Resurrection Read online

  Miggs moved across the street, playing his light around. And what it revealed was a horror. A stone monument with a cross at its apex was jutting from the muck outside a cafe along with a couple smaller stones. Caskets were drifting past, bumping into one another along with the wooden wreckage of things that might have been caskets once. Across the street was a little neighborhood convenience store and two corpses, one naked and the other dressed in black rags, were standing upright in the doorway where the wall of water had deposited them. The roof from somebody’s house had gone through the plate glass windows of an insurance office and there were ragged, stick-limbed things trailing from it.

  This was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.

  As they plodded along, Heller felt things bump into his legs in the water and he just didn’t want to know what they might be.

  “Gonna be a hell of a job to clean this up,” Miggs said into the wind.

  Oh yes. It certainly was. When the waters retreated, there would be a lot of mud and in the mud…oh, Heller didn’t even want to think about it. But one thing was for sure, if they thought that he was going to be down here fishing stiffs from the muck, they had another thing coming. He wouldn’t put up with it. He’d go to the fucking union.

  “Hold it,” Miggs said.

  Something came floating past…another corpse. This one was pretty fresh, floating like a board, legs together and fingers still intertwined at his or her breast. Miggs’ light passed over it and Heller saw yellow bone where the face should have been. It passed on by and he started breathing again.

  “C’mon,” Miggs said.

  The wind was picking up, whipping and howling, throwing rain around in a wild thrashing tempest. The street was a churning shadowy sea of mud. It came up past their thighs. Slopping and stinking and just as black as quarry mud. Good God. A river of sewage and foul water and grave waste. The smell of it was absolutely nauseating.

  They were making for a little saloon that rose up out of the water. It would be a place to wait this out, anyway. Heller followed behind Miggs and then something caught his legs and he almost fell into the drink. He tried to untangle his feet, but it was like he was caught in fishing line.

  “Help me for chrissake,” he said.

  But Miggs wasn’t helping him: he was laughing. In the wind and rain, he was laughing at Heller’s predicament as he scrambled around, trying to stay on his feet, trying to shake whatever had snared him up. Not that that was any big surprise. Miggs made it no secret that he did not like Heller. From the first day he’d been partnered with him, the older man had looked down his nose at him. Heller thought it was because he had only three years on the force and Miggs had something like twenty. But that wasn’t it at all. Heller asked him once what his problem was and Miggs, being Miggs, had told him. “You’re a fucking whine-ass, Heller. Everybody knows it. I don’t know how I pulled a guy like you, but you just keep your pissing and whining to yourself and we’ll get along fine.”

  And now Miggs was just loving it.

  “Asshole,” Heller said to him, stuffing his flashlight into his belt and reaching down into that filthy water and taking hold of what had him. It felt like sticks. Like wicker or something. He yanked it up best he could and it wasn’t wicker at all, but the ravaged skeleton of a woman with long trailing black hair sprouting from her skull, something held together by scraps of gray meat and wound up in threads of her funeral dress.

  “Yah!” Heller said and fell right into the water.

  He’d stepped right into her, got his feet trapped in her ribcage. That stinking water in his face, his bicycled his legs until he felt that grim baggage break free.

  “Oh, ha, ha, ha!” Miggs said, his light on Heller. “You ought to see the look on your face! It’s priceless!”

  Heller scrambled to his feet, pawing mud off his raincoat. “Let’s just go,” he said, wanting nothing better than to take a punch at his partner.

  Another coffin swept past them and this was a recent interment. In that yellow half-light coming out of the sky, he could see it was black and shiny still, the brass handles not tarnished in the least.

  “That’s a nice one,” Miggs said, finding it all a little too amusing. “Don’t you think it’s a nice one, Heller?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Finally they reached the saloon and climbed the steps out of the water. The door was locked, but Miggs blew it open with his 9mm. Inside, it was dry. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and old beer. A wonderful smell after being out in the streets.

  Heller heard a creaking sound. “Hell is that?”

  Miggs shook his head.

  The back door burst open like a stick of TNT going off and a tide of surging ebon water flooded into the bar room in a tidal wave that knocked Miggs off his feet and put him under. Heller let out a high, girlish scream, swimming for the door, managed to squeeze through before it wedged close. Miggs came up gasping, alone, trying to fight his way through the flood. His drenched fists hammered uselessly against the door as the water rose and rose. Finally, he got it open enough to squeeze through. A tide of water came with him.

  “Back to square one,” he said.

  Dripping wet, the mire sluicing around him, Heller said, “What the hell happened?”

  “How should I know?” Miggs said. “Maybe we opened that door and it created a vacuum or something. Must have been a lot of water caught behind that other door. Who knows?”

  “Miggs,” Heller said. “Miggs.”

  “What?”

  “There’s…there’s someone over there.”

  Miggs turned around, put his light where Heller was pointing. And, yes, there was someone over there near the telephone pole. A kid up to their chest in the water.

  “Hey!” Miggs said. “C’mere! You can’t be out in this!”

  But the kid-a little girl, Heller saw-was not moving. She just stood there and so very stiffly he thought she might be just another corpse. But then she moved. Did something.

  Miggs went over to her.

  “No,” Heller told him, tensing suddenly, “don’t.”

  But Miggs went anyway, grumbling something under his breath.

  Heller wasn’t sure at first what was bothering him about the kid, but now that he squinted his eyes in the rain and got his light full upon her, he saw all right. Just a little thing, a little girl with fine blonde hair…only there were great empty patches on her scalp and her face looked like wax melting off a skull. Just distorted and hideous, punched with two black holes for eyes.

  But Miggs did not see that with the rain in his face.

  “Gimme your hand,” he said, reaching out to her.

  “I’m cold, mister,” the little girl said and her voice was congested like her lungs were full of leaves.

  “Miggs!” Heller cried.

  But it was too late. Miggs took hold of her hand and you could see that as he did so, his entire body tensed. Maybe he felt the coldness of her flesh or maybe he saw her face. But what was for certain was that when he took her outstretched hand in his own, gripping it, it was like pulp. It came apart in his fist, black juice squeezing out between his fingers.

  He let out a scream and Heller fell back and over at the sound of it. When he came back up, there was nothing but Miggs’ flashlight being carried away down the street. Nothing else. No Miggs. No little girl.

  “MIGGS!” Heller shouted. “MIGGS! MIGGS! MIGGS!”

  But there was nothing but his own voice echoing out, empty and morose.

  Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus Christ.

  That wasn’t a little girl, a voice shrieked in his head. That was a dead thing, a living corpse…

  Heller’s mind just went blank and he stumbled through the flooded streets, splashing and falling, his eyes drawn into narrow slits against the rain which hit him in sheets of needles. He kept moving, things bumping into him, his throat constricted down to a pinhole so that he could not even cry out. Then there was a building in front of him. A tall building that had
been a hotel. He pulled himself up the steps and through the door and it was just black inside, black but dry.

  Breathing hard, he pressed himself against the wall, trying to get his bearings.

  Okay, okay, he had to find a door, find a room to hide in. It was the best he could hope for.

  He still had his flashlight and that was something. He held it in his hand, ready to thumb the button…but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t dare. But then he knew. The light. Part of him was afraid that the light would be seen. And not just by that awful little girl, but others like her.

  For there was no getting around one thing: the dead were in the streets of Witcham now. And some of them weren’t lying still.

  Heller stood there, soaking wet and shivering. He had the flashlight in one hand and his 9mm Beretta in the other. He knew he had to find a place, a place he could hide. Though his mind was certainly not firing on all cylinders, his instinct was nearly electric. It told him that he must find a little hidey-hole, a corner he could push himself in. One that was defensible. There he would wait until first light. For surely the living dead had to crawl back in their graves when the sun came up.

  Christ, the hotel was so unbearably dark.

  It was like being shut in a closet. He had to take a chance. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight. He saw a few doors set in a corridor winding off to his left. Okay. That was a start. He clicked the light back off. He moved down there, opened the first door. Inside, mops and pails, boxes and shelves of cleaner. No, that wouldn’t do. Barely enough room to stand. He tried the next door. Shoving his 9mm into its holster, he gripped the knob and opened it. He put his thumb on the flashlight switch…and paused.

  He heard a sound in the lobby. The sound of someone…or something…brushing against the walls blindly as if they were looking for him.

  No time.

  He stepped inside the room and-

  The floor fell away beneath him and he was tumbling, slamming into steps and cracking his elbow and then his head, galaxies born in his brain in great nebular explosions. And then water. Sinking into it, plunging down into midnight depths, his face brushing a muddy bottom.

  He came up like a rocket, gasping and clawing and sending waves rolling in every direction.

  Stupid goddamn idiot…you’re down in the cellar.

  It was so incredibly dark. Just one rolling shadow and you couldn’t see where the water stopped and the air began. Just that darkness that was thick and creamy and oddly suffocating. The water was up to his chest, his nostrils filled with its rank odor. Trying to make sense of it all, Heller made for the wall, figuring he could guide himself back to the stairs, extricate himself from this nightmare.

  He had his gun, but the flashlight was gone.

  This was not good. He’d made a lot of racket in his descent. Whoever had been in the lobby must have heard him. Knowing this, Heller just froze up and listened. He could hear nothing up there. Nothing at all. But behind him, there was a splashing sound. He wheeled around with his gun. God, the darkness. Like trying to see through a tarp. Another splash off to his left. He absolutely panicked this time, smelling dead things around him. He jerked the trigger on the 9mm, shooting blindly. In the muzzle flash, he saw that the stairs were quite a distance away.

  Okay, make for them.

  Heller moved through the water, pushing aside a couple floating boxes. No more splashing save his own, just that cutting silence. The noise he made struggling through the water was like thunder. It unnerved him so much that he stopped. And the splashing stopped just after he did. And that meant, that meant…

  Somebody was following him.

  Somebody was standing right behind him, dogging him in the water. He swung around, bringing his gun up and an odor like spoiled meat blew into his face, warm and sickening. Hands touched his face, his gunhand…hands that were soft and terribly moist.

  He pulled the trigger, catching some hulking thing standing there in the muzzle flashes. Something reaching out with gnarled hands, ribbons of flesh hanging from them. He screamed and lost the gun and those hands were on him. Half out of his mind, Heller fought back. Clawing with his fingers, going almost instinctively for their eyes. His fingers hooked into empty eye sockets that slopped with something like mud and tore into mucid flesh that had the consistency of raw pork fat.

  Then he was in the water, half-swimming and half-stumbling. Something bumped into him and he realized it was his flashlight. He came up with it, clicking it on and the light showed him a man standing a few feet away. His eyeless, ruined face was grayish-white, swollen, set with numerous holes from which water trickled. A couple black beetles emerged from his eye sockets and ran down his face. He grinned at Heller with blackened teeth.

  And it wasn’t just him.

  A dozen other heads came up out of the water now, strands of hair hanging in cadaverous faces. Grinning faces.

  “Jesus Christ,” Heller heard his own voice say.

  Then a woman vaulted up out of the water right in front of him, spraying him with stagnant slime. She was dressed in rotting cerements, her face little more than a skull grown with fine green moss. She reached out and took hold of him, pulling him in close and then her mouth opened in a contorted oval like that of a lamprey and she vomited a stream of black silt into his face, blinding him, making his skin burn like it was rubbed down with lye.

  Screaming, he fell back in the water.

  And she went with him.

  They all did.

  Ten minutes later, just silence and dripping in the cellar. That and a few ripples. Heller’s flashlight floated around in a lazy circle, the light gradually dimming.

  5

  Amongst the wreckage floating along Angel Street, there were dozens of white, nameless things that until quite recently had slept away the ages in jars of serum and formaldehyde. What was in the rain and in the water saturated them, filled them, overflowed them. The things-unpleasant and grotesque to the extreme-bobbed in the waters, puckered and pickled and bleached of color. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: in those dead, dreaming husks, there was activity. Eyes like peeled grapes opened and malformed faces grinned, fingers like scratching sticks reached towards the sky along with other things that were not fingers at all. There was motion and movement and a dread awareness.

  And in that shadowy organic soup that flooded River Town, things were born and lived that were never intended to see the light of day.

  6

  In the thick, listening darkness, Meg waited.

  Waited there in the empty house, something unwinding inside her. She felt loose and rubbery, held together by sheer force of will. She was trying to remain calm. Trying to keep herself steady, trying not to panic. But with what she had been through, that was like standing ground zero in a blazing building and trying not to singe your fingers. Her heart was pounding and her nerves were frazzled and there was a curious rushing sound in her head that she figured were her nerves, fully aware and fully electrified like they had never before been in her life.

  Alan was gone.

  Yes, Alan was gone and she was hiding upstairs in their bedroom with a gas lantern burning on the nightstand. Maybe the light would attract attention, the wrong kind of attention, but she could not bear to be without it. Bear to be alone in the darkness in the great empty house, listening to the rain fall and the water lapping against the walls.

  She was petrified.

  Just drawn deep into herself now that Alan was gone. Now that Alan had opened the door…and some malefic long-armed shadow had pulled him into the night.

  She kept trying to breathe like they’d taught her in birth classes. The baby wasn’t coming yet…thank God…but there were other breathing exercises they’d taught her to stay calm. And she needed to stay calm. She needed to stay calm for baby. Because if she got herself too overwrought, it would effect baby. They were one now and she had to remember that. She had to stay calm, she had to-

  Oh dear God,
what’s happening here? What’s this all about? What happened to Alan? What was that that grabbed him? What dragged my husband out into the night?

  Easy.

  She had to take it easy.

  She was thinking many bad things now. Not so much thinking them, but feeling them, knowing them to be true. Knowing that there were things out in the water. Awful things. Faceless, hungry nightmares like that crazy shit she read about in those horror paperbacks she could never seem to get enough of.

  Meg tensed.

  Tensed again.

  Downstairs. A noise. No, not just a noise. Not a board creaking or something rattling in the wind. Something far beyond that. This was the sound of invasion: somebody was in the house. Somebody had come in from out there. Somebody that was now standing at the bottom of the stairs, just breathing. But not breathing like they were out of breath, but breathing with a congested sound like an old man with pneumonia. Yes, a clotted, wet breathing.

  Meg tried to calm herself.

  But it wasn’t working. She tried to tell herself that this individual might have been somebody that had come to rescue her, but she didn’t believe that for a minute. Because whoever had entered her house in the dark of night was not a person, but a thing. Something dirty and dripping and evil.

  Oh please, God, make them go away, please make them go away.

  But they were not going. They were standing down there. She could hear the water dripping from them. It sounded like blood dripping from a slit artery. Yes, they were standing down there, knowing she was here, just not where exactly. So they were perhaps smelling for her, casting about like a dog for scent.

  And now they had it.

  They were coming up the stairs. Yes, very slowly and maybe even painfully, dragging their feet from one step up to the next. When they pressed those feet down they made a squishing sound and water ran from them.

  Oh yes, closer…and closer still.

  Yes, they knew where she was and the trod of those feet was quicker now. Meg could smell her uninvited guest. He or she or it smelled of night and rank earth, rotting things pressed in oblong boxes, cocooned in black soil and rancid silk. Something that had lain in a pool of drainage from a backed-up pipe.