These Ravening Dead
“TONY!” HER PARALYSIS lifted. Sweeping up the chopper, Rima screamed to Emma, “Back up, back up!”
She brought the blade straight down. The chopper’s keen edge buried itself with a hollow crack, splitting the boy’s skull. A gray slop of decaying, jellied brains gushed from the split, and more dribbled from the boy’s ears and eyeless sockets. The boy’s jaws slackened, but now there were other hands on Tony and he was screaming, the snow under his torn arm going crimson, as they swarmed him like ravenous rats feasting on carrion.
“NO!” Emma was stabbing at backs and buttocks, but it was like spitting into the face of a hurricane. “Let him go, leave him alone!”
Rima sprang for the roiling mass of bodies. Tony’s pike still jutted straight up, waggling like an obscene masthead void of its sail, but she couldn’t see him for all these ravening dead. Slashing in a sweeping cut, she drove the chopper into the side of a neck—man, woman, she couldn’t tell—and watched with sick horror as the head swooned until the right ear rested on its shoulder … and still, the thing did not turn to face her but jabbered and tried clawing up the back of another blocking its way.
“Stop it!” It was Emma, fists balled. She shrieked at the woman. “Don’t hurt him anymore! I’ll come with you! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Rima!” Whipping round, she saw Tony rearing up, smeared with his own blood and the viscous tar of foul ichor and decayed guts. A girl with no nose or lower jaw had twined her arms round his neck and now clung to him like a lover. “Rima!” he shouted, and then she spotted a flash of steel in his right hand. “Emma! Girls, run, get away, run!”
No, no, no! “Tony, stop!” she shrieked as Emma screamed, “Kill her, Tony, kill her!” He was already driving, ramming the blade home, his penknife burying itself in the girl’s swollen, churning belly.
That’s it, Rima thought. We’re done for.
The girl arched. Her mouth unhinged, and what came was a wordless, ululating bellow. Then, in the blink of an eye, her stomach erupted, tore itself apart, releasing a mist of red fluid and black squirmers.
No. Her breath stoppered in her throat. The mist bloomed over Tony, who was already coughing and choking, clawing at his face as the ebony whips wormed down his mouth, up his nose, and into his ears. Dumb with horror, Rima watched as they thrashed and cored into the whites of his eyes, and now there were ruby tears streaming down his cheeks, as Tony, back bowed in agony, collapsed to the snow, gargling blood, his skin rippling as squirmers bored and chewed.
“What are they?” Emma shrieked, eyes bulging with terror. “What are they, Rima, what are they?”
They are our death. She couldn’t move. Really, where could she run anyway? The fog, perhaps, if it would’ve taken her. Less than two seconds had passed, and they were coming for her now, hundreds of them corkscrewing, eeling, riding a seemingly endless red river of the girl’s blood. She felt the moist flick of something on her cheek and then dozens more, and all at once, they sprang for her exposed flesh and writhed over her face. As soon as she opened her mouth to scream, they leapt into her mouth and she felt them instantly swim down her throat, fan out through her lungs. Agony detonated in her chest. Her knees buckled. Somewhere, in the far distance, she heard Emma screaming and knew the squirmers had found the girl, too, and then that knowledge winked out and there was only pain and the constant burrowing, slithering, chewing.
Rima barely registered when she hit the ground, though she saw white rush for her face; felt the crawl and rapid slither up her cheeks. Black filaments swarmed before her vision, and as they reared to strike, she saw them, up close, for what they were: bristling maws and glaring red pinpricks for eyes.
She managed a single, last scream.