Zombie Pulp

THE MATTAWAN MEAT WAGON

The kid’s name was Blaine. He had heart, but his head was no good. Naïve as all hell and Cabot took every opportunity he could find to remind him about that. About how things worked and his place in the larger scheme of things and how he better not fuck up because too much was riding on it.

“I don’t get it, though,” the kid said. “Why me? Why do I pull something like this? Did I piss somebody off? I mean, shit.”

Leaning up outside the warehouse door while the meat was loaded in the back of the truck, Cabot lit a cigarette and sighed. “Everybody gets a shot, kid. It’s nothing personal. But in Hullville we all pull our share. You, me, everyone. I make this trip once a month.”

“Yeah, but in the back of the truck—”

“You don’t worry about what’s in the back of the truck.”

Cabot knew the kid wasn’t liking it, knew he thought maybe it was a little barbaric and maybe more than a little uncivilized. But those words had lost their meaning here in the brave new world. Ever since Biocom started sweeping people into the grave and waking ’em back up again, things had changed. Morality, ethics, humanity… abstract concepts. The country was a cemetery now.

No, he wasn’t going to beat that drum.

The kid wasn’t real bright, but he wasn’t that stupid. Cabot wasn’t going to remind him what his life had been like before a patrol found him out there in the Deadlands and brought his sorry ass into Hullville. How the town had patched him, smoothed out his rough edges, put food in his belly, a pillow under his head and a roof over him. They did it because they needed him and he needed them and he seemed like an all right kid.

The Council did right by him.

And now, favor for favor, it was time to earn his keep.

Chum came out of the warehouse, his overalls grimy, his eyes looking like open wounds that wanted to bleed. “Okay, Cab. You’re loaded. Take it easy.”

“That’s my way,” Cabot sad, grinding out his cigarette and watching the fog coming in off the lake.

Chum hooked his elbow, said, “I mean it, Cab. Watch the kid. Watch him.”

“Sure.”

Then Chum was gone and Cabot was standing there feeling a little weak in the knee. He cleared his throat of fuzz. “Okay, kid. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Blaine kept trying to swallow but it just wasn’t happening. He froze up and Cabot took him by the arm and led him over to the steel-reinforced cab of the big Freightliner.

“Relax, kid,” he said. “Just pretend you’re delivering beef to the butcher’s. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

It was funny, Cabot got to thinking as he drove. Just five years ago the world was full of cities with people in them and now there were just a lot of graveyards and ghost towns out there swarming with the walking dead. A few far-flung burgs like Hullville and Moxton, walled-up medieval towns protecting themselves against a coming siege. Once humanity ruled the Earth, now they hid in ratholes and crossed their fingers, made offerings to the Wormboys to keep them happy.

After the gates were closed behind them, Hullville faded into the fog and there was desolation. Ruined little towns and collapsing farmhouses, overgrown fields and wrecked cars, overturned trucks. Day-glo skull-and-crossbone signs set out, warning the unwary away from the Deadlands. Not much else. Just the fog and the night and whatever waited in it.

“How far?” Blaine wanted to know.

“To the drop-off?” Cabot shrugged. “Twenty miles. We gotta go slow in this soup. Be a real pisser if we crashed into an old wreck and had to hoof it. That would be a real hoot.”

“It got a name? This place?”

“Not anymore. Just a ghost town now.”

Cabot drove on, feeling the Freightliner purring beneath him. She was solid and steady with a 220 Cummins under her hood. Medium-duty, she was small compared to some of the rigs he’d handled, but she’d do in a pinch. The cab had been reinforced with riveted steel plating and the side windows weren’t much more than gunport slits now, the windshield only slightly larger, all of it shatter-resistant and impact-resistant plexiglass. The cab was armored like a tank and with where they were going that was a good thing.

The fog grew thicker, tangling and twisting, flying past them in fuming pockets and sheets. Got so they couldn’t see much out there in the headlights but the jagged contours of gnarled black trees, a few rusting cars on the side of the road. Nothing else but that mist, enclosing and enveloping, blowing out at them like steam from a pot. Now and again, Cabot spied shapes and shadows moving through it but he didn’t dare mention it. Kid was getting nervous. Starting to shift a lot in his seat, looked like he was about to have a litter of puppies.

“Why do you do it, though?” Blaine asked him.

“This? Because I was a truck driver before and that’s what I’m good at. You need a load run through hard country, I’m the guy for the job. I ain’t worth a shit at anything else.” Cabot told him how it was in the old days, running freezer trucks of Texas beef up from Kansas City, flatbeds of harvesters into Boise, tankers of hi-test down to Little Rock. “Been everywhere and hauled everything, kid. This ain’t so different. Not really.”

Blaine studied the rack of pump shotguns. “Oh, it’s different, I think.”

Cabot shrugged. Maybe the kid wasn’t so dumb after all.

He drove on, cutting through the fog, keeping the truck in creeper gear all the way. Just too damn much wreckage and debris on the roads. They’d used a big loader a few years back to sweep all the wrecks into the ditch or onto the shoulder, but now and again some fool tried to cross the Deadlands or skirt them and he plowed his pick-up into a rotting hulk and created yet another driving hazard.

Blaine sat up straight, looked out his window port, tried to catch something in his rearview. He stared at Cabot. “You see that?”

“What?”

Kid swallowed. “I don’t know… I thought I saw some woman standing there by that wrecked van. Looked like she was holding a kid.”

“Out here?” Cabot stepped on the accelerator, got them moving a bit quicker. “Ain’t no women or kids out here.”

“But I thought—”

“Maybe you saw something, but it sure as hell wasn’t a woman and what she was holding was no kid. You know better than that.”

“But she didn’t look… bad.”

“Some of ’em don’t, not until you get up close and see their eyes, smell the stink coming off ’em.”

There he went being fucking naïve again. Jesus. Kid knew the score, all right. He’d gotten his ass into a bind out in the Deadlands when he and some other survivors tried to slip through in a van. They’d blown a tire outside Carp River of all places. That town was just as infested with Wormboys as a dead dog was with maggots. And, yeah, the comparison was appropriate. The kid got away, but the others were butchered out there. He hid out by night, ran by day for over a week. That’s when a patrol from Hullville out mopping-up stragglers came across him and brought him back—

Cabot jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a smashed minivan and nearly put them right into an overturned Greyhound bus rising from the ditch like a missile from a silo. He jockeyed the truck a bit, jerked the wheel this way and that, got her under control. Just as he did, a blurred form appeared out of the fog. They both saw it for maybe a split second before it thudded off the Freightliner’s grill and was gone.

“Christ!” Blaine said. “You’re gonna kill us!”

Cabot laughed. “Don’t worry kid. I could thread a fucking needle with this baby. Relax.”

But the kid was past relaxing and Cabot saw it.

He couldn’t seem to sit still like his shorts were full of ants. He was tapping his fingers rapidly on his knees, shifting around, peering out the port of his window. Cabot could hear him breathing real fast like he was ready to hyperventilate. There was a sheen of sweat on his face.

The radio crackled and the kid jumped.

There was static, then: “Seven? You alive out there? Talk to me.”

Cabot grabbed the mic. “Hey, Chum. We’re about ten minutes out.”

“How’s that fog?”

“Like soup.”

“Anything to report?”

Cabot peered out into the soup. “Not much. We got a wrecked bus that’s a hazard. Seen a couple stragglers, no numbers, though. Sweet and clean.”

There was silence for a moment. “How’s your guest doing? How’s Blaine?”

Blaine sighed and shook his head.

“He’s not liking it much, Chum,” Cabot said, winking at the kid in the dim cab. “Sitting over there with a sour look on his puss like he’s got about seven inches of cruel loving up his ass and he can’t shake it loose.”

Chum giggled over that. “Okay, don’t be a stranger, Cab. Out.”

“Why’d you have to say that?” Blaine asked Cabot. “It sounds gay.”

But Cabot never answered him because in the back of the truck there was a sudden thudding sound, a thumping. Then something which might have been a hand slapping against the rear door, a low moaning like someone was in pain.

Blaine had balled his hands into fists now. He was shaking.

“Just our cargo, kid,” Cabot told him, grinning. “They must be waking up back there. Dope must’ve worn off. It does that. We better push it, get our piggies to market.”

It began with a microbe in Clovis, New Mexico.

A robotic satellite called BIOCOM-13 was sampling the upper atmosphere for microorganisms of possible extraterrestrial origin. Somewhere during the process, it found the microbe, analyzed it, sealed it in a vacuum jar, then proceeded to get cored by a rogue meteorite. Long before a maintenance crew could get up there, BIOCOM-13 fell into a rapidly decaying orbit and plunged to Earth.

It crashed outside Clovis, its sample jars bursting upon impact. Several were bacterium of terrestrial origin, a few exotic mold spores, and a virus. The virus would come to be known as Biocom after the satellite. The virus, it was later learned, was not from Earth. It had drifted here, scientists theorized, perhaps stuck to a rock or a speck of cosmic dust, on a trip through deepest space that might have lasted ten-thousand years or ten million.

It probably would never have made it down if the satellite hadn’t grabbed it.

NASA exobiologists had long said that the possibility of pathogenesis resulting from contact with an alien microbe was minimal. That extraterrestrial agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and multicellular parasites evolved differently and would share no common biochemical or cellular traits with terrestrial types. Ergo, it was more conceivable for a human being to get infected with Dutch Elm Disease or wheat rust than an alien microbial agent. But Biocom was a virus. And NASA had left viral agents out of the loop. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own; they convert that of the host organism to reproduce themselves. So a virus is a virus is a virus, regardless of where it comes from. It adapts to any chemistry.

And nobody knew where Biocom came from.

First contact was in Clovis and from there it spread in every conceivable direction, mimicking pneumonic plague and putting two thirds of the world’s population into the grave within six months. But they didn’t stay there.

They started rising.

They got out of their graves, feeding on the dead and the living and spreading the virus like the common cold. If you got bit, you died. And if you died, you came back with a whole fresh slate of culinary impulses.

Of course, nobody believed it at first.

Zombies? The dead rising? Utter bullshit. File it away with those aliens on ice at Roswell and Bigfoot shitting in the Oregon woods. But the stories did not go away: they proliferated. From Florida to Maine, Michigan to Texas, the dead were rising. And it wasn’t long before videos of the same showed up all over the internet. One in particular was posted to YouTube. It got so many hits it crashed the server.

What it showed was Clovis, New Mexico.

At first glance, the grainy video taken with a night-vision device looked almost comical, like something from a Gary Larson cartoon about the living dead: men in bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, women in fluffy nightgowns with curlers in their hair, all wandering the streets in the dead of night. Then some daylight footage was added and things got spooky. Men, women, children. Some stark naked and some dressed in burial clothes, pallid, decaying, infested with vermin. They were rising from cemeteries and crawling free of mortuary slabs and morgue drawers. Their faces were gray and seamed, their eyes flat dead white or lit a lurid red and filled with a cunning, evil intelligence, narrow teeth jutting from shriveled black gums, chattering and gnashing, looking for something to bite.

This is when people started to worry.

And when they saw the video of the naked little boy with the glaring black autopsy stitching running from throat to crotch feeding on the dead cat or the bloated woman breastfeeding her swollen, blackened infant while grave maggots wriggled in her dirt-clogged hair… well, panic ensued. The authorities denied it all, but still the stories spread and nobody believed what they were told because by then, they had all seen the walking dead. Biocom overflowed the graveyards and deceased loved ones came washing out, knocking at doors and windows in the dead of night with grim appetites.

Six months later… the world was gone.

Biocom was the great eraser that washed the blackboard clean. A world that had been a struggling, unruly child lost its innocence almost over night and became a deranged adult that shit and pissed itself hourly, its mind lost in a sucking black whirlpool vortex of dementia, madness, and resurrection.

The plague filled the cemeteries and emptied them again and that’s the way it was. Many contracted the plague, but survived it. But even survival left a little parting gift: sterility. No man or woman over the age of thirty came away able to reproduce. The young and virile became something to protect and covet. Without them, there was no children and with no children, no future.

And that had been five years ago. Five long, hard, cruel years.

This was the reality that Cabot and the others in Hullville lived with day in and day out. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Some people just couldn’t keep it down. They lost their minds, they raged, they pulled into themselves, they became sightless breathing shells. And more than a few slit their wrists or ate the gun.

But for all those, many more did not roll up like frightened pillbugs. They survived. They accepted. They adapted and overcame. Not just in Hullville, but in towns like Moxton and Pick’s Valley, Slow Creek and Nipiwana Falls. They accepted the reality that the new world was not the world they or their parents had known. The new world offered the survivors nothing; everything from food to shelter to a bucket to piss in had to be fought for, had to be wrenched free from the hard earth or taken from those that held it.

Survival.

A simple concept and one the human race was very adept at.

Graveyards and ghost towns.

A few struggling pockets of humanity trapped in-between. In Hullville, things were run by the Council. They made all the decisions. Guys like Cabot didn’t like the idea of driving the sick, the weak, the old and diseased out to the Deadlands and ghost towns, but there was no other choice. If the Wormboys weren’t given meat, they’d come for it.

So Cabot, like so many others, did what he was told.

For in the end, it was always better to be in the front of the truck than in the back.

The ghost town came up out of the fog like a clustering of tombs blown with fingers of white vapor. The headlights speared through the mist, but neither man looked too closely at what they might reveal in the deserted lots and leaf-blown streets. A pall of age and shivering malevolence hung over the town, just as thick and palpable as the fog itself.

“This is it, kid,” Cabot said, his voice dry and rasping. “This is where we dump our load.”

Blaine said nothing.

He hadn’t said a word in some time now. He was just as still and silent as the mist-shrouded streets spreading out around them. Cabot had been keeping an eye on him and, mile by mile, he had gotten more tense, every muscle drawn taut, his jaws clamped tight, sweat beading his face.

Cabot pushed the truck further into the ghost town.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught shapes pulling back into the fog, thought he saw eyes once that reflected red in the headlights. He’d done this so many times but it never got any easier. He fumbled another cigarette into his mouth with a shaking hand, his fingers trembling so badly he could barely fire it.

The Freightliner’s lights revealed the town inch by diseased inch: the dusty windows of empty shops, the spiderwebbed windshields of abandoned cars rusting at curbs, rotting houses leaning precariously on lawns gone wild with weeds. Everywhere, desertion and desolation, the American dream gone to rot and ruin.

In the back of the truck, the cargo was thumping and bumping around in the darkness, trying to shake off a drugged stupor.

Cabot pulled off his cigarette, pretending he could not hear them back there. Pretending he could not feel the flat, evil atmosphere of the town invading him and turning him cold and white inside.

“Another block,” he said. “We’ll be in the village center. That’s where we’ll get rid of our load.”

Blaine muttered something under his breath.

“What’s that, kid?”

He swallowed, then sighed. “I said it hasn’t changed much. Just older. Decaying.”

Cabot looked over at him. “You been here before?”

Blaine nodded. “This is Mattawan. This is where I came from. This is where we were running from that night our van puked out.”

“Why didn’t you ever say so?”

“Nobody ever asked me.” He shook his head. “Whenever I started talking about it, people shut me up. In Hullville, they all shut me up. You’re here now, they’d say. Where you came from don’t matter. We all came from somewhere.”

Cabot didn’t like this. He was getting a real bad feeling stirring in his guts.

“We hid out in a basement for three years,” Blaine said. “We foraged by day. The dead were in the streets then, too, but not as bad as at night. Ever notice how they’re so sluggish and stupid during the day? But then at night—”

“Kid, you should’ve told someone.”

“Nobody’d listen. Now I’m back. I’m home.”

Cabot was wiping sweat from his own face now. “Sure, kid. But this ain’t home. Not anymore. It’s a graveyard.”

And then Blaine reached over and quickly popped the lock on his door, threw it open and leaped out. Cabot cried out, caught the kid’s elbow, but he pulled free and was gone.

“Shit!”

Cabot hit the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. It rocked back and forth on its leaf springs. He shut the kid’s door, smelling the vile and polluted stink of the mist out there.

Then he jumped out himself, looking around in every direction.

“KID!” he called out. “GET THE HELL BACK HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? GET THE HELL BACK HERE!”

His voice echoed off into the misty darkness, but there was no reply. Fog filled the headlight beams and brakelights, swirling and steaming. Shadows clustered in warped doorways, the air damp, heavy, and moldering.

Cabot wiped a dew of sweat from his face, his breath coming fast.

Maybe Blaine was naïve and just plain stupid, but he was not. He knew this was not just some empty dead town. They were out there and they were out there in numbers. Even now he could feel their malefic eyes crawling over him, sizing him up.

They wanted what was in the back of the truck.

But they would take whatever meat they could get.

Cabot started first this way, then that, stopping each time, daring to go further. There was a park across the way. He could make out the shapes of slides, swingsets, an upended teeter-totter rising up in the fog like a derrick. This more than anything said all that needed saying about the wasteland the town now was, the extinction of the people who’d once lived there.

A little house bordered the park and Cabot wondered if maybe the kid had gone in there, wondered if it could be that simple.

He stepped over the curb into the long yellow grass that climbed up above his calves. His breath would barely come. He could hear the truck idling, a stray breeze in the trees overhead. Shadows were crawling everywhere and death waited in each one. The house was sagging, weathered and gray. A lone monolith wreathed in darkness.

He moved further into the yard, the crackling of dry leaves under his step making something pull up tight inside him. He saw a birdbath in the yard. It was sprouting withered creepers. The front door of the house was hanging from its hinges, the darkness beyond sinister and pooling.

That’s when Cabot saw he was not alone.

From one dusty window above, a white face was staring down at him. Its eyes were black and glistening. He almost fell over backing away. The figure up there began slapping its hands against the window violently.

“Shit,” Cabot said and ran back to the truck.

He got inside and threw the locks, started breathing again.

He was shaking worse than the kid himself now, everything inside him gone loose and watery. He knew how things worked. He knew exactly how they worked. The kid was valuable to Hullville. They needed the young and the strong because they could still bring babies into the world and Hullville needed babies. They needed a next generation or they were done. He would be sixty himself come next birthday and his procreating days were long over. He was just as sterile as the rest. Not as valuable as the kid. He wasn’t old, but it was coming and when you no longer had a use in Hullville you went in the back of the truck.

That’s why the patrols went out.

They needed bodies. They found anyone they could and brought them in. Then the Council decided whether they were useful or not. Lots of them were. People with trades, doctors, carpenters, bricklayers, engineers. But others… alcoholics, drug users, the old, the lazy, criminals, the sick… they were culled off, went into the back of the truck for the trip to the ghost town. That kept the Wormboys happy.

And now Cabot had fucked up.

He had lost the kid.

The Council wouldn’t like that. He thought about calling it in, but he was afraid to. He could hear Chum now: You lost the kid? Well, that’s a real pisser, Cab. He was set to marry up with Leslie Rule next month. They’d a had some beautiful babies, I’ll bet. Oh well. Shit happens. Dump your load and head in. Council will want to talk to you.

Shit.

Council will want to talk to you.

“Like hell,” Cabot said under his breath.

He pulled a pump shotgun from the rack and filled his pockets with extra shells.

He was going out there.

Out into the graveyard of Mattawan.

He was going to find the kid.

Night and fog.

Cabot moved through the mist, having no idea where he was going. It was a fool’s errand and he knew it, but to go back empty-handed… well, that just wouldn’t do. He eased by picket fences spotted with black mold, crossed overgrown yards where children’s plastic toys bleached colorless by the grim roll of years were tangled in weeds. He slipped by rows of rotting houses with broken windows and rooflines fringed with mold.

So far, so good.

He scanned the darkness with a flashlight, the beam reflecting back off the rolling fog. Sometimes he saw shapes out there. Sometimes they were just trees or bushes and sometimes they were something else. He used the flashlight sparingly, turning it on and then clicking it off just as quick. The Wormboys were out there. Mattawan was dark, lit only by the mist and the pale moonlight filtering through it. Light of any sort would draw them right away like moths to a streetlamp. They didn’t like light much, but they knew it meant prey when they saw it.

Cabot tried to focus his mind, tried to come up with some sort of plan.

Where would the kid have gone? He had lived somewhere in this gutter, only he was never particular as to where that had been. And what had happened in the truck? Had he been planning this all along or had the sight of the place just unhinged him?

He couldn’t have known we were going to Mattawan. Nobody calls it that anymore. Ever since it died it’s just been the ghost town.

But there was no time for that.

Cabot decided right then and there that all he could do was sweep around the general area, be quiet about it, then make for the truck before he became lunch. If he couldn’t find the kid—and he was starting to feel pretty sure he wouldn’t—then he’d make up some story, anything to throw him in a good light and shade the kid in a bad one.

Sound thinking.

Cabot moved down a street that was crowded with rusting cars and trucks. Some were smashed up against trees, others had popped the curb and died on lawns. Many had bird-picked skeletons behind the wheels. The town was wild, hedges and bushes consuming lots, ivies engulfing garages, yards lost beneath uprisings of weeds and straw-yellow devil grass. Tree limbs had fallen everywhere.

He kept moving, keeping a wary eye out for anything alive… at least, anything moving. The mist distorted everything. Turned trees into stalking figures, shaped fire hydrants into crouching forms.

He stopped.

Behind him there were footsteps… slow, measured.

He whirled around, tucking the flashlight into his pocket, both hands on the shotgun now. He waited behind a hedgerow, ready, ready. A warm stench like spoiled pork wafted through the air and sweat ran down his face. He caught a momentary glimpse of a hobbling stick-like shadow melting into the fog.

The footsteps faded into the distance.

Cabot waited another few minutes, then he was moving again. Stealthy, alert, his muscles drawn taut like piano wires, his blood pulsing hot in his veins. He moved over grassy lawns, frost-heaved sidewalks yellow with rain-plastered leaves. The mist was damp and chill about him, moving, swirling, encompassing. His heart was pounding in his throat, his temples.

Off to the left, a branch snapped.

He froze, unsure whether to go forward or go back.

There was a scraping sound now… like something sharp dragged over the hood of a car.

He smelled a sweet and high odor like rotting hay. It grew stronger by the moment. He brushed sweat from his face, licked his paper-dry lips. The world around him was painted gray by the mist. Tree limbs creaked together in the breeze. He looked around, peering through blankets of fog, terrified at what he might see coming at him.

The stink was overpowering now.

He turned, ready to run, ready to give up his position by making a mad dash for the truck and then—

Someone was standing not ten feet away.

At first, Cabot was not even sure that he was looking at a man. Dressed in a black coat that was feathered with moss, his back twisted and body contorted, he looked like a dead, gnarled tree growing up from the weedy soil, his skeletal hands reaching twigs, his face corded like pine bark. “Please, friend,” he said in a rasping tone. “I am so hungry, so very hungry…”

Wormboy.

Cabot just waited there, the shotgun in his fists. “Get the fuck away from me,” he said.

The Wormboy dragged himself forward, grinning happily. His face split open with it, tissues tearing and tendons popping like dry roots. His eyes were blank and white, rimmed with red, his mouth hanging open to reveal pitted gums and black teeth. A dark slime oozed from his lips like running sap.

Cabot shot him.

He caught him in the belly and nearly tore him in half. But what was left, like stringy pink and gray meat, kept crawling in his direction.

Cabot ran.

Off into the shadows, trying to find that little park but what he found were shapes, long-armed shapes, dozens of them moving at him out of the mist. They were coming from every direction. He was in a nest of them. Grinning faces bloated with putrescence swam out of the fog. Spidery fingers clawed out for him. Gurgling voices called out. They were ringing him in, gliding forward like swarming insects.

Cabot turned and fired, ran to the left, fired, to the right and fired again. Fingers tore at his jacket and he swung the shotgun like a club, felt it smash into something soft and pulpy. More were coming and he needed to reload, but there just wasn’t time.

He dove through a knot of Wormboys, hammered his way clear. He leaped over a hedge, crawled on his hands and knees through the grass. On his feet again, across a yard, around a house, down an alley. Behind him, they were coming, screaming and squealing, the stench of their numbers gaseous and revolting.

He cut through another yard, paused and fumbled shells into the shotgun.

And then a voice said: “Hey, mister! Over here!”

Cabot felt his heart gallop to a stop, lurch painfully, then start beating again. He turned and there was a little girl standing there in what looked like a white dress that had gone dark with filth. It hung in rags. Her face was as pale as the mist, her eyes huge and black and glistening with wetness. She held a finger like a skeleton key to her lips, said, “Sshhh!”

She began backing away between two ruined houses, arching a finger at him to follow. His breath lancing his throat, Cabot listened to the Wormboys gathering out there, sniffing out his trail. The girl could have been one of them and then, maybe not.

“Hurry! Or they’ll get you!” she said.

He followed her, some electric instinct telling him to run, that this was a trap, a trap, but he was too scared to listen.

He followed.

The girl kept backing away, through the grass, around bushes and trees. Without even turning, she vaulted a heap of dead leaves. Cabot went after her, praying under his breath. He stumbled through the leaf pile and there was a sudden, unbelievable explosion of white agony in his ankle.

He went down, screaming, fighting, the shotgun going one way and he going the other.

The girl turned away, made a high whistling sound like a wind blown through catacombs. And as she did so, Cabot saw in his pain that the back of her head was mostly gone. Strands of dirty hair fell over a gaping, rotten chasm that boiled with meat flies.

She whistled again.

Dear God, she’s signaling the others, calling out to them…

Cabot thrashed, trying to break free.

The pain tossed his mind into darkness and then yanked it back out again. His eyes irised open, blinking away tears, and he saw the girl. Just standing there, giggling softly, looking very pleased. Her eyes were larger than ever, oily and moist, filled with a raw-toothed hunger. A fly ran over her threadbare lips and she caught it with a gray tongue, sucked it into her mouth. Then she ate it, gums shriveled away from teeth that were black and overlapping, filed sharp.

As her insane laughter echoed into the night, Cabot reached down to his ankle to see what held it. The pain made white specks flash before his eyes.

A trap, oh yes, a trap.

A bear trap. The spikes were buried in his ankle, buried deep like the jaws of a tiger. He tried to force them apart and he nearly went out cold from the pain. His hands came away dark and dripping.

Two more figures came out of the darkness.

They stank like tombs.

Cabot screamed, but a pulpy, moist hand squeezed his mouth shut. Somewhere during the process, he fainted.

He woke later to the sound of humming.

Humming.

A woman’s voice, but cracked and dry-sounding like her throat was packed with dirt and dead leaves. His eyes opened, shut, opened again. He was in a room that stank of old blood and rancid meat, a shocking rank odor. Candles were flickering on a mantle throwing greasy, wavering shadows in every direction.

The humming went on and on.

Beneath it was the near steady drone of flies.

Something crawled over his face but he dared not move.

He tried to remember, to make sense of it. There were only fleeting, maroon-tinged images of the fog, the things hunting in it. Then that evil little girl. The bear trap. Then… Jesus, just some distorted nightmare of him being dragged through the mist, dragged by the trap that snared his ankle, the agony throwing him into darkness.

You’re in their lair, he thought then. They’ve got you good.

His leg was numb from the knee down and he didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. But he knew the trap was gone. Without moving, without daring to give indication that he was even alive, he peered around. It looked like he was in a living room… or what had once been a living room. Stainless steel traps hung from chains on the walls. Old blood was spattered everywhere in loops and whorls. It looked black in the dirty light.

What the hell is this?

But by degrees, he began to understand.

He was dumped on the floor, resting in a pool of blood gone sticky and cold. All around him were hunched shapes, silent, stinking, netted with flies. Gutted torsos, gnawed limbs, sightless faces peeled to the bone. He was in a litter pile of human remains. He felt something inside him run wet and warm as he realized it. Not just the mantraps on the walls, but tables gleaming with cutlery, saws and axes. Candlelight was reflected off puddles of dried blood clotted with tissue and hair. Flies filled the air in clouds, rising and descending to feed. They investigated his lips, his nostrils, dozens of them crawling over his wounded ankle. A maggoty head was at his left elbow, a cleaver sank in its skull.

A slaughterhouse.

He would have screamed, but what was the point? He had never been alone in his life as he was now. That humming. He craned his head precious inches. He saw a woman in the guttering light. Her hair was long and colorless, matted with tallow and dried blood. Her face was an obscenity. There was a skullish hollow where her nose had been, some cancerous ulceration chewing it away and spreading, leaving a gaping fleshless pit in the center of her face. A black chasm in which carrion beetles spawned. Her eyes were dark and glossy, her teeth jutting from a lipless maw.

She was humming.

Working on something.

Cabot craned his head a bit more and saw. She was kneeling before a cadaver, working it with a knife like a woman preparing a chicken for Sunday dinner. Sawing, cutting. She yanked out moist loops of bowel and glistening lumps of organ, separating them, threw a snakelike ribbon of entrails over her shoulder. Flies covered her, covered what she was working on. She hummed happily. Now she was reaching into cloth bags, sprinkling things into the hollowed belly. Seasoning it. Now stitching the gut closed with needle and thread.

Dear God.

Cabot was trembling. He couldn’t help it. Then through the door came a man in the same shapeless, shroud-like rags the woman wore. His face was white and pulpy, threaded with segmented green worms. They didn’t seem to bother him. He looped a rope around the cadaver’s ankles, threw the other end over a roughhewn beam overhead. Together, they pulled and pulled until the body was dangling in the air, fingertips just brushing the floor.

They tied the rope off.

And that’s when Cabot saw its face: Blaine.

It was the kid. Stupid, dumbass fucking kid. This is how it ended for him in this cannibal’s lair, as meat. The knowledge of this made things unwind in Cabot until he felt hopeless, calm, senseless. The kid was just livestock to be slaughtered, dressed out and seasoned, aged for the dinner table.

Cabot knew he would be next.

The girl that had trapped him came hopping through the door on all fours. She went right over to him, pressing her vile flyblown face into his own. She licked his cheek with a scabrous tongue. Nibbled at his throat, his exposed belly, then downwards towards his ankle.

Oh not that, don’t wake that ankle up.

The woman turned, putting red gleaming eyes on the girl. “Nah! Nah!” she cried out in a rasping voice that was full of grave dirt. “Not et one! The finding of the meat! The getting of the meat! Must be aged, must be soft!” She threw something towards the far wall. It might have been a heart. The girl scampered after it, began chewing and sucking on it.

So this is what it had come to? This was the malignant, loathsome sort of evolution that had been going on in graveyard towns like Mattawan. The dead were not just shambling in the streets and hiding in the shadows or hunting in packs… they had formed familial bonds of a sort, basal tribe-like hunting units. This is what had been going on in the shadows, the mortuaries, cellars and ruined houses. Breeding and evolving like crawly, slimy things beneath rotten logs.

Evolving.

Cabot did not move. He had not moved when the girl tasted him and he would not move now. They thought he was dead, so he would be dead. They were letting him cool before they dressed him out.

The man stumbled away and the woman followed him, muttering about the finding of meat, the stocking of meat, and the tasting and filling of meat. The girl tagged behind, crawling on all fours like an animal. Cabot heard stairs creaking as they went up to the second floor.

He waited.

Flies covered him, biting him, laying their eggs. Beetles crawled over his face.

He did not move.

Later, when Cabot opened his eyes, there was only silence.

The zombie family was gone.

He listened for a long time and only heard the flies, the rats that came out to feed upon the dead. He sat up, a brilliant thunderclap of pain in his leg. He dragged himself away from the corpses, through sticky pools of blood. Using a table, he pulled himself up. He could not put weight on his leg. He found a shovel in the corner.

A shovel? Yes, of course a shovel. They’ve probably opened every grave in the county. When the truck comes from Hullville they probably get their share and bury it until it’s soft and wormy the way they like it.

He knew it couldn’t be this easy.

He couldn’t simply walk out of there without them knowing. But he did. He hobbled out of the room and through a door that was hanging from its hinges. The night air was damp and sour-smelling, but fresh compared to the house. His breath did not want to come, his ankle was throbbing, his body knotted with aches and pains, but he kept going. Even with the shovel as a crutch, he was every quiet. Through yards, across streets, down alleys. Moving by instinctive sense alone, he found the park.

The dead were not there.

He looked for them, but the mist was empty. Just decaying houses, collapsing fences, leaning and splintered telephone poles whose lines hung limp as spaghetti. The truck would not be far. He would find it, get in it, get away. Yes. He would pull the lever that opened the doors to release his cargo. The Wormboys would take care of the rest. Then he would go back, make up a story. Maybe crash the truck and call for a pick-up on the radio, say the dead had attacked, he’d released the cargo to draw them away.

Yes, yes.

Through the mist, the latticing of shadows.

The truck would be just ahead.

He stopped, suddenly roped tight with fear. He could hear… yes, grunting sounds, sucking sounds, chewing sounds. The stink of blood in the air was violent and overwhelming. He crept through the fog, knowing he had to see and then, hidden behind a bush, he did.

The doors were torn off the truck.

Jesus… look at that.

The rear door was open, lift gate down. The Wormboys were everywhere. They had released the cargo and fell on them in a starving mass. It was a sea of blood and bodies and entrails out there now, the dead squirming in the waste like worms, feeding and fighting, blood-slicked faces snapping up meat. A feeding frenzy. They bit the bodies in the streets, one another, even themselves.

Now was the time to get out.

Cabot hobbled away into the mist until he found the sign marking the perimeter of the town. Only then did he dare rest. But not for long. He moved down the road, weaving through the auto graveyard out there. And then… lights.

Headlights.

They were coming for him.

Thank God.

He stepped out, waving his arms. A truck. It slowed. Cabot fell over, just worn out and used up. He lay there, half-conscious, just breathing, just alive. Not much more.

“Help me with him,” a voice said.

“Where… where you from?” he heard his voice ask.

“Moxton,” the man said. “Moxton.”

Hands on him. He was lifted gently into the truck. It was warm in there. He drifted off, feeling safe at last. It was good.

Later, Cabot opened his eyes.

There was darkness all around him. He heard people mumbling and sobbing, pushing against him, crawling over him. He tried to get up and he was knocked flat. He tried to talk to the people with him but he was not heard. With a slowly dawning horror, Cabot understood. Understood how that truck was from Moxton and not Hullville and in Moxton they did what they had to survive.

A great clicking. A groaning.

Moonlight pushing in as the rear doors of the truck opened.

People screaming.

Mist flooding into the bay like toxic steam. And in that mist, hulking shapes and morgue shadows with reaching arms and graying fingers. Graveyard faces specked with flies, faces gone to wormy white pulp, all grinning with long gnarled teeth and leering with glossy red eyes.

Cabot closed his eyes.

And waited his turn.