“Quiet,” I told him. I looked to the girl. “Honey, what are you doing out this late? It’s not safe…it’s…”
That’s about as far as I got. For right then I got a good look at her and something in my guts pulled up in fear. This was no little girl. Her eyes were bright and yellow, luminous, and her face was a seamed and corded fright mask, an awful grayish-blue in color. She held up hands to me, her mouth opening and revealing a set of tiny hooked teeth of the sort that were designed to seize prey and hold onto it. Steam was rising from her and there was a sound of crackling energy like static electricity in a blanket.
A shrill piping noise came from her mouth, growing in volume until it was nearly hypersonic, painful to hear. She drifted forward, a low pulsating glow enveloping her, sparking with nuclear waste. She did not walk, she drifted, hot radioactive steam boiling from her, leaving a flickering misty trail in her wake.
She would have had me.
I fell back and fired twice and missed with both rounds. But the dog wasn’t about to let her get me, God bless him. He howled and charged, leaping right at her with jaws wide for attack. She enfolded him in her arms and he let out a wild, shrieking whine of pain. The dog literally burned up in her arms. It blazed with a cool blue fire, smoking and blistering, shriveling down to a blackened, smoldering thing right before my eyes. There was a hot, violent stink of cremated dog…then he fell from her arms, burning bones and blowing gray ash.
By then I was running. She did not come after me and by the time I got home and into my building I was shaking so badly I couldn’t even hold the glass of whiskey I tried to pour down my throat. That poor dog. I would never forget him…what he did for me and what that irradiated wraith did to him.
After that, whenever I saw a dog that wasn’t rabid, infected, or mutated, I gave him food, water, anything I could. And also after that, I shot the Children on sight. For if there are ghouls haunting the graveyard of this world, then they are the Children.
8
One thing I got used to very quickly were the corpses.
Because they were literally everywhere. The city itself wasn’t much more than a blasted, broken corpse itself. There had been so much fighting between the National Guard and private militias that entire neighborhoods were burned out, buildings collapsed from heavy firepower. Avenues were congested with rubble and the blackened carapaces of vehicles. Telephone poles had been knocked over and lay tangled in the knotted mesh of their own wires.
And everywhere in the urban graveyard…bodies.
By April, the corpse wagon system had broken down entirely and the dead were left wherever they had fallen or were thrown.
They were the only raw materials the city had left and they were in abundance. In whole and in part. Some rotted down skeletons, others burned to blackened husks, and many more swollen up green in the sun, clouds of meatflies rising and descending, feeding and laying their eggs. It wasn’t unusual to see the dead moving, shivering, because they were so infested with maggots. Many corpses had been gnawed upon. Probably rats. But other things, too, that only came out when the sun went down.
The heavy snows that had buried Youngstown had melted almost overnight, leaving standing pools of water throughout the city in which waterlogged bodies floated. The heavy rains had washed them into yards and doorways, created rivers of them that lapped up against storefronts. And what amazed me the most?and maybe frightened me, too?was that I and the other survivors paid the heaped human remains very little attention. We scavenged amongst them and hopped over them and kicked them aside, and the only time they were avoided was because of the disease vectors they might be carrying.
After awhile, you got used to anything.
So given that the city was inundated with the unburied dead in every possible stage of decomposition, it really was no surprise that nature in her endless creativity had now spawned mutants that took advantage of all the carrion.
A few blocks from my apartment house there was a 7-11. Back in the day I used to stop there for Slurpies and chili dogs, but within two months of Shelly’s death it had been converted into a body dump for some insane reason. There were hundreds of bodies there broiling in the sun, exhaling clouds of flies and a hot, gaseous stench that would put you right down to your knees.
Word had it that even the incinerators and burning pits couldn’t handle all the dead, so they were stored in alternate locations throughout the city. So the corpse wagons just dumped them in the parking lot.
I passed by it almost daily, paid little mind to the piled dead. The entire city stank like a sunwashed cadaver by that point, but it was particularly concentrated at the 7-11 so I always wore a neckerchief over my mouth. The only thing that intrigued me was the idea that there might be food in the 7-11 that nobody had scavenged. But even the idea of that couldn’t get me to brave the carrion field. The flies were so thick in the air that it looked like a churning cloud of soot rising above the corpses which were heaped in dozens of mounds that had decayed into rank, oozing masses.
One day I found a box of untouched canned food at another Salvation Army depot and I had to pass the body dump on my way home. As I did, I saw that the bodies were moving.
They were actually moving.
I thought at first it was the gas making them writhe and shudder, but that’s not what it was at all. Curious, I stood there with my box of goodies, the hot stink blowing over me, the flies buzzing madly.
And that’s when I saw my first corpse-worm.
It burst from the mouth of a stiff…thick as a man’s wrist, segmented, slick with something slimy like snot. It was flattened out like a tapeworm. It rose right up and hovered there like a cobra preparing to strike. Now it didn’t have any eyes that I could see, but I was almost certain with a rising aversion that it was looking right at me. There was sort of a bulb where its mouth should have been and it kept opening and closing like it was breathing, the whole time dripping a black fluid like India ink.
I just stared, perplexed, revolted.
I dropped my box of food, cans of beans and Spaghettios rolling around the sidewalk.
That worm just hovered there like it was daring me to intervene. Then another worm slid out of a dead woman’s green belly and another forced itself free from the eye socket of a fleshy skull. Pretty soon they were all coming out like they needed to sun themselves, like nightcrawlers drawn out by the rain. Some of them were no bigger around than fingers, but others were as thick as a human leg. They came out of nostrils and eye sockets and assholes, slithering forth and rising up, all of them slimy and corpse-belly white.
I had seen things by that point, things created by fallout that would have driven me mad a year before, but nothing like those worms.
They soon tired of me, however, having no interest whatsoever in living flesh, and went back to work. They started to eat, tunneling through that heaped carrion, sucking and slurping and chewing. Once they burrowed their way into a body, the buffet was open. That bulb or mouth or whatever in the Christ it was, would squirt some of that black juice into the corpse and the innards would liquefy. That juice was some sort of digestive enzyme, like what spiders inject into their prey?they’d squirt it in and then suck up the dissolved liquid.
It was sickening.
But what was even worse was that I saw a dozen worms slide up out of bodies and wrap themselves together in a fleshy helix. They coiled together like that, making some weird trilling sound, vibrating, a watery mucus enveloping them.
This is what made me run.
For I knew, you see, that they were breeding. And that horrible trilling sounded positively orgasmic, pleasurable…like the worms were getting off.
And this was but another component of the world I inherited.