The dead don't run. They hobble. They limp. Some of them crawl. The faster ones trample those with fractured or missing legs. The stronger amongst them push the weaker to the side.
They make no noise when they walk, no noise at all.
They came at us like a wave, a wave of limbs and contorted faces, eyes wide, clouded and vacant, hands, fingers coming at us like the foam on the top of a breaker, fingers, claws, nails. Visually they were hard to look at, their details hard to discern, one dead thing difficult to tell from another. Their mouths were open, every one of them. They were too human and dispassionate to see as a herd of panicked animals, too animalistic and insatiable to think of as a crowd of people. They all wanted one thing, which was us.
When a mob is coming for you there is no emotion except fear.
There was one of them - a woman in a dress that had been soiled and stained with blood and even burned, it looked like - a woman who was faster than the others. She strode boldly ahead of them and as she got close we saw there was no skin on her face or neck, just the twanging elastic bands of her facial muscles that snagged on her vicious-looking exposed teeth. Her eyes were dark pits under a thick gel of clotted blood like cold spaghetti sauce. Her hands reached for us, the fingers clenching again and again, her hair flowed out behind her in great tangled ropes.
Marisol picked up a broken piece of brick. She squeezed it in her hand a couple of times and then with a little yell, "Hyah!" she flung it as hard as she could at the dead woman's face. It struck her square in the forehead, in the exposed skull. The dead woman collapsed into a heap, her head like broken pottery.
It broke the fear, a little. Enough.
Marisol and I began to grab bricks and shove them down in the dirt, trying to close the hole in the few minutes we had before the dead arrived. It was pointless busywork, of course, but it was better than panicking. "Marisol - go get - the rest - to help," I gasped, between bricks. She nodded at me and turned around to head to the houses behind us. She didn't get any further than a step or two, though. When I saw why I dropped the brick I was holding.
The mummy was there - the one who lead me out of the fortress. She held the dead man with no nose on her lap like a mother tending a sick child.
"What do you want?" I demanded. "What are you?"
The voice that spoke to me gurgled out of the dead man's throat, an affectless growl that belonged to neither him nor the mummy who clutched him. It belonged to Mael, of course, Gary's teacher, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. He hardly bothered to introduce himself. What am I? Just bits and pieces, is all, odds and orts and not enough of them to add up. I'm no harm to you. Quite powerless on my own. Then again, I might be a help.
I stared into the dead man's eyes. "Listen, I don't have time for this." I gestured for Marisol to get the others, to keep filling in the hole. She ignored my waving hand and stared at the mummy.
I do. I've all the time in the world, lad. More time than I want, to be frank. I have a certain accommodation with the fine lady of Egypt you see here. Her and her mates. Now I can't lift a finger to aid you, seeing as I haven't any. I'm fully bodiless right now, to the extent I had to borrow this poor bloke's mouth. She has a real talent for knocking heads, though. Are you interested in hearing more, lad, or should I piss off and leave you to your bricklaying?
I had seen how strong the mummies were. How many of them could there be, though? Hardly enough to take on the crowd of dead people outside the wall. They might slow the walking corpses down. It might be enough.
Still. I'd come this far by knowing not to trust the dead. "You obviously want something in return. Help us and we'll talk about it."
Marisol kicked me in the shin. "He means he'll do whatever you ask." She stared at me and mouthed the words "hey, asshole". Then she jerked her head in the direction of the dead mob, maybe five minutes away from us at their current speed.
I guess she had a point.
The dead man smiled. It's nothing you'll mind doing. It's just finishing what you started. I'm a two time loser, friend. I sacrificed myself to save the world and I failed at dying. I tried to oversee the end of the world but I was no good at being dead. What comes after that? What's more important than the end of the world, I'd like to know. There's got to be something for me still, because I'm not allowed to just die. Do you ken it now? I've been shivered down to fragments of what I was. I can't rest until they're reunited. And I think you know who's holding the best of me.
"No - I have no idea what you're talking about," I confessed.
The dead man's eyes rolled in their sockets. One of them got stuck showing only white. Gary, you oaf! Finish him off! Until he's well and truly dead I'll never sleep easy! He ate me - bit into my head like a melon, and now he's got half my soul in his belly. Free me and I'll save all your friends.
"Gary's still alive?" I asked.
"You said he was dead," Marisol insisted. Well, I had said that. I'd believed it, too. I shrugged.
I'd set him on fire. Burned him alive, or undead, or whatever. Then again I'd also seen him take a bullet in the head and he'd come back from that.
I glanced over at Gary's fortress. It was still smoking, though I couldn't see any more sparks shooting out of its top. I was unarmed and already exhausted. If I didn't do this, though, he would just come back. Over and over again, forever, until everyone I knew and loved and cared about was dead. Including myself.
"Don't wait for me if I don't come back out in time," I told Marisol.
"Okay," she replied.
Just as I began to move the mummy punched the dead man so hard in the face that his head collapsed. I might have shrieked a little to see that. The mummy ignored me. I guess my conversation with the ghost was over. She climbed over our pathetic attempts to fill the hole in the wall to stand outside, her arms crossed, waiting for the dead to come. From inside the fortress other mummies emerged - maybe a dozen of them in total. They moved far more quickly than the dead ought to. I gave them a wide berth on my way back inside.
Once inside the fortress it wasn't hard to find Gary's tub room. I just followed the smell of overdone bacon. Smoke filled the open space at the center of the tower, an oily, nasty fuming smoke that smudged my clothes where it touched me. Everything in the big room was covered in a thin film of fatty soot. Human beings didn't belong in a place like that but I did, I had to be there. I stepped closer and peered into the gloom of the empty bathtub. The bricks were spalled by the intense heat of the fire, some of them pulverized by the blast. A pool of molten fat in the center of the tub still bubbled and flickered with tiny flames.
What was left of Gary leaned up against the rim, one sagging shoulder pressed hard against the bricks. Gary's legs were nothing but scorched sticks of bone that stuck out from the charred mass of his abdomen. They looked like the legs of a stork, perhaps. Something of his torso remained and his arms, club-like appendages that were curled across his chest. His head was still smoldering. It had sustained less damage than the rest of him - the one part of his body that hadn't been made mostly of combustible fat. His eyes were gone, as well as his ears and nose, but I could sense somehow he was still in there.
"Dekalb," he coughed. "Come to gloat?" His voice was nothing but a dry rasp.
"Not exactly."
"Come closer. I'm glad for the company in my last couple of minutes, I guess. Come on. I don't bite. Not anymore."
I figured I could handle him now by myself. The voice - the ghost, or whatever it had been - had told me Gary could no longer control the undead. It would just be the two of us. At least, that's what I was thinking when I stepped closer to the tub. Then I heard a rattling noise like a length of chain being dropped from a height. Exactly like that, in fact. Jack must have climbed up his own chain - then laid in wait, in ambush, for somebody, anybody, to walk directly underneath him.
He was on my back, his legs wrapped around my waist, his teeth in my neck. His fingers grabbed at my face, one of them sinking into my left nostril and tearing, ripping at the flesh there. I shook back and forth, desperately trying to dislodge him as warm blood ran down my already-stained shirt. I heaved backward, unable to catch my breath, my body still stunned by the force of impact. No, I thought. No. I'd come so far, so far without getting badly injured, without being killed -
"Sucker," Gary chortled, without lifting his head.