They’d been taken care of. Sitterson had succeeded in forgetting even their names. But he’d also vowed to coach any new guys past such dangerous concerns.
“Does it really matter if we see—?” Truman began, and Hadley cut in quickly.
“We’re not the only ones watching, kid.”
“Got to keep the customer satisfied,” Sitterson added, glancing over his shoulder at the soldier. “You understand what’s at stake here?”
“Sorry,” Truman said, nodding.
Sitterson turned back to his screen, considered asking for some coffee, but decided that—
•••
—Her lust was all-consuming, her breath fast, and she yearned for him, lifting her butt to allow him to pull off her jeans. He bent forward and ran his tongue up her right leg, her thigh, passing her panties and gripping the elasticated waist instead. He pulled it up and growled, letting it snap back across her stomach, and Jules laughed.
Then the growl faded away as he dipped his face down between her thighs, and Jules’s head fell back as she felt the first touch of his tongue.
•••
“Oh,” Truman said, but Sitterson ignored him. That was another thing with these newbies—the first few times were porn.
He pretends he knows what’s at stake
, he thought.
But the sight of a hot chick getting eaten out drives all that from his mind
.
Sitterson adjusted a dial, tapped some buttons on his computer, checked some readouts. All seemed good.
“Oh!” Truman said again.
Hadley upped the volume on the speakers, Control was filled with groaning, and Sitterson grinned. Bastard was just winding the kid up. And... well, Hadley got a lot out of this, too. Sitterson guessed all the married guys did, because it was allowable. It was part of the job.
For just a moment he imagined Lin lying there on the moss with his face pressed between...
But that was too much of a distraction, at least for now.
“Looking good,” he said, checking more readouts. He glanced up at the screen again, humming softly.
“Looking good.”
•••
Jules sat up and pushed Curt aside, sitting astride him and undoing the final couple of buttons on her shirt. She teased... touching her stomach... fingers stroking the edges of the fabric while Curt panted beneath her. And then she pulled at both edges and let it drop from her shoulders, quickly slipping down her strapless bra
and exposing what she knew were just about the best breasts in the Northern hemisphere.
And Curt was a guy. Though he’d seen them a thousand times before, he still caught his breath and looked up at her in silent, worshipful wonder.
“You look so—”
•••
“—good,” Hadley said. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” Sitterson said, “great tits.” But it was the voice of a man admiring a particular work of art. The girl leaned forward, the guy wrapped his arms around her.
“Score,” Hadley muttered.
“Eat that, Stockholm,” Sitterson said.
Beside him, Hadley sighed. Sitterson checked more dials and readouts, then he glanced to the left where he’d seen movement on one of the other monitors. Hadley had seen it as well.
“Oh,” Truman said again. “She’s...wow.”
Any moment now
, Sitterson thought. And just for a moment he looked away from the screens, allowing himself a moment to close his eyes and compose himself, readying himself for what was to come. He almost told Truman to do the same.
But like he’d had to do, the kid would need to learn the hard way.
•••
Curt rolled her over and slid his hand into her panties, his fingers expert at touching her where and how she most desired. She groaned out load and looked up at the tree canopy, her left hand freeing him from his jeans as he worked at her, her right hand splaying out on the ground and clasping a handful of the scented, warm moss.
I wonder where the stars have gone?
she wondered.
Something slammed into her hand and she could no longer move it. It felt warm, then suddenly cold again.
Curt’s fingers were inside her, but she no longer felt them. She grew cold again. The ground pricked against her bare skin.
And then the pain bit in and she screamed, looking at her hand and seeing the thick rusty blade that had passed through her palm and pinned her to the ground.
“Curt!” she screamed, bucking him off, because nothing else she saw around her made any sense. “
Curt
/”
SIX
F
or the first few seconds Curt could not move, or speak, nor could he feel his heart beating. Like him, it was frozen in shock.
When it did kick back in he almost collapsed from the impact, coughing as it pummeled his ribs, trying to rise from his knees, and painfully aware that the love of his life was about to die in front of him.
They were being attacked, but not by people. These things might once have been people but now they were...
Dead
, Curt thought.
They must be, because they’ve got things crawling out of their mouths and holes in their skin, their faces, their heads, and
—
And Jules was screaming for him again, almost naked and sitting up, trying to pull away from where a skinny, small boy had impaled her against the ground with a
fucking knife
! The boy—
—
Zombie!
Curt thought,
That’s all they can be, what they must be
—
—wore old-fashioned clothing, had long hair caked in mud, and when he glanced back at Curt his eyes were milky white and terrifying.
He held Jules’s wrist and tugged his rusty blade from her hand, eliciting a scream that chilled Curt to the core.
Behind her, a lumbering, fat woman reached around and pressed the rusted teeth of a saw against her throat.
Staring at his lover’s terrified, screaming face Curt could not avoid seeing what happened just behind her, as the zombie woman’s stomach seemed to flap open and spill three burning coals from a cauterized interior. They tumbled onto Jules’s head and fell down her back, and the pleasant country air was suddenly alive with the stench of burning hair and scorched skin and flesh.
The woman pressed herself against the back of Jules’s head and pulled the saw across her neck. The teeth snagged on skin and parted it with a terrible ripping sound, like wet cotton being torn.
And Curt shoved aside his shock and leapt forward.
He dove past Jules and knocked the zombie woman aside, seeing as he did so that there was a huge third shape lumbering toward them from the shadows.
“
Fuck away from her!”
he screamed. The mother-zombie fell aside, saw
twanging/
at the air. Jules’s scream had died out and she was leaning forward, but as he turned to help her the kid-zombie’s arm swung and the knife’s rusted blade buried itself in Curt’s arm.
He roared in fury, shock keeping the pain at bay for the precious few seconds it took him to try and pull
it out. He couldn’t, so he grabbed the kid-zombie’s arm instead and tugged hard. The thing came close, no expression at all on its face—and that was the worst thing right then, worse than the shock and Jules’s crying and the idea
What the fuck is going on here
?— the complete lack of expression on the faces.
No signs of life,
Curt thought, and he grimaced as he punched the kid-zombie in the face with his left hand.
He felt the nose give way and parts of it crumbled off. It didn’t seem to faze the kid-zombie at all, but it did shove him back so that he let go of the blade.
Curt stepped in front of Jules and tugged the blade free of his arm, screaming as he did so, bending to see how bad the damage was, mind working at twice its normal speed as he tried to figure out just what the fuck he was going to do next.
Carry her no can’t carry her too slow fight them all maybe but that punch didn’t
—
He heard a chain rattle, looked up, and saw that big-zombie had arrived. He was maybe six and a half feet tall, almost that around, and unlike the others he did exhibit some basic human emotion.
He grinned.
Something dropped from his hand and hit the ground at his feet, connected to his hand by the chain Curt had heard rattling. It was heavy, and metallic, and though the trees filtered the moonlight Curt could still see the ugly teeth of an old-fashioned bear trap, broken, just one jaw left. As he wondered what had happened to the other jaw, big-zombie swung the makeshift mace and chain with terrifying speed.
Curt fell forward and tried to protect Jules, but the heavy metal whacked the side of his head. He fell, grunting, seeing the shadow of the weapon pass by above him as it ricocheted from his skull.
Flat side not teeth side
, he thought with vague relief, trying to rise to protect himself from another blow. But dizziness hit him and he stumbled, blinking blood from his eye and mumbling, “Ju... Jules...”
“Curt!” she shouted, and her throat sounded raw.
In front of him, Curt saw Jules trying to stand, reaching for him with one hand while the other clasped the bloodied mess of her throat. Her nudity made her pathetic now, and their loving seemed a million years away as he watched the bear trap swing around again and bury its teeth in her back.
She screamed and arched forward, reaching back to try and pry the thing loose, blood spewing from her ripped throat and down across her chest and stomach. And when she fell forward Curt thought it was because she was trying to walk toward him, but her legs would not obey
He shook his head and cleared his vision, dashing forward to grasp her hand but only just missing as big-zombie started to haul her backward.
Her fingers dug into the earth and rucked up furrows of rotting leaves and damp soil.
Curt lunged forward again... and then felt the cool sharpness around his throat. He snapped his head back from the blade, connecting with something dry and soft that crunched as it broke, and then the blade was
pulled tight against his throat, something hard pressed against his back, and he was pivoted from his feet. He struggled and thrashed, thinking of Jules’s gashed neck and trying to protect his own, but there was nothing he could do.
Not even scream.
He could only watch as big-zombie stomped on Jules’s back and pried the bear trap from her flesh, blood gouting into the night air. She was pleading and whimpering now, bubbles forming at her throat as she did so, and as the kid-zombie grabbed her hair and pulled back her head, she was looking directly into Curt’s eyes.
It’s holding me so I can see this, and then it’ll kill me.
Mother-zombie held the broken saw blade against Jules’s throat again, and Curt thought,
This is when it ends, the joke, the trick, some freakish new TV show maybe, and the guys will come out from the cabin laughing at how easily we were taken in by a bunch of fucking zombies coming out of the woods and
—
Mother-zombie began sawing at Jules’s throat. She struggled, her eyes rolling back and mouth working but saying nothing, but she was held fast. The saw hacked through skin and flesh, and Curt heard the flow of blood as her carotid artery was severed. Then he heard the first hard scrape of rusted metal teeth against bone.
“Oh God,” Curt whimpered, unable to close his eyes however much he tried, “oh God, oh God, oh—”
•••
“—God,” Truman said, “oh God, shit, shit, shit...”
The sounds coming through the speaker were turned up, because it had to be that way. Wet, tearing sounds. The bubbly hiss of the girl’s last breath. The saw tearing into bone, catching, jarring.
From Hadley and Sitterson, only the uncomfortable shuffling of men who had seen this before, but who could never quite get used to it. Sitterson was looking down at his hands, which were hovering above the keyboard in case any last-second tweaks needed performing, though he knew from all he had seen and heard that all was going well.
The girl had stopped making those noises because her throat and windpipe had been cut through, and now came only the terrible scraping sound.
“This we offer in humility and fear,” Sitterson intoned, “for the blessed peace of your eternal slumber. As it ever was.”
“As it ever was,” Hadley echoed softly.
Sitterson pulled at the thin leather thong around his neck, lifting the pendant from beneath his shirt. It was made from white gold, cast into the shape of a five-pointed symbol. Not a pentagram, but something more arcane, something older. He glanced at it briefly, concentrating on one small arm of the deformed star, and then kissed it before dropping it against his chest once more.
From the corner of his eye he could see Truman
watching, but he did not turn to face the young man. Why should he? There was nothing on offer there.
Behind him, Hadley had crossed to the mahogany panels at the far end of the room, built into the plain concrete wall and the ancient rock of the ground behind them. Sitterson turned slightly and watched his friend open the first panel, sliding it back on smooth runners, to expose the ornate brass apparatus. Without hesitation Hadley grasped the lever and eased it downward, pushing against pressure, and kept his hand on it until it clicked into place against the lower pin.
And deeper down in a place that could never be seen Sitterson knew what was happening: in the mechanism older than Man, a small metal hammer struck a glass vial, cracking it from top to bottom and releasing the blood retained inside. The blood ran into a brass funnel that extended into a long, long pipe, running even deeper through rock and dark spaces, emerging eventually into a place deeper still.
Here, the blood poured onto a slab of marble leaning against the wall, and in the total blackness it began to fill the intricate image carved onto the marble slab’s surface.
Sitterson opened his eyes, not aware that he’d been daydreaming. His heart was thumping.
I mustn’t go down there,
he thought,
not even in my dreams!
“The boy,” Hadley said, and Sitterson nodded, sniffed, wiped his hands across his face. He had to get himself together.
This had only just begun.