Free Resurrection by Tim Curran

brim of his hat. He looked senseless and numb like he’d just been shot up with Seconal. “Whahuh?” he said.
    Mitch stepped in-between Tommy and Hot Tamale. “Okay, lady, tell us why we shouldn’t go out there.”
    “Cops’ll be coming,” Hubb said. “That hippie with the ponytail went to get ‘em.”
    Hot Tamale laughed, but it was a low, evil sort of laugh. “Oh really? Well, wake up and smell the coffee, people, because he didn’t make it very far. I just saw him. He’s laying out there next to his truck and something chewed half his face off.”
    That landed and hit hard. Everyone seemed to suddenly be moving a little closer together like kids around a campfire that have just been told an especially unpleasant horror story. There was an almost communal dread slinking through them as it occurred to each and every one that maybe the cavalry wasn’t coming after all. That Hot Tamale had been right in the first place and they were on their own.
    Even Tommy kept his mouth shut.
    “You don’t believe me?” she said, vindicated now. “Then step out there and have a look. While you idiots were chatting it up in here, that guy was dying out there. Something got at him and I’m willing to bet that something had teeth.”
    Yellow Hat had pulled in closer to her now. He was her kind of people and he went to her like a metal filing to a magnet, falling right into her orbit. Chances were, he would never break the gravitational pull of her big ass and bigger mouth. And probably didn’t want to. But that was fine, that was to be expected, Mitch figured. Yellow Hat was one of these guys who do not look for the silver lining behind clouds, they looked and expected to find misery and often did. And with that in mind, his despairing little brain was easily assimilated by that of Hot Tamale. They went together like dirty bellybuttons and lint.
    “You’re talking bullshit,” Mitch said, knowing nobody else was going to.
    Way he was thinking, maybe she was right about a few things, but she’d have to prove it. She wanted to sling the shit? Okay, fine and dandy, but Mitch wanted to see what color it was and how bad it stank.
    “Oh, am I? Why do you think we ran back in here, bright boy? You think we missed you and your brilliant conversation? We came back because we had to come back! Our car wouldn’t start two streets over and when that rain started hammering down, when it started to fall those things started coming out like goddamned earthworms. I saw ‘em. Herb saw ‘em. And they weren’t people. You hear what I’m saying to you? They weren’t people!” She was breathing real hard now and nobody dared interrupt and she liked that just fine. “You tell ‘em, Herb. You tell ‘em what we saw.”
    Herb swallowed something. Maybe a wad of gum the way his throat bobbed. When he started to talk, he spoke in a very calm and controlled matter like he was just reading from a cue card. “The rain started coming down real hard. We got to our car and it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t turn over. And I was thinking, boy, now we’re never gonna get over to the Wal-Mart. And I wanted to go to the Wal-Mart because they had the Moundses bars on sale. You buy one pack of Moundses bars and you get the second pack free. But the car, she wouldn’t start and then I see the lady. The lady was standing right next to the car in the rain, just looking in the window at me. She was dripping wet, the water running off her. Her face was white like a clown and there were holes in it. She was smiling, too, and she had black teeth like them wax Halloween witch teeth. She was…she was real scary-looking, you know?”
    Despite the droning narrative, Mitch was picturing it all and it made his flesh crawl. First the kid and his faceless people and now this. Now this. What the hell did it mean?
    The rain is falling and the dead are rising.
    That passed through his mind at almost hyper-light speed and he let it go, would not take hold of it and