Authors: Christopher Golden
Waking Nightmares (34 page)
There were bullet holes in most of the dead people. A fat, naked black woman had been shot half a dozen times. She had collapsed to the floor, but now she struggled to rise again, and one of the cops shot her in the face, eradicating her right eye and blowing shards of skull and drying brain matter onto the wall beside her.
Amber screamed.
The cops and security guards glanced back at them. One of the cops swung his weapon around, and Miles thought he might have shaken them out of fear and surprise, but he twisted back and aimed at the dead people again.
“You shouldn’t be here!” one of the guards shouted, backing up a few steps to talk to them. He had gray hair and a paunchy belly and he looked terrified. In his hand, he held a Taser gun, but he hadn’t fired it.
“What are you doing?” Amber demanded. “It’s . . . it’s wrong!”
“Are you high?” the guard asked. “They’re fucking zombies !”
“This isn’t a movie. You don’t know what they’d do. They just look lost and sad. Those two old ladies don’t even have their eyes open. You think they’re going to eat you?”
“That’s what they do!” one of the cops shouted at her. “Don’t be stupid. The fat lady keeps coming for us. And these are just the ones who were on the tables. The morgue assistant who called it in said the ones in the drawers, they’re banging to be let out!”
Miles turned and vomited on the linoleum. He wanted badly to cry. His eyes burned with the need to shed tears. But all he could muster was a nausea that retreated to a dull queasiness the moment he puked. For a second he leaned against the wall, trying to breathe, trying not to picture the dark inside of one of those morgue drawers. His mother wasn’t out in the corridor, which meant she had woken from death inside a metal coffin, a drawer where she had been put into cold storage, covered with a sheet.
He wondered if she knew what had happened to her. The dead looked lost, Amber was right about that. But he had seen his mother’s ghost upstairs, and he felt sure she must know. Even if her spirit had left her flesh behind, somewhere her consciousness knew that her remains had been desecrated.
“Just stop, you idiots,” he said. “Stop shooting long enough to see if they try to attack you.”
One of the cops shot the autopsy man in the chest, and Miles wondered what he thought he would hit. There were no organs in there, no further damage that could be done to make the corpse lie down, short of a grenade exploding.
“This is magic,” Amber said. “It’s got to be part of what’s happening everywhere in town. It’s not fucking
Dawn of the Dead
.”
Dawn of the Dead
.”
“How do you know?” the redheaded female guard snapped at her. “There are vampires. You want us to treat the zombies nice until they eat our goddamn brains?”
Miles didn’t want to argue anymore. The only one among the dead who seemed intent on reaching the living was the black woman, but she didn’t look angry or evil or hungry. And as she looked up at them now, she had a faraway gaze as though her purpose lay somewhere quite distant. She tried to speak, but she had no voice.
Yet he thought he could make out the two words she tried to utter. He had no expertise in reading lips, but it seemed clear to him.
She said,
My baby
.
My baby
.
The woman wanted to reach her child. They might not all know who they were, or what had happened to them, but this one did.
Blind with grief, thinking of his mother in that drawer and the way her ghost had vanished upstairs, Miles could not stop himself. He ran through the blockade the guards and cops had set up. The female guard tried to grab him, but he shook her off and before the cops even knew what he was doing, he was between them and the dead woman who only wanted to reach her baby.
“You stupid bastard!” someone shouted at him. “What the hell are—”
The black woman, riddled with bullet holes, reached for Miles. A tremor of fear passed through him, but it was swept under by the current of his grief. He saw his sorrow reflected in her eyes, and he took her hand. She stepped toward him.
“Move aside, damn it! Move aside!” one of the cops was screaming.
One of them took a shot, but they didn’t dare shoot Miles and they couldn’t hit the dead woman without putting a bullet through him, too.
Amber screamed his name. He heard a scuffle and understood that she was trying to get to him, and the guards were holding her back. He saw the two old dead women bumping into each other, their eyes still closed. The autopsy man slipped in his own viscera and fell down. His heart broke for all of them, and for his mother, and for himself. And he prayed the cops were wrong.
The dead woman wrapped her arms around him, sagging into him as though she wept, although—like Miles—she had no tears. She held him as though gaining solace from his kindness, and then she stepped back, her gaze straying once more to some faraway place where she must have believed her baby awaited her.
Miles turned to the cops, who stared in astonishment, mouths open in expressions that might have been comical if there weren’t so much anguish in the air around them all.
“They’re harmless,” Miles said, his voice catching. “They’re just in pain. They’re grieving for themselves.”
The guard who’d been holding Amber released her, and she stepped up beside the cops.
“We’ve got to figure out a way to make them dead again,” she said.
Miles nodded. She understood the obscenity here, what this twisted magic had done to them. This was an abomination.
He heard the shuffle of footsteps behind him and the whimper of someone in fear. Before he turned, he saw Amber’s eyes go wide in surprise, and saw the cops raise their guns and take aim again.
Miles spun to see two people emerging from the open door to the morgue. One wore a white lab coat, maybe the morgue assistant who had called in this horror in the first place. The other held him from behind, a scalpel to his throat, a puncture wound in his neck already weeping blood.
The man who held the morgue assistant had been burned to death, his skin cracked and charred. Where his eyes ought to have been were ruined, blackened pits, but his grip on the terrified morgue assistant was strong.
The burned corpse smiled.
“Pinsky,” one of the cops said.
“This one’s not harmless,” said the other. “He’s a fuckin’ serial killer.”
CHAPTER 13
AMBER
tore free of the security guard holding her back and brushed past the two cops, who shouted at her to get the hell out of the way. She grabbed Miles by the arm and pulled him aside, out of the line of fire, but she saw in his eyes that he had no fear of the policemen’s bullets just then.
tore free of the security guard holding her back and brushed past the two cops, who shouted at her to get the hell out of the way. She grabbed Miles by the arm and pulled him aside, out of the line of fire, but she saw in his eyes that he had no fear of the policemen’s bullets just then.
“Do it!” she shouted to the cops. “Shoot him!”
“No shot!” the younger cop snapped.
The two policemen shuffled forward, guns trained on the charred cadaver who had taken the morgue assistant hostage. Amber felt her stomach churn every time she glanced at that dead man and saw the scorched, empty pits of his eyes and the bones jutting through skin burned paper-thin.
“Even if they had a shot,” Miles muttered to her, “it wouldn’t stop the thing. They’ve all got bullet holes.”
She knew it, but to hear him speak the words chilled her. Amber stared at the wide, terrified eyes of the morgue assistant as the burned man walked him backward toward the elevator at the end of the corridor. The scalpel had already drawn a thin red line on the hostage’s throat, opening up a puckered wound that began to weep blood.
One of the cops took three quick steps forward, and the burned corpse twisted his hostage around to make sure the morgue assistant stayed between him and the police. The other cop took a shot, winged the dead man’s shoulder, and both corpse and hostage froze. A sneer of fury contorted the burned man’s face, cracking charred flesh, splits in his cheeks showing raw, bloody meat. The burned man was pissed, and he jabbed the knife an inch into the morgue assistant’s throat.
The hostage screamed and began to beg and plead, tears rolling down his face. The burned, eyeless corpse smiled and backed toward the elevator, the morgue assistant helping him now, walking carefully backward, afraid to do anything but comply with the dead man’s every whim.
Amber felt useless and helpless. She choked on a scream, unable to let it out. She shook her head and a terrible sorrow embraced her. In a time of impossible things, this moment would be branded on her soul forever, poisoning her sleep every night. She’d overheard the cops . . . in life, this man Pinsky had been a murderer, a serial killer. Now some anarchic magic, some convulsion in the chaotic sorcery plaguing Hawthorne, had given him a semblance of life. The other revived corpses wandered aimlessly or sought out some simple comfort, but Pinsky’s mind held only one purpose—to survive, and kill again.
Pinsky jerked his hostage back, nodded his charred skull at the elevator, and Amber saw the light of understanding flicker in the morgue assistant’s eyes. Trembling, his neck bleeding badly, the man reached out and pressed the elevator call button.
A quiet sob wracked Amber’s body and she clung to Miles’s arm, almost hiding behind him as the true abomination of this horror became clear to her.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “He can still see.”
As if he’d heard her, the dead man turned toward her, brow crinkling so that the skin split. Those empty, charred pits stared at her. Amber froze, wanting to scream and run but afraid that he would pursue her. Her rationality had all but fled. The police shuffled forward, not shouting at the killer the way they might have if he were alive. They seemed at a loss as to what to do. Shooting the corpse did nothing, but if they tried to rush him and take him by force, he would murder the morgue assistant.
One of the old women shambled toward Amber and Miles, and for a moment her view of Pinsky and his hostage was obscured.
She heard the ding of the elevator arriving. The doors slid open to the sound of voices, and Amber saw that the elevator had passengers. She saw police uniforms and a momentary relief washed over her before she remembered that bullets did nothing, that the police could
do
nothing.
do
nothing.
Pinsky spun as the voices cut off. As the elevator’s passengers saw him, the burned corpse twisted his hostage around and backed into the wall. The killer had nowhere else to go. Charred eye sockets narrowed.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Chief Kramer said, slapping his hand onto the elevator door to keep it from closing.
The chief and another cop who Amber didn’t know sidestepped off the elevator, not wanting to turn their backs on Pinsky. There weren’t alone. A red-haired girl about Amber’s age practically leaped out, stalking toward the killer.
The morgue assistant howled as Pinsky stabbed him again.
“Please!” he said, tears streaming down, his voice, his whole body shaking. “Help me.”
Two people were still on the elevator, a beautiful Asian woman and a tall, lanky, good-looking white guy in need of a shave. At first glance they looked ordinary enough, but a weird light flickered in that enclosed space, and Amber thought it seemed as though a breeze gusted around them.
“Who the hell is that?” Miles asked.
Even the dead people in the corridor ceased their shambling and seemed to awaken from their death fugue and turn to look at the two people in the elevator.
The scorched killer slid his back along the wall, holding the weeping, bleeding morgue assistant in front of him. Black flakes of burned skin smeared with grotesque fluids on the wall as he worked his way toward the elevator, obviously intent upon getting on board. Either Pinsky hadn’t seen the people in the elevator, or he counted on the knife he held to his hostage’s throat to prevent anyone from interfering.
The elevator door started to close.
The man inside whipped out a hand to stop it, and Amber saw a penumbra of purplish light crackling like fire around his fingers. He stepped off the elevator, reached his other hand toward the murderous corpse—this one sizzling in a sphere of golden light—and made a single gesture, a twitch of his wrist. The knife jerked from Pinsky’s burned hand, snapping off charred fingers, and the blade clattered to the floor.
The fat woman fell to her knees and covered her face as if weeping. The two dead old women crashed into each other. Autopsy man flailed on the ground in a smear of his own entrails. They all felt something, reacting like animals to an oncoming storm.
Pinsky sneered, the skin of his left cheek splitting, revealing yellowed bone. He grabbed the morgue assistant by the throat, intent upon murder.
The tall man gestured again and the morgue assistant was ripped from Pinsky’s grasp and flung toward Chief Kramer. He staggered as he collided with the chief, and both men fell down.
The redheaded girl hissed, her eyes glinting horridly, and Amber froze as the girl lunged at Pinsky, baring fangs. A vampire, Amber thought.
Ohmygodanactualvampire.
And then the vampire girl drove the burned corpse of the killer into the wall and began to tear at his insides, and Amber wanted to be sick.
Ohmygodanactualvampire.
And then the vampire girl drove the burned corpse of the killer into the wall and began to tear at his insides, and Amber wanted to be sick.
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