by J. Thorn
The answer was obvious. Ken gathered his stuff and went to another cabin. He didn’t know anyone there. He had a terrible time.
And as soon as he got home he withdrew every penny from his bank account – he’d been saving for a car when he turned sixteen – and paid in advance for a year’s worth of lessons at the first martial arts studio he found. He didn’t kid himself. It wasn’t about self-defense. It wasn’t about “never letting it happen again.”
It was about a goal.
He wanted to go back to camp in one year’s time, and kick Adam’s ass.
In the next year he absorbed hapkido. And while he only grew four inches – still short for his age – he did add fifty pounds of muscle to his frame.
Oddly, at the end of the year Adam’s attitude had done a complete one-eighty. Maybe it was the fact that he’d heard Ken wanted to teach him new and exciting ways to die. Maybe it was just that Ken had a lot more confidence and so wasn’t as easy a target. Maybe it was just that both of them grew up enough to get over their insecurities.
Whatever it was, there was no end-of-the-year ass-kicking. He and Adam ended up being best friends.
But Ken never quit martial arts. It slowed down a bit when he got married. A lot when the kids started coming. But he still made time at least once a week to get out and do some forms, or some weapons practice or sparring.
So when Matt came at him and all he saw was teeth and all he thought about was turning into something less than himself, he just reacted.
He grabbed Matt’s hands, crushing them in his own fingers. Matt kept barreling at him. Teeth gnashing. Spittle flying from his mouth. That growl, that low, terrible growl.
Ken knew he couldn’t stop the kid. Whatever had happened to his students had somehow made them stronger than they should be. Had turned them from normal-level kids to high-level ‘roid freaks.
So he didn’t try to stop Matt. Just let him come. Let him come. Actually pulled him.
Matt stumbled forward a bit. And in the second that he was off-balance, in the instant that the kid’s feet left the floor and he was completely weightless, Ken fell back himself. He rolled to his back, still holding onto Matt’s fingers, and used their joint momentum to yank the boy onto him.
This was the dangerous moment. The time where if he screwed up, Ken knew he was dead.
He didn’t screw up. His foot popped up perfectly, jamming into Matt’s gut hard enough that the boy’s breath exploded out of him. Inertia transferred from downward motion to upward and backward motion as Ken’s foot kicked up like a piston, shooting Matt up and over him.
Ken let go of Matt’s hands. The boy didn’t stop growling, and his claw-fingers grabbed for Ken’s face, nails dragging bleeding lines across Ken’s cheeks and temples. He just missed gouging out Ken’s eyes.
There was a crash.
The growling stopped.
Ken followed through with the roll, so he ended up on his hands and knees, facing the direction he had started. He spun around, positive that Matt would be rushing him from behind.
But Matt was gone.
Ken’s stomach felt at once tight and loose, a strange dichotomy that he didn’t understand.
He rushed to the broken window. Looked down.
Matt’s body was there, three stories below.
Motionless.
Ken had just killed one of his students.
But he didn’t have time to think about it, to care about it. Because the window let him see the city.
“Maggie,” he whispered.
8
Boise was a lovely city. Ken had always thought it was the perfect mix of big-city life – movie theaters, malls, a few nightclubs – and small-town community.
But now he could not remember why he had ever thought anything positive about the place. He could only see the black smoke rising in dozens of locations. Could only see fire skittering over the surfaces of several of the buildings.
The Banner Bank building… was just gone. Disappeared from Boise’s skyline. Smoke and fire reached greedy fingers into the sky at the spot where it had once stood, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out where at least one of the crashing planes had gone down.
Then, as he watched, one of the huge industrial cranes that stood in the city center tilted drunkenly.
It was the one by the Wells Fargo Center.
“Maggie,” Ken said again.
The world had gone mad a moment ago. Now it felt like it was ending. The great crane, tall enough to loom over the eleven-story building, seemed to hang at an impossible angle for far too long. A fireball bloomed from somewhere near its base, a great ball of orange and red that ballooned upward before disappearing into an ashy black and gray outline.
The crane fell. It hit the Wells Fargo Center hard enough that Ken could hear it even miles away. A sickening, lurching crunch of metal and glass and concrete shearing off.
Things fell from the side of the building. He couldn’t tell if they were huge pieces of concrete or human beings.
The crane slid along the side of the skyscraper, gouging great furrows in the side of one of the largest landmarks in the city. Then it slowed, stopped. Still hung up on the side of the bank building.
The building where Maggie was.
Where the kids were.
He pulled away from the window. Intending to turn and run. To get to his car, to race to the bank where Maggie had been dealing with a re-fi of their house, and find her and the kids.
It saved his life.
One of the students – could they even be called students anymore? – had apparently taken advantage of his distraction. Had run at him from behind. When Ken pulled away from the window, the kid –
(Kari Harper.)
– missed jumping on his back by stupid, dumb luck. Instead she impaled her throat on one of the jagged shards of glass left behind when Matt went through the window. Blood ran over the piece of glass, staining it crimson in a way that was almost beautiful. Kari twitched like a trout caught on a lure, yanking back and forth and only succeeding in shredding her throat further.
She grabbed the shard of glass and tried to pull herself off, but only succeeded in slashing her palms open. She must have severed the tendons or nerves, because her fingers stopped working and she just batted at the glass ineffectually until she finally sagged, still pinned to the windowpane like the world’s largest and most grotesque insect on a science board.
Ken looked around. The class was still a battleground. But it seemed like the tide was turning. Most of the kids still alive had that dead look in their eyes.
Only a matter of time before one of them took him down. And it didn’t matter how much sparring he’d done, how many thousands of times he’d punched a heavy bag. One bite and… what?
Didn’t matter. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to survive. Had to get to Maggie and the kids.
As if to contradict him, a now-familiar growl drew his attention.
Stu.
Blood drizzled through the mangled bite on the jock’s shoulder, and his blood-crusted skin looked like it was scabbing over.
His eyes were dead. Dead, but still focused on Ken.
The big kid rushed at him.
9
Ken was dead. There was nothing he could do.
Where before several decades of martial arts training had come to his rescue, now they seemed to have abandoned him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to go.
He just watched as Stu – a tackle on the high school varsity football team – barreled at him. Growling. Teeth clicking together in obvious anticipation of ripping the flesh from Ken’s body.
And Ken stood there. Just stood.
Goodbye, Mags.
A high-pitched shriek ripped Ken’s attention to the right. He turned just in time to see a blur of motion pounce on Stu. Stu roared, screeching in pain as something tore into him, ripping his ear off.
It was Laura. The girl that had bitten Stu, the girl he ha
d tossed into a desk. She was still oozing that pink pulp from the side of a horribly misshapen head, and now Ken could actually see bone fragments dropping out of her skull. She couldn’t be moving, couldn’t be alive.
But she was. She was, and she had just saved Ken’s life, buying him time with her frenzied attack against the thing that had once been Stu.
Laura – the once-Laura – pushed her thumbs into Stu’s eyes. He shrieked again as her thumbs went deep into his eye sockets. The eyes seemed to both pop and wilt, almost disappearing under the pressure of her attack. Gray matter dripped down his face. He roared and threw Laura away from him.
Ken watched her body fly into a pile of other students who were rolling around in a mass of gore. He thought she would return to finish Stu off, but she didn’t. Just started fighting with whatever was in reach.
Ken turned back to Stu. The teen’s face was a mass of blood and he was spinning back and forth, trying to orient on some unknown location.
Me. He’s trying to find me.
Ken didn’t wait to see if he was right. He ran for the door.
Threw it open.
And was nearly engulfed.
10
Ken knew it must have happened everywhere in the city –the fireballs, the tilting crane, the explosions had made that painfully obvious. But knowing that hadn’t prepared him for the scene in the school hallway.
What had happened in his class must have happened in all of them. And hundreds of kids must have run, fleeing for their lives and making it as far as the hallway before being taken down by the things that used to be their friends and classmates.
The walls were green and white. Or they had been. Now they were green and white and spattered with impressionistic splotches of red and black. Ken’s first step into the hall almost ended in disaster as his foot came down in an inch-deep puddle of blood and he nearly skidded into three students locked into a life and death struggle near a bank of lockers.
The sound. The screams rolled over him like a sonic tidal wave, nearly knocking him off his feet. The growls and high-pitched whines of the students that had succumbed to whatever maddening impulses were even worse, a pulsing, pounding current that seemed to whisper madness into the deepest shadows of Ken’s own mind.
Just give up. Just give in.
No. Mags. The kids.
They won’t notice. They’re gone.
I don’t know that.
You do. They’re gone.
No.
They’re dead.
NO!
And worst of all was the smell. The smell of any indoor high school was a peculiar beast, a confluence of b.o. and aftershave applied by incompetent hands; of perfume put on in amounts that would embarrass a medieval French prostitute, mixed with the overriding smell of hormones on the brink of breaking free. But this….
The desperate scent of terror, the tangy copper-smell of freshly spilled blood. The pungent odor of bowels that had been purged in fear and death.
The smell brought Ken back from the edge of an abyss, reminded him that he was still alive. Alive, and separated from the only things that made his life worth living.
He looked down the hall to his right, to his left. Saw the same thing in either direction: teeming masses of students intent on killing or being killed.
And not just students. Ken saw Joe Picarelli, the gym coach, kneeling over a young girl, yanking loops of entrails out of her stomach while making that same horrific growl.
Ken backed into a corner between the nearby bank of lockers and the doorway to his classroom. He snaked out a hand and yanked the door closed, not sure if that would stop anyone from coming out but equally unsure what else to do.
He felt like curling up in a ball at the base of the lockers. Felt like giving up. That damn screaming pounded at him.
Give up. Give in. Give up. Give in.
He turned and climbed.
He hoisted himself onto the top of the lockers. There was no way to get out of the school via the hallway, not unless he was suddenly going to channel the ability of an Australian sheepdog to walk across the backs of the students roiling and rolling about on the floor like hyper-violent rioters.
So he went up on the lockers.
Ken didn’t have a plan. Just knew that to stay still would be to die. To remain would be to succumb to the pounding voice within him that counseled defeat.
He pulled himself onto the lockers. There was about two feet of space between the tops of the lockers and the ceiling. Not much room, just enough for him to crouch and observe the screaming chaos, the death everywhere.
One of the doors opened nearby and Emily Sumter, the English teacher, made a break for it. Joe Picarelli jumped away from the now-still form of the girl whose innards he’d been yanking out and leapt on the older woman’s back. Emily went down, screamed once, and then was silent as Joe grabbed her head in both hands and slammed her face repeatedly into the floor.
She was going to retire this year, Ken thought. He had an insane moment where he realized he wouldn’t have to chip in the usual ten bucks for cake and a retirement gift. Another insane moment where he was actually grateful, because Emily had always treated him like something you’d find underneath an abandoned refrigerator.
Then Joe Picarelli stopped slamming Emily’s face into the floor. He looked up.
He saw Ken.
He howled.
And ran for the lockers.
11
Ken just reacted. An all-but-buried part of him wondered how long that would keep him alive, how long instinct and dumb luck would suffice for survival. But sitting back and drawing up plans was out of the question when you had a two-hundred-pound man with gobbets of flesh hanging from his outstretched hands rushing at you.
He had been crouched atop the bank of lockers, perched like the world’s strangest squirrel in the space between lockers and the ceiling. Now he scrabbled to his feet and rammed his forearm through the ceiling tiles above him. He stood, following his arm through the drop ceiling acoustical tiles, ramming his way into the plenum between the tiles and the structure of the building itself.
He felt a hand grab his ankle. Felt fear shoot lightning bolts up and down his body.
He’s going to bite me. I’m gonna get bitten.
Ken froze, unable to move for a critical second, as though hoping on some level for the bite to come. For this to end.
It didn’t happen.
A moment later he realized why.
“Too high,” he muttered, and with the words he kept punching his way into the space above the drop ceiling.
The lockers were almost six feet tall. No way Joe Picarelli could bite him at that height. He was safe. For now.
The hand on his ankle clenched. Ken had an instant to remember the superhuman strength of the kids he had battled in the past few minutes before Joe yanked his leg out from under him. He almost tumbled down into the maelstrom of teeth and nails and flailing limbs and death and madness below. Barely managed to grab onto some kind of ductwork in the ceiling plenum.
Ken felt himself pulled taut, like one of those Gumby dolls he had played with as a kid.
He remembered that he inevitably ended up pulling the legs off those toys. The thought was not a comforting one.
He looked down, but couldn’t see anything. His belly was pressed into the edges of one of the metal grids that held the acoustical ceiling tiles. He couldn’t tell how close he was to having his feet or legs bitten by Joe or some other person.
He pulled, trying to muscle himself up and out of harm’s way. Joe wouldn’t let go, though, and Ken felt himself tiring. He was in good shape, for a teacher, but he was no match for whatever unnatural power was flooding the muscles of the gym coach.
Pain lanced through his calves. He thought he’d been bitten; waited to change into whatever those things were.
The change didn’t happen. Nothing came but more pain. He felt his pants leg soak with blood. Joe must be pulling his skin and muscle aw
ay from his leg with his fingers, yanking at him like Ken might work at a difficult chicken leg during a family barbecue.
Then he felt something else, a strange, mushy sensation that pushed its way through the pain. Something moving around the soles of his shoes. Pulling and pushing at once.
Ken realized that Joe had pulled him close enough that the gym coach was biting his feet. Only the fact that Ken favored thick-soled Doc Martens shoes had kept him from being wounded.
Ken cried out, an inarticulate scream of pure terror as he realized that the span of his life and sanity could now be measured in centimeters. He kicked out, felt the heavy soles of his shoes smash into Joe’s face. He kicked again. Again. Crunches, strangely delicate, like wishbones popping.
Joe’s hands kept raking at Ken’s legs. Ken kept kicking. The crunches started to sound muffled, wrapped deeper and deeper in soft tissue.
The hands fell away abruptly. Ken’s body went from taut to slack, and his lower half slammed painfully against the lockers as a shriek scraped against his eardrums. He knew it was Joe. Just like what had happened to Laura when she had tripped into the desk.
Ken yanked himself up until he was standing on the lockers again. Then pulled himself into the formless black above the ceiling tiles.
It was dark. The only sense of reality was provided by the hole he had come through and the rolling waves of sound from below, a pounding tsunami of rage and terror that threatened to drown him.
He moved forward. Didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to keep moving.
Had to get to Maggie. Had to get to the kids.
If they’re even alive.
What were the chances of a woman, with a nine-year old, a seven-year old, and a two-year old in tow, making it through what was happening?
He didn’t know. And didn’t care. He had to find them. No matter what.
Light punched into the darkness. A hand burst through the tiles in front of him. A black outline pushed its way into the slightly greater darkness around them both.
