Free Zombie Pulp by Tim Curran

and wonder. He could not move, could not breathe. The drawers—many of them now—thumping and banging and rattling in their housings. Their metal faces were bulging, dented out from the inside.
    Then all around him, as if stirred by some secret malefic wind, sheets began to tremble and rustle and shift with motion beneath them. Arms slid out, fingers clutching madly in the air like snakes.
    Johnny heard a voice whisper, another grunt, another make something like a dry barking sound. He sat there, suppressing a demented desire to start giggling. The bodies were sitting up now, sheets sliding from gray, bloodless faces and bodies like sloughed skins. Shadows crawled up from the corners, twisted like thick serpents, hissing and slithering.
    A voice as brittle as crunching straw said: “Watch out, George…that sumbitch got a big knife he…”
    But the others were talking now, too, speaking in those dry voices that were merely snarling, guttural noises that made Johnny want to scream. They were like cold steel at his spine, the flats of knife blades dragged along his belly and groin. Echoes. Just echoes. That’s what they were. The worn spools of those decayed brains repeating and repeating their final living thoughts until the room was alive with a ghastly murmuring.
    They had risen up all around him now.
    Grinning, frowning, smirking. Those faces were hideous moons with ragged, black impact craters for eyes. A dozen morgue drawers burst open, slid out on squeaking casters, sheeted forms rising, fingers twisting and tearing at their shrouds. Oh and dear God, those eyes—blanched and discolored, staring and hollow and so utterly empty.
    The dead were on their feet now, stumbling and staggering and shambling. Some were naked, others clothed in bloody prison issue or filthy hospital gowns.
    Johnny crawled on hands and knees out the doorway and they followed, a ragged, grisly throng of chattering teeth and wiggling fingers and whispering voices. Ligaments popped like rusty hinges. Muscles snapped and bones splintered. They stank of tombs and drainage ditches and body pits. One of them looked at Johnny, tried to speak, but a flood of black bile oozed from his lips, hung from his jawline like ribbons of mucus. His voice became a bubbling, gargling sound.
    Screaming, Johnny found his feet, scrambling madly not towards the office, but to the garage and the outside door. His fingers had gone stupid and numb and rubbery and he could barely work the lock, barely throw himself into the black wet night before they were on him. Shouting and hollering, he fell out into the rain, coming to rest in a muddy pool. Thunder rumbled in the sky and lightening flashed, painting the landscape in lunar brilliance.
    They had not followed him.
    Johnny sat there in the muck, rain pounding down on him. The air was cold, but the mud around him was warm and sluicing like blood. He looked frantically off towards the prison itself, could see the high towers, the buildings, the wall…but not much else.
    The whispering throng was coming out now.
    They paid no attention to Johnny.
    Balanced atop their shoulders, they carried caskets. Single file, they pushed through the muck and rain with their coffins, a funereal parade of contusions and slit throats, stab wounds and shattered skulls. A collection of stiffly animate rag dolls trailing stuffing from snipped stitches, bearing torn limbs and dangling shoebutton eyes. And making, yes, making for potter’s field. At least thirty of them, keeping an almost military cadence.
    Johnny sat there for awhile, drenched and dirty and shaking.
    The rain fell and the susurration of the ghouls faded into the distance and although Johnny wanted to run and run, he could not. He got to his feet, brushing mud from his arms. Then he followed them, knowing deep down he had to see this.
    Through the swampy, sunken landscape he went until he caught sight of them gathered at the far side of the cemetery. In the flashing lightening,