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Burl.
“Move, goddamn it. Move, move, move, move.”
His right arm came up slowly, rising to the surface, then above it, and finally out toward the mud beyond the ditch. The rain immediately washed the mud from his hand, and when the next lightning flashed he was horrified to see how pale he was. Blue-white. Corpselike.
Like one of them.
“It’s the cold, asshole,” he told himself. “It’s just the cold.”
He reached for higher ground at the edge of the pit, but his fingers sank into the mud and found nothing to hold. He tried again and did nothing more than splash and stir the water in which he lay.
“No,” he said, and that note of panic was back in his voice, stronger and sharper than before. Jake tried it with both hands. Nothing. He tried to kick against the near edge of the ditch, but his feet sank to the ankles. It took real effort to pull his feet out again. The right one came first, plopping free of the mud, but as he pulled the left one out he felt his shoe slide over the bulb of his heel.
Then he heard the sound.
Off to his right, on the other side of Big Bird, his yellow front-end loader.
It was a splash, but it was too heavy to be rainwater.
He froze and listened.
Another splash.
And another.
Each one just a little louder and more distinct than the last. Coming closer to where he wallowed in the mud.
“Oh, Jesus…”
At the sound of his voice the sounds of splashing paused for one moment and then began again. Not faster, but faster. Coming around the end of Big Bird. Coming in his direction.
He heard the other sound then.
The moan.
Jake almost screamed, knowing it for what it was.
One of them.
Stay or go, stay or go? He was trapped inside a bubble of indecision for a terrible long moment. Then the splashes got even louder, and suddenly Jake was moving. His whole body thrashed and twisted like a beached dolphin. He pawed at the mud and kicked and wormed his way up the edge of the pit.
Closer and closer. The moan louder. A single voice raised in a plaintive cry.
Jake was halfway out of the pit when he saw it.
It was a man. A stranger. Dressed in a business suit, jacket torn, tie askew to expose a ravaged throat.
For an awful moment their eyes met. The man in the mud and the thing in the rain. Then with a cry like a wild animal, the creature rushed at him, hands outstretched. Jake screamed and tried to scramble away, got halfway to his feet, and then it was on him, slamming into him, knocking them both down so they slid back into the muddy pit under the front-end loader. It clawed at Jake, trying to grab him, trying to pull him toward teeth that snapped and clacked.
Jake punched it, hitting the infected man in the face, in the throat, in the chest, but it was hard to find the balance and resistance to throw a solid punch. Jake was six-eight and more than three hundred pounds and this man couldn’t have been more than two hundred, but in the mud and water they were evenly matched.
Except that the thing did not react to any of Jake’s punches. Jake felt cartilage collapse beneath his knuckles as he hammered at its nose and throat. He felt bones crack in the face and temple and ribs. And he felt pain explode in his fingers and knuckles and wrists as the impacts took their toll while the struggle reawakened shocked nerve endings.
But the thing kept fighting as if pain was not even connected to its existence.
And maybe it wasn’t.
This thing was like Burl and those girls. It couldn’t have been alive. Not with the injuries it had. And yet it was fighting. It was a monster.
