The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  Once before, just out of college, when she hadn’t yet been used to the attention her new look earned, Kelsey had gone to a party with a couple other girls from work. She’d gone upstairs with a guy who seemed nice enough. His name was Richard and he wore glasses, and what on earth did she have to fear from a guy who wore a sweater vest? He’d pushed her down on the bed and tore her dress.

  Richard had said the same thing to her. “Don’t act like you don’t want it.”

  And that had been his mistake, because Kelsey not only didn’t want it, she wasn’t about to let someone give it to her anyway. Never again.

  She’d kneed him in the nuts hard enough to send him weeping and gagging to the floor. She’d paused to send another kick or two to that tender region before she left the room. Nobody seemed to notice she’d left the party with him, and while word had it that he’d needed surgery to repair the damage to his balls, she’d never been linked to the incident.

  She hadn’t let it happen to her then, and she surely wasn’t going to let it happen to her now. If only she wasn’t so tired, so sore, so thirsty, she’d have pushed him off her already, but now the effort was making the world sort of swirly and making her stomach sick. She pushed at his chest, but he bent over her and forced his mouth down on hers, and it was all she could do not to bite him.

  No. Fuck that. She did bite him, catching his lip. Blood spattered onto her face, and Jeremy jerked back from her with an agonized shout.

  “Bitch getcha? She gotcha, didn’t she?” Ty crowed. “Backstabbing cunt!”

  Kelsey got unsteadily to her feet. She grabbed the cabin wall for balance and backed up a step, toward the front of the boat. Jeremy made no move to come after her, just sat with his hand clapped over his mouth and watched the blood drip through his fingers onto his still-distended crotch.

  At the front of the boat, Duane sat, still holding Sheila. Kelsey didn’t want to look at her. At least all the way out here there weren’t any flies, she thought randomly as dizziness pushed her to stumble onto one of the benches. The body might’ve bloated and started to turn black, but at least there weren’t any maggots.

  “Sheila, baby, wake up.” Duane had said this perhaps two hundred times in various degrees of earnest desperation, but now he sounded resigned and unconvinced his plea would ever be answered. “C’mon, honey. Wake up.”

  And then…Sheila did.

  With a gurgling rattle from deep in her chest, she flailed. Her feet kicked. Duane screamed hoarsely, his own arms flying apart as he tried and failed to scramble backwards.

  Sheila heaved herself to a sitting position. Her mouth hung open, still making that sound, that grinding, ratcheting, terrible noise. Her milky eyes rolled.

  Kelsey couldn’t move. She’d gotten used to the rolling side-to-side motion of the boat that had threatened her with seasickness at first, but now the deck felt like it was going to tip out from underneath her. She reached for something to hold onto and found the railing, but her fingertips slipped and she banged her arm.

  The pain slapped away the dizziness, and that was good, but when she saw Sheila was indeed still a corpse and still getting to her feet, that as not good at all. For half a minute, Kelsey’d been able to convince herself that maybe she was dreaming, but not any longer.

  Sheila gave a guttural grunt. Behind her, Duane had folded himself into a gibbering ball. Sheila’s dead gaze swiveled toward him, then toward Kelsey and finally past her toward Jeremy who muttered a curse of surprise. Kelsey didn’t move.

  “What is this shit?” Jeremy said.

  Sheila’s jaw worked. Her body shuddered. She took a lurching step forward, a horror movie made real. Her feet slipped on the deck. She went down onto her face with a full, bone-crunching thud. Something wet spattered against Kelsey’s calf, and she bit back a cry of disgust.

  “Sheila? Honey?”

  Duane bent over her, a hand on her shoulder. His fingers sank into the purpled flesh and may or may not have made a squelching sound. Kelsey clapped her hands over her ears a moment too late not to hear it. Duane pulled on Sheila’s shoulder, and her entire arm separated with a low purring sound.

  It wasn’t enough. There was more. Too much more. Sheila rolled onto her back, mouth open, tongue lolling, her remaining arm slamming like a club into the side of Duane’s head hard enough to knock him down. She was on him in the next moment, straddling him, her teeth sunk deep into his throat. She tore it free like a dog thrown a hunk of meat, snapping and slobbering and gobbling.

  Was she…eating him? The bites of flesh went in and came back out, so Kelsey couldn’t be sure if Sheila was indeed trying to consume her boyfriend or just using her teeth as a weapon. And really, did it freaking matter? Kelsey pushed against the bench with her bad foot, ignoring the pain, and crawled as fast and as far as she could around the front of the boat while Duane’s screams edged off into gasping sobs and then…nothing.

  There was no place to go except around, and this took her to within an arm’s length of Ty. If she hadn’t strapped his hands together behind him with duct tape, he’d have grabbed her, she saw that in his eyes, but Kelsey was beyond caring about his stupid jealousy or how much he hated her.

  “The fuck’s going on?”

  “Sheila,” she managed to say, and that was all before Jeremy’s voice rose in a scream that went higher and higher until it became ear-piercing and broke off abruptly.

  The sounds of a struggle prompted Kelsey to creep past Ty, who snapped his teeth at her like a dog on a chain trying to threaten the postman. She peered around the edge of the cabin, but couldn’t get a good look at the front of the boat. She heard the wet slap of flesh, the crack of bone. The boat rocked. Something splashed into the water, and in the next moment she saw it was Sheila, floundering. She went under the water, came up, went under again. She didn’t break the surface that time.

  Grunting. The squeak of something on the deck, more slapping, more breaking. Kelsey took a chance and inched forward to see around the edge of the cabin. Jeremy and Duane were locked together like sumo wrestlers, pushing and shoving. As she watched, Jeremy shoved Duane hard enough to knock him backwards. Duane hit his head on the bench and went still.

  Jeremy turned.

  “Kelsey.” It didn’t sound like him. His voice had gone thick and raw, like he had a throat full of blood or snot, like he spoke through a mouth full of meat. He took a step toward her, one hand reaching out. His mouth yawned wide.

  Something jittered inside, behind his teeth and tongue, toward the back. Something black and writhing, also glimpsed in the caverns of his nostrils, and Kelsey had time to think that maybe she was wrong, maybe there were flies this far out, before Jeremy’s head erupted in a black cloud. He coughed and bent at the waist, his hands on his knees. Black goo shot out of him in thick ropy spurts. He spasmed, going upright and then further, bowing back so he faced the sky. A plume of something like…dandelion seeds, that’s all she could think of, spewed from his mouth and nose. They weren’t attached to fluffy white puffs and they didn’t float on the air. More like they hurtled, like minuscule bullets. Most hit the deck or went over the side into the water. A few hit her arm where they clung like hot tar, burning.

  Revolted, Kelsey scraped at them with her fingernails. On the deck behind Jeremy, Duane stirred. He didn’t get to his feet, but his body convulsed furiously. His heels drummed the deck, and he let out a guttering, wretched cry.

  Black spores jetted from him too, obscuring his face as he clawed at it. Jeremy had stopped spewing them but had fallen forward onto his hands and knees. Blood and goo dripped from him, she couldn’t see exactly from where, onto the deck. He smeared it with his fingers. He looked up at her, his teeth lined black, mouth painted red. His eyes were a bleeding horror, his nose torn and flapping from the force of whatever had ripped its way out of him. He grinned.

  He got to his feet.

  There was no place for her to go but back, around the cabin, toward Ty. She’d loved him once, a