Reckoning.2015.010.21

by Michaelbrent Collings

  He kind of doubted it. And for some reason that hit him harder than many of the deaths he had seen. To die was one thing. To Change another. But for a hunter – a warrior – to lose his hands?

  God, what do we have to do to get through this?

  "I do have one such machine, e kare," said the Māori. "I thought it might be prudent to have one: they are very useful for finding certain internal injuries."

  "Good."

  Christopher listened through the hatch again. Silence.

  Which didn't mean there were no zombies out there. There could be more, one or two or a hundred, just creeping around on cat-zombie-feet.

  He put a hand on the wheel that would open the hatch. Looked at Aaron. "Feeling lucky?"

  23

  He spun the wheel.

  Cracked open the hatch.

  Even if he was right about what was happening – about what he might have done with the girls – there was no guarantee he wasn't signing his own death warrant right now.

  A crazy zombie was a deadly zombie.

  Would a confused zombie be any less terrifying?

  But when he looked through the crack he opened between hatch and jamb, he saw nothing but an empty room.

  He opened it a bit wider.

  Still nothing.

  Wider.

  Then open all the way.

  The room was empty.

  He stood absolutely still for a long time. His body was rigid, as though every muscle had tensed in aid of his hearing.

  He heard only the silence of an empty place. The few breaks in the quiet came from behind him: Aaron's slightly ragged breathing, the near-silent whispers of Theresa's and Amulek's clothes as they shifted ever-so-slightly.

  Christopher picked up Lizzy. Aaron, unbidden, picked up the still-unmoving Hope. He looked at Mo. "You up to guiding me through how to use the ultrasound?" he said.

  Mo pushed himself to his feet. He went three shades whiter under the permanent gray/black of his tattoos, but made no sound, no complaint. Just nodded. "Of course." The tone of his voice made it clear that Christopher had just asked a foolish question.

  Amulek and Theresa took up positions behind the hunter, ready to aid him. He waved them off. "See to the others," he murmured, as though he weren't the man with the greatest wounds – as though he weren't wounded at all. He pointed at Buck, then Maggie. Both still unconscious. "Bring them," he said. He looked at Christopher. "We should keep them with us, should we not, e kare?"

  Christopher nodded with a certainty he didn't feel.

  Amulek went to Buck. It was almost ludicrous, the disparity in their sizes was so great. But Amulek hoisted the big man onto his shoulders as though Buck weighed nothing at all. Theresa, wounded and barely managing to stay on her feet herself, could only grab Maggie by the arms and pull her along the floor.

  A strange caravan, passing in a tight knot through a bunker that had been destroyed by a throng of zombies. But the destruction was haphazard. Tornado destruction: one thing utterly decimated, the next untouched. It wasn't the complete, focused attacks they had shown of late. It was….

  They've lost something.

  And Christopher thought – hoped – he knew what it was.

  The hospital area – he guessed someone more pro-style than he was would call it an "infirmary," like in Star Trek or some other hard-core-geek show – was slightly less of a mess. Like the zombies hadn't cared to delve this deep into the bunker.

  Like they'd gotten bored.

  Or lost.

  Please, let it be lost.

  The ultrasound was tipped over, and for a moment Christopher worried it might be broken. If that were the case he'd have a helluva harder time convincing his friends of what was going on.

  I'll have a helluva harder time convincing me.

  But when he tipped it back onto its wheels and pressed the sequence of buttons Mo directed him to, it turned on. The monitor showed the operating system boot screen, then went to the view seen in countless television shows and movies: a wide, inverted cone on a field of gray, with a series of numbers and letters along the sides, top, bottom.

  "What now?" asked Aaron.

  Christopher had put Lizzy on the floor next to the machine. Now he hoisted her up and put her on the closest examining table. She was only wearing a diaper, her belly exposed, and he pushed the ultrasound wand against her stomach.

  "Now," he said, "we see what's living inside her."

  24

  He didn't know what he'd expected.

  No, that's not true. You know exactly what you expected. It just wasn't this.

  All he got was grays. Grimy-looking, slimy. Pockets of black that he figured were organs or voids or something like that.

  Dammit, Jim, I'm a post-apocalyptic survivor, not a doctor.

  Holy crap, Christopher, what's up with the Star Trek references?

  "Um, son, you planning on showin' us something?" Aaron didn't sound exasperated – not exactly. But he did sound a bit hurried. Made sense. If life had taught all of them anything in the past days, it was that death was always coming. Rest and respite were short-lived illusions.

  The things had left.

  They would be back.

  It was only a matter of when. Not if.

  "Just… just… give me a sec."

  He moved the wand over the girl's stomach. Her chest. Wondered for a moment if doing that might give her cancer or something.

  Don't be stupid, Christopher.

  Where is it?

  Is it even here?

  It has to be.

  Aaron's hand closed over his, and he realized he hadn't just been passing the wand over her body, he'd been whipping it back and forth. Moving it so quickly it left friction burns on Lizzy's stomach, her chest. He hadn't even been looking at the monitor. Hadn't looked, because he had known.

  Not there.

  It's not there.

  Oh, shit, what do we do now?

  Aaron's hand was firm. Callused. Strong. He took the wand away. "Son, whatever you were looking for isn't there."

  Christopher stared dully at his hands. Realized suddenly how much he had hoped for this moment. Not in a "gee-golly-it's-Christmas-I-hope-I-got-a-pony" way, but in the way a cancer patient might hope for a miracle cure. The way a death row inmate might hope for that last-second call from the governor.

  And now… nothing.

  Aaron put the wand back in its holder. Went to turn off the ultrasound.

  Christopher's eyes were downcast.

  He saw the remote. Sticking out of his pocket.

  At the same time, Aaron said, "We've got to have a talk about your little gizmo, though."

  And that was enough. Hope flared, if only for a moment. Hope flared, and that momentary brightness brought memory to light.

  (Something was there in the blackness with him. Something young, but somehow old as well. It writhed up and down a ladder…. The ladder the thing crawled on was familiar….)

  He slapped Aaron's hand away. Grabbed the wand in the same motion. And in the next he flipped Lizzy roughly onto her stomach. He almost apologized to Maggie for treating her daughter so roughly.

  But Maggie's not here. Not really. Asleep. Just like Buck. Just like both the girls.

  Aaron started to reach for him.

  Christopher planted the wand in the middle of Lizzy's back.

  (... a ladder….)

  The view on the monitor shifted.

  Aaron's hand closed on Christopher's.

  And Theresa screamed. Mo said something under his breath – something harsh and biting: a curse, perhaps, or perhaps a bitter prayer asking how such a thing could be.

  (… a ladder….)

  No, not a ladder… a spine.

  "Good God," whispered Aaron. "What is that?"

  25

  "This is why killing the girls wouldn't have mattered," said Christopher.

  He heard Aaron's question in his mind: "What is that?" And wanted to shy away from the answer. Be
cause it was, in a way, madness. It was a look into the darkness that frightens every child. A glance into the nightmares that we grow out of. But the reason we grow out of them is because we live through enough nights where nothing comes for us that we manage to convince ourselves that the monsters aren't real.

  I survived a thousand nights. Two thousand. Ten thousand.

  The monsters never came.

  So they can't be real.

  There's nothing in the darkness.

  I'm safe.

  And what Christopher was looking at now gave lie to all that. Made a mockery of it in a way that not even the zombies – not the living ones, not the undead – could manage.

  The spine was easy to spot. It looked like a bridge on the ultrasound. Ridges of white, larger spaces of gray in a suspended series of slats that traversed the child's midsection.

  No. Not a bridge.

  A ladder.

  And on the ladder, climbing sideways from rung to fallen rung….

  She.

  How Christopher knew it was a she he couldn't say. But he did know. And she meant to bring a new order, a new creation to this world. The end of the world for humanity would be a new Eden for… whatever it was.

  She moved along Lizzy's spine. Long, languid. A bit like a centipede, with too many limbs, big enough and hard enough that the ultrasound picked them up easily. But at the same time, she was thin, and twisted along the bones, through the muscle with an ease that should have been impossible.

  Not only that….

  Christopher rubbed his eyes. "Did you see that?" he said.

  "Yeah," said Aaron.

  The creature had… moved. But not with that sliding, pulling motion. Suddenly it had seemed to phase out, gliding not through bone and flesh but through existence itself. It had fuzzed out on the ultrasound, and then reappeared a few inches away.

  Aaron turned Christopher gently toward him. "I think…." He glanced at the monitor, where the thing still writhed along the architecture of little Lizzy's spine. "I think you have a bit of explaining to do, son."

  26

  Christopher almost started talking.

  And that, he realized, would have been a mistake.

  He was a jumble of thoughts. A ragged tumble of panicked ideas and half-composed plans that had only now been proven to have both reality and validity. And if he had started talking right away, what he said wouldn't have made any sense.

  Hell, reality barely makes sense right now.

  So instead of talking, he just looked at it. At her.

  The thing danced. A strangely hypnotic motion along Lizzy's back. Up, down, in, out. Threading the toddler's spine like a needle. Moving in and out of the vertebrae in such a way that the spinal cord should have severed, the nerves should have been destroyed. But somehow… somehow Lizzy had walked. She hadn't even been impacted in the slightest.

  At least, not physically.

  After a moment, Christopher moved the infant off the table. He lay her on her stomach on the floor at his feet – careful to keep her near, so careful… because if she strayed too far….

  He shivered.

  He lifted Hope out of Aaron's arms. Put her on the table. Face-down.

  He put the wand on her back.

  Maggie screamed.

  "What's that? What's that thing, what's going on where am I what's that thing in my baby?"

  27

  Christopher jerked at the sound. So did Aaron and Theresa. Only Amulek and Mo seemed to take Maggie's screams somewhat in stride, though even they clearly hadn't noticed her return to consciousness.

  Christopher wasn't surprised that she had awakened. He had expected it. Had hoped for it. Still, he hadn't really been ready for the screaming.

  Then again, she had been through a lot. Son dead, then Changed into… something. Something not a zombie, but more.

  Then husband gone.

  She doesn't know he's back. She didn't see.

  And now this.

  She screamed again. This time no words, just a long, whistling shriek that cut off with a series of jitters as Aaron took her shoulders and gave her a quick set of shakes.

  "Maggie. Maggie!"

  She turned to face the cowboy. Screamed again. Clawed at his face. "Get away from us!"

  And of course that made sense, too. Because he'd been with Elijah. He'd been one of the ones who wanted to kill her little girls.

  Is he still after them?

  The answer came as Aaron somehow used his one good hand to wrap Maggie's flailing arms into a pretzel. "Stop," he said. Then, as she continued to scream that high-pitched shriek, he said it again. "Stop!"

  "Get away from us. Get away from my babies!"

  "Maggie, I'm not going to do anything to them. We're trying…." He glanced at the ultrasound monitor. "We're trying to help them!"

  Maggie's thrashing slowed. Petered out. Died. She looked at the monitor. Saw what was there.

  Another one of the things. Like the first it was long, gave the sense of being formed of segments like a centipede or millipede. But where the other had swung from bone to bone, had thrust bony legs through muscle and tendon, this one seemed to have flagella that waved in impossible currents as it swam through Hope's back.

  Up and down, back and forth in languid turns that reminded Christopher less of the motions of an insect and more of the smooth turns of a fish in a tank that was too small for it.

  "Please…." Maggie turned to him. He didn't know whether that was because she sensed he knew what was going on or simply because she didn't trust Aaron. Either way, he suddenly felt the weight of a mother's desperation, hope, love, anguish. It almost crippled him. "Please, tell me what's going on."

  He looked at Amulek. "Get her a chair." Then back at Maggie. "You're going to want to sit down."

  28

  Maggie sat down, but Christopher still didn't speak. He waited, waited. His thoughts were more or less ordered now, and he was pretty sure what he wanted to say.

  He just wanted to wait for Maggie to calm down.

  Sure. Because that's going to happen.

  But she did. At least enough that she managed to stop screaming, to stop talking, to stop whimpering. She sat in silence. Her hands twisted over and around each other in compulsive motions, but other than that she was still. Composed as could reasonably be hoped for. More so.

  Everyone here is strong. So much stronger than we could expect.

  Again, that sense of fate. That sense that all this – all that had happened – had brought them together. Brought them to this particular moment. This particular place.

  That it was… because it had to be.

  Christopher waited another moment. This time to see if Buck would wake. Then he realized it might be nice to have everyone but Mr. Crabbypants know what was going on.

  He actually had to keep himself from grinning at the thought. At the look on Buck's face when he found out everyone knew more than he did.

  "Okay, here's what we know," he said. "Half the world turned into zombies in ten minutes. The whole world." He looked around. "Which Aaron says speaks to some kind of coordinated movement."

  "An attack," said Aaron.

  Christopher nodded. "Right. And there's also the fact that they kept looking up and doing their 'World's Creepiest Breathers' thing. Downloading. And whatever they downloaded turned their brains to slime."

  "This is very interesting, e kare. How do you know they are downloading? And what are they downloading?" said Mo.

  Christopher had to mentally readjust as he realized as the Māoris had been hunkered down here during a lot of the Change. They might well have missed a lot of what the survivors had seen.

  "Well," said Christopher, "we don't know. But did you see them breathing?"

  "Often."

  "Not just breathing," Theresa interjected. She sounded irritated. Like Christopher was doing a supremely bad job explaining things.

  I probably am.

  "Every so often – at least at the
beginning – they'd all look up and breathe this weird gaspy panting. All in time, like they were all linked together. They didn't seem to see or hear anything around them when it happened, either," said Theresa. "Gave me and Elijah and my brother… gave us a chance to escape a few times." She paused in the middle of her sentence, and Christopher remembered that her brother had died protecting the survivors, just as Elijah had died trying to kill them.

  Aaron covered the uncomfortable silence. "We think they were downloading instructions. Or maybe whatever caused the Change in the first place was continuing to… evolve them." He spread his hands. "At first they were just zombies. Rabid humans, more like. Then they were could secrete acid. Then they could climb walls, and on and on and change after change. Eventually, even the dead rose up and came after us."

  Mo nodded, imperturbable as always.

  "Right," said Christopher. "And when you crack them in the head, the pink sludge – the receptor that their brain has turned into – is destroyed. So their communication is severed from… from whatever. And they go nuts."

  "What does that have to do with the girls? And that gizmo you made?" asked Aaron.

  "And why didn't the zombies attack us the last time?" said Theresa.

  "I'm getting to that," said Christopher. He flashed a quick smile at Theresa. She didn't smile back, but her glare seemed to be half-strength this time, which he counted as a win.

  Focus, Don Juan.

  "Fast-forward a bit. We found the girls all wrapped up in that spiderwebby stuff on top of the Wells Fargo Center. Along with their brother and with Maggie and Buck. Also: surrounded by zombies, who showed no signs of hurting them."

  "Wrong," said Aaron. "They tried to hurt them plenty."

  "No," said Christopher. "They tried to hurt us, and the others got caught in the crossfire. Or maybe they did try to hurt them, because the queens weren't old enough yet. Or –"

  "What the hell do you mean, 'queens'?" said Aaron. "You're not making much sense."

  "Sorry. Got ahead of myself." Christopher took a breath. "Let's just assume for a second that the zombies weren't trying to hurt the girls. Just go with me."