—heavy white sheets—but there were no bodies. The shrouds were lying on the floor, dangling from the shelves, tossed every which way…as were the toe tags. Hundreds of discarded white sheets cast-off like pupae.
He
told himself the answer was simple—the Army had cleaned this place out and the bodies went to the pits.
But would the soldiers bother unwinding each corpse from its respective shroud? Did that make even one shred of sense?
He knew exactly where he had stowed Megan and Sonja. They were gone, too, and for the first time he began to think that the crematory pits might actually be a small mercy in comparison to the alternative.
In the second storage room, the trembling light on his gun picked out something he had overlooked: a single shrouded form pushed back in the corner. It was next to a great heap of sheets so he didn
’t see it at first and maybe he didn’t want to see it.
He pulled the corner of the shroud away so he could glimpse what lie beneath.
It was a woman. In his light, Luke saw a sweep of bright red hair which framed a sunken face, the cheekbones jutting almost obscenely. He saw nothing to make him think she was anything other than a corpse and then…in what seemed the blink of an eye…her cheeks looked rosy, her lips full and pink, and her eyes were open, shining and translucent, the pupils gigantic, horribly dilated, the whites shot through with a networking of red veins.
He
uttered a cry and let the sheet drop back over her.
Something was happening around him and he knew it. He could
feel
it like some malefic static charge was building in the air. He could barely breathe. The shadows slithered around him like snakes, coiling and whispering.
He stumbled back towards the doorway, very aware now of those echoing sounds in the mortuary, how stealthy they were as if their makers were playing some grim game of hide-and-go-seek.
Beneath the sheet, the body was moving.
He
plainly saw the chest rising and falling with respiration. He heard a smacking sound like moist lips parted.
He ran. Up the stairs and into the corridor, stumbling wildly through those narrow marble hallways, bouncing off walls and falling through doorways, every inch of him electric and pulsing.
Out into the snow finally, casting wild insane looks around him. He pounded through the drifts, the wind at his back picking up sheets of snow and burying him in them. He had almost made the stone wall when something happened which nearly finished him, laying his mind raw and bleeding.
But he saw it.
There was no denying it.
All around him, from that perfect
unbroken field of white, he saw gray hands rising from the snow like fingers breaking the mold of graves. Hands thrust from the frozen crust—dozens and dozens of hands like trembling bleached spiders—their gnarled fingers splaying out, twisting, wiggling. The dead began to rise all around him dressed in the icy cerements of the grave, some completely naked or wearing the simple shifts of the autopsy room. Men, women, children. Clots of snow fell from blue-gray pallid faces that were punched through with huge empty eyes. They smiled with crooked, jagged grins, lips pulling back from long white teeth that sparkled in the night.
Luke screamed when they called him by name in their
hollow silver voices.
Again, he ran. They moved after him in a ghastly pale throng. The voices got louder and louder as the crowd drifted after him like wraiths free of the tomb, not a one of them ever breaking the snow with their weight.
The wind almost knocked him on his ass as he made it to the truck and reached out for the door, slipping and sliding on the snow-covered ice. That’s when he saw a little boy standing there, his face white as a corpse pulled from a river. Worse, Luke recognized him. It was Pauly Crossik, Jack and Janet’s eight-year old boy who had died from the plague a month before. He stood there in his little burial suit, his eyes glaring a dark blood-red, juicy pink lips pulled back to the gums from gleaming canines. He grinned like a wind-up monkey. “Cold, cold,” he said in a scraping black voice. “I’m so cold, Mr. Barrows.”
“
Get away from me,” Luke told him.
But he only drew in closer.
“Every night we play in the snow outside your house. Me and Megan. Tonight we’ll come inside and play.”
Luke brought up the shotgun and put the light
on him…it seemed not to be reflected, but
absorbed
until his face was phosphorescent like a newly risen moon. Pauly hissed like a snake, black slime running down his chin, and then Luke pulled the trigger and…Pauly seemed to break apart into a million fragments that sought the wind, found it, became a whirling, screaming cyclone of snow and blackness that danced away off through the tombs.
As Luke jumped into
the cab, running hot and cold, he heard a voice out there in that blowing cemetery wind. A voice singing a lullaby and he knew it was Sonja’s, but it was no longer sweet and pure but profane and foul as the screaming wind carried it amongst the leaning headstones.
He nearly got stuck getting out of there, but he rocked the pickup free of a drift and pushed an accumulating wall of snow out of his way with the plow. He had almost made it out of the picnic grounds when he saw someone standing in the middle of the road, her hair blowing out around her, wild and serpent-like, a fiery orange in color that ma
de her graying face look all that much more pallid. It was the woman from the mortuary.
The truck hit her.
It slammed right into her.
But she broke apart like the boy and became a whirling shadow-shape of snow. Luke thought he saw gloating yellow eyes and a grinning red mouth pull off into the storm, but he couldn
’t be sure.
When
he got home, he was pretty much out of his mind. The front door was open and he charged from room to room, filled with a raging anger at the violation of his home. He knew Sonja had been there and she
wanted
him to know she had been there. On the living room wall, in what looked like blood was scrawled:
WAIT FOR ME
He screamed his head off, partly out of terror and partly out of hate at what his wife had become. All he could hear was Sonja’s last words to him:
Don’t give up…give our deaths meaning and fight…do you hear me? Fight…promise me you will…whatever comes next…promise me…
The dead were coming back. He could no longer deny it, much as his reasoning brain told him he must. Vampirus was more than a germ or a simple virus, it was the seed of evil. He might have laughed at that months before, but he was not laughing now. Because there was no denying it.
It was real.
It was active.
And it was taking the world.
As
he stood shivering in his house, which was little better than a grim vault, he knew only one thing for sure. He had made a promise to his wife and he would keep it. Because now he understood what she had wanted of him and his own mind translated it as such: his job was to kill them.
To kill every last one of them.
35
He was not sure how to think or how to feel anymore.
If the deaths of his wife and daughter turned his world upside down, then what he
experienced at the cemetery turned it inside out. He was mired in superstitious dread, sinking deeper all the time, afraid he was going to drown. He couldn’t pretend that it was the mourning and grief that had brought him to this level, stripping the gears of his mind and destroying his ability to reason clearly.
The c
onversion to faith was a painful process.
All day long his brain
tried to convince him that what he saw at Salem Cross was a nightmare series of hallucinations, but he knew better. Yet, his mind would not give up or give in.
C
’mon, Luke,
it kept saying,
you can’t really believe that anyone can possibly rise up again. It’s fucking Medieval believing shit like that. From a medical standpoint it’s impossible and you damn well know it. Death brings about a series of changes that make resurrection a dire impossibility: soft tissues and organs corrupt, gravity pulls blood into the lowest parts of the body and solidifies it, the brain decays to pulp, bacterial action destroys nerve pathways. A corpse, quite literally, drowns in its own rottenness. You know that. You were a medic for godsake. You know there is no such thing as incorruptibility and reanimation. It’s comic book shit.
It all sounded so good.
He might have even believed it if Pauly Crossik hadn’t risen from the grave.
36
That night he listened to the wind howling
outside, blowing across the world which was an ugly, sawtoothed cadaver entombed in a seam of gray brittle ice that no thaw would ever touch. Filled with despair and grief, he stared out the window into the moaning black darkness, watching gaunt shadows parade through it in a grim dance macabre. Reality was dead, reason sleeping, dark fantasy and nightmare awake and ravenous like hungry infants in need of night feedings. And through it all, Wakefield slumbered like a corpse in an icy winding sheet.
He was
waiting for Sonja to come home.
For the soft tread of his daughter on the porch.
The idea of them coming into the house like a deathly breath of pestilence scared him white inside. Yet, there was exhilaration at the idea. He felt a morbid longing to be wrapped in the arms of his dead wife. He promised her he would fight, but, honestly, he didn’t want to fight anymore. He wanted it to be over with. He wanted the sunless, cold sleep of the undead and the joyless mirth of dancing through snowdrifts at midnight like a silent breath from tombs.
Mostly,
he didn’t want to think anymore.
He didn
’t want to remember.
He didn
’t want to hurt.