She tapped the phone’s screen, smearing dust over the glass as she pulled up her e-mail. The battery was at 68 percent. Plenty of power to write her goodbyes. If she was ever found, and if the phone was plugged back in, it should automatically send her messages.
Her hands shook, and she closed the app with a violent swipe of her finger. They would find her. She just had to wait. Had to stay sane long enough for them to dig her out.
If they could even reach her.
If they were willing to risk another team for the sake of one surveyor.
The fear grew stronger with every breath of stale air. Her throat tightened. She would have wept, but her body was too dehydrated for tears.
She opened up the e-book app on her phone. When she was a child, when she had bad dreams, her father would come into her room and tell her stories until she calmed enough to sleep.
She scrolled to a collection of short fiction by H. C. Howell. Her throat tightened at the dedication: For Claire.
For years, she had told herself she’d get around to reading her father ’s work, but life always got in the way. She choked on a laugh. That wouldn’t be a problem much longer, would it?
Pushing back the fear, she switched off her helmet lamp and scrolled to the first story.
“The one good thing about the zombie apocalypse is that it’s a short-lived apocalypse.”
Clara Hamilton took the non-sequitur in stride. She didn’t recognize the British man with the cane, but it wouldn’t be the first time a student hadn’t bothered to show up until midway through the semester. “Thank you, but we were discussing the respiratory system.”
“Oh yes, they’ve got lungs.” The man leaned back in the molded plastic chair, crossing his feet beneath the desk. He ignored the muffled laughter of the other students. His voice was light, but his eyes burned. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to groan. But think about it. The flies and maggots would devour them. Have you ever seen zombies picking the bugs off of one another like chimps? And they can’t heal, so any injury will go gangrenous just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “The trouble is, while they’ll die off within weeks or even days, that doesn’t help you tonight.”
Glass shattered somewhere in the building, making Clara and several of her students jump.
“We don’t have much time, darling.” The man jumped to his feet, graceful and fluid as a dancer. “Henry Cornwell the Third, at your service.”
Clara set her notes onto the desk and moved to open the doorway. She saw students and one teacher hurrying through the hall, but nothing to indicate mass panic or—she flushed to think she had even considered it—zombies.
And then she saw the blood. One of the students clutched his arm to his side. Blood dripped through his fingers, leaving a speckled trail on the tile floor.
Another window broke, this one closer. Screams reverberated through the hallway.
Clara spun back to her class. “Nobody panic.” Ten years of teaching everything from elementary school through community college had honed her voice, allowing her to slice through the fear and confusion.
A sharp popping sound came from the east wing of the building. A gunshot? Protocol for a school shooting was to go into lockdown and wait for the police, but that was the first shot she had heard, and wouldn’t explain the wounded student in the hall. She turned to the stranger. “Not that I believe you, but how many zombies are we talking about?”
Henry pursed his lips. “Pretty much the entire research department from the lower level. Some will make their way up the stairs while others circle around outside and smash their way in through the windows. Your best hope is to make for the roof.”
Clara didn’t move. “Who are you?” She was positive she had never seen the man on campus, and she knew she would have remembered that accent.
“A friend.”
A time traveler. Claire remembered her father talking about this story now. One man, sent from the future to save his great-grandmother’s life and prevent the zombie plague.
“Everyone to the stairs,” Clara shouted, waving her students down the hall. The fire alarm began to ring. Raising her voice, she asked, “How did it happen?”
“There was an accident. Do the details really matter?”
“I want to know.”
“Experimental treatment for end-stage medullablas-toma.”
Clara stared blankly.
“Brain cancer. It usually hits children.” He gave Clara a gentle push into the hall. “On the bright side, it does cure cancer. Or at least renders it moot . . .”
“Oh, God.” Clara slowed, staring at the woman staggering down the hall behind them. Professor Cas-sidy’s suit jacket was dark with blood. Her face was torn, and she held her right arm at a strange angle.
“She’s gone,” said Henry, pulling Clara away. “You can’t help her.”
Another zombie was smashing through the doors near the stairwell. The students screamed, pushing and trampling one another in their rush to escape this new threat. Clara grabbed a metal trash can, the only thing she could find to use as a weapon, but Henry was faster. His cane whooshed through the air like a sword.
The first blow dislocated the zombie’s wrist. The second smashed the elbow of the opposite hand.
“A time traveling ninja?” Mom had shaken her head as she looked up from the manuscript. “Really?”
Dad laughed. “A little over the top?”
“Just a little.”
“Oh, come on. Ninjas vs. pirates is clichéd, but ninjas vs. zombies? This is going to be awesome!”
“Hello?” Claire’s heart pounded with fear and hope. She set down her phone and checked her radio: nothing but static.
The imagination expected silence, but the earth was rarely still, even this far down. Air moved through the tunnels. Occasionally the rocks shifted ever so slightly, sprinkling dust from the roof and causing the beams to groan like a haunted house. But this had been something different. Almost like laughter.
Or maybe it was another hallucination. Dreams and reality had blurred together for the past day or so as dehydration set in. She glanced back down, forcing her eyes to focus as she skimmed to the end of the story where Henry and Clara fought zombies in a carnival of gore and violence.
“This is why you locked yourself away every night while I was growing up?” Her tongue was swollen, slurring her words. “So a British ninja could beat a zombie to death with its own arm?”
The laughter came again. She could feel the sound in her bones. There was nothing cruel in the laugh. It was almost rueful. “Who’s there?”
Nothing. She was alone. Alone and trapped, death closing in from all sides. And no time-hopping ninja was going to pop in and save her ass.
She stood, wincing as aches and bruises made themselves known. She had battered every inch of her body during the cave-in, and she was pretty sure she had sprained her left elbow. At first, she had counted herself lucky to have survived at all. Now, she wasn’t sure.
Claire had gone ahead to check the elevator shaft while the others took air quality readings. She remembered deafening thunder. The ground had shifted. A feeling of pressure, and then cold panic, as her body reacted even before her mind realized what was happening.
The roof had split behind her. She flung herself forward. Dust blinded her, but she kept crawling along until she reached the gate to the elevator shaft. Terror had nearly driven her to yank open the gate and keep going, just to escape the crushing death behind her.
The shaft was still an option. Maybe the quick death was the merciful one.
She returned to the elevator shaft, studying the flat concrete walls. There was no cable, just a set of dirty metal tracks on either side, and several steel conduits bolted into the concrete.
Three hundred feet until an obstruction. But there were other tunnels. If she remembered right, there should be another level around two hundred feet down. She couldn’t remember if shaft six stopped there or not.
If so, those tunnels might not be blocked off. Or they could have collapsed even worse than this one.
Not that it mattered. Even at her best, she never could have made the climb in one piece. But at least the fall would be quick. She stretched out one foot, hesitated . . .
The phone buzzed. She jumped, nearly tumbling forward. Her body shook uncontrollably as she backed away and pulled out phone from her pocket.
The screen was dark. It had been another delusion, a cruel prank of the imagination.
She collapsed, clutching the phone in both hands. There was no point in conserving the battery anymore. She stared at the e-mail icon, but couldn’t bring herself to open it. Instead, she opened the reader, picked another story at random, and began to read.
The man sprawled on Jackson’s living room couch had a dreamlike quality, both unreal and too real. He wore a black suit with a thin red tie, like he had just stepped out of a bad 80s sitcom. A black patch covered his right eye. He held the TV remote in one hand. “Did you know KITT was a chick?”
Jackson stared. “Huh?”
“The car from Knight Rider? They gave her a man’s voice, but that Trans Am was all woman. What I wouldn’t give for a night in her garage.” He glanced up. “Then you’ve got Optimus Prime. The new one, I mean. From the movies. Queer as Liberace. The flames are a dead giveaway.” He let out a sharp, coughing laugh.
“How did you get into my apartment?”
“Don’t you recognize me, Jackson?” The man tapped his eye patch. “I haven’t seen you since you did this to me.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy.” Jackson backed away, one hand reaching for his cellphone.
“Six years ago, the corner of Maple and Second.”
“Six years—” He had gotten into an accident on that corner, taking out a neighbor’s mailbox and smashing the car’s right headlight and fender. He stared at the man’s eye patch.
“There we go.” The man chuckled. “There’s that slack-jawed look of disbelief.”
“You’re . . . you’re my car.”
“Your father’s car, actually.”
Jackson and his father had spent two years restoring the car, a 1973 Triumph TR-6 convertible. The curves of the body were almost sensual. Black with red pinstrip-ing and redwall tires, the car had sat untouched in the garage for four years until Jackson was old enough to help rebuild it.
He knew that car as well as he knew his own body: the feel of the bucket seats, the faint smell of oil and dust and old cigarette smoke, the cracked wood-grain paneling and the solidity of the walnut gear shift knob. He had only driven it twice before the accident, but in his dreams, he had taken that car all over the country.
Claire flushed, remembering how sweaty her palms had been as she dialed the phone to tell her parents about the accident. The car had still been drivable, but her father had never returned the keys.
Jackson shook his head. “That’s—”
“If you say ‘impossible,’ I’m going to chuck this remote at you. The whole ‘That’s impossible!’ scene is so overdone and clichéd. Either I’m real, in which case you need to get over it, or else you’re having a mental breakdown.” He tossed the remote onto the couch and jumped to his feet, moving to the entertainment center to examine a row of dusty trophies. “So you’re still swimming, eh?”
“I’ve been on the university swim team for two years now.”
“Good for you.” He picked a medal off of one of the trophies. “Still doing the 100 meter freestyle?”
“And the 50.” Whatever was happening, the man—the car?—didn’t appear threatening. “How—no, why are you here?”
“That’s a better question.” He replaced the medal. “How long’s it been since you and your dad talked?”
“We talk,” Jackson said, too quickly.
“I don’t mean saying hi when you go home to do your laundry. I mean really talked.”
“He’s busy. We both are.” Jackson pointed to the stack of books on the coffee table. “I’ve got finals in three weeks—”
“I’m here because I want to go for a drive.”
Jackson blinked. “Well, you’re a car, right?”
“Smartass. Yeah, I’m a car. And tomorrow I get scrapped. But I get one day’s freedom first, and I want what anyone would want in his last day.”
“To take a drive?”
“To go home. To be with my family.”
Claire scrolled back to the first few pages of the collection, checking copyright dates. This was one of her father’s final stories, finished when he was in hospice, waiting for complications from a failed kidney transplant to kill him. “You never told us you wanted to come home,” she whispered.
Guilt surged through her. She pushed it back, concentrating on the story and the memories it evoked. Long afternoons in the garage with her father. The pride the first time they turned the ignition and the engine coughed to life.
“I loved that car, Dad.” She had been a bit of a nerd in school, but showing up at school in a gleaming convertible when most of her friends were driving five hundred-dollar rustbuckets, seeing the looks on the other kids’ faces . . . it was one of the best moments of her high school life.
She remembered his voice, full of frustration. “If you loved it so much, you should have been more careful.”
“It was only a headlight.” It had been October, and the leaves had begun to fall. The roads were slick after a recent rainfall. “You were more worried about that stupid headlight than you were—”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Sure, I know it now.” Claire scrolled back through the story, skimming the ending. Jackson and the car returned home, and Jackson found a way to save it from the scrap yard. “Is that why you wrote these things? So you could invent happy endings for everything? There’s always a solution. Always a reason for what happens. And closure for everyone who needs it.”
Real life didn’t work that way. In real life, stories ended in divorce, or in slow, ugly death as your organs failed one by one, or alone in the darkness hundreds of feet below ground.
“You were right about one thing, Dad. I want to go home.” Not back to her apartment. Not to her boyfriend, or to any of her friends from school. She wanted to be back in that messy house, with her father’s typewriter clacking away from his attic office while her mother graded papers in her recliner.
She closed her eyes, remembering the occasional ding of the typewriter. She used to love that bell when she was a little kid, back before Dad switched over to a word processor. It was a magical sound, the ring of angels and fairies and other wondrous things.
Darkness brought imagination to life. She could hear him typing, the sound coming from behind the cave-in. The bell stopped, and the tapping took on a lighter, plastic sound. Once the family went digital in the nineties, they had needed two computers: one for Dad and one for the rest of them. Floorboards creaked as he stood and paced, working through a plot point.
She clung to those sounds, listening with every cell of her body, until they were more real than the rock and the dust and the despair; until she recaptured, just for a moment, that feeling of security, of being a child and listening to her father’s voice as he pushed the nightmares away.
“Dad?”
The rocks digging into her body reminded her where she was, and what had happened. She flipped on her phone. 5:49 p.m. The battery had run down to 30 percent. She closed her eyes, trying to recall that feeling of peace and safety that had lulled her to sleep, but the typing had stopped, and she was alone.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Did she have time to read the entire collection? She scrolled to the last story, a sword and sorcery tale called “Spellbound.”
Jokra the orc hurried through the tunnels, clutching her father’s stolen spellbook to her chest. The only light came from the book itself, a faint glow to illuminate the obsidian walls around her. The shouts and screams of combat faded behind her.
The attack had come without warning. Dwarves poured into the orc lair, pushing their oversized, wheel-mounted crossbows. One dwarf would steer and aim while another turned the crank, automatically reloading and firing faster than the orcs could respond. Jokra could still hear the clank of the chains as they spat steel-tipped death at her friends and family.
She passed the garbage pits, barely noticing the stench of mold and rotting meat. She veered left, toward the underground lake. Only when she reached the edge of the lake did she stop.
She mopped her face with her sleeve and fought for breath. The cavern was quiet, save for the rhythmic dripping from the stalactites far overhead. [tk: check w/Andy re: cave formations; would an obsidian cave have stalactites?]
Claire tapped back to the copyright page, searching for the date of this story, but “Spellbound” wasn’t listed. How had one of Dad’s drafts made it into this book? He had started using those “tk” notes after switching to a computer. He could search for those two letters to find places where he needed to come back and fix something. The editor deserved to be shot for leaving his edits and notes in the published copy.
Jokra sat, folding her legs and opening the spellbook in her lap. There was power here, magic enough to save her, if she could only find it. Her father had fallen before he could protect her, but if Jokra could decipher his secrets, she might yet save some of her friends. Or at least herself.
A distant splash made her ears shoot up. She held her breath and searched for the source of the sound. There it was again, a quiet paddling, as if someone was swimming toward her. [tk: Sounds like a ripoff of Gol-lum and Bilbo from The Hobbit.]
Human for a Day (9781101552391) Page 23
