by J. Thorn
They’re getting smarter.
He looked behind him. Couldn’t see their pursuers. But he could hear them. Slavering, growling, too many bodies crammed into too small a space. But he knew that they wouldn’t be falling over one another like a human mob would do. They would all know exactly where the others were, would move and adjust to make way when necessary. Only when there was a need to climb atop their unnatural brothers and sisters – like when they had climbed to reach for Ken and Dorcas on top of the garage outside the homeless shelter – would they step in one another’s path.
Ken pushed himself to run faster.
The hall grew brighter. Shattered windows ahead. A way out.
He could see Idaho Street, littered by more refuse. Something that looked like a plane fuselage.
And another screaming horde of zombies coming right at them.
57
“Ken,” said Aaron. The cowboy still sounded so matter-of-fact it was creepy.
“I see them,” said Ken. He did not sound matter-of-fact.
“Where do we go?” said Dorcas. She was panting, and sounded as panicked as Ken did. For some reason that made him feel a bit better.
Small consolation not to be the only terrified person when you get torn to pieces.
“Up,” said Aaron. He jerked his head to the side.
There was a small side branch to the corridor. A dark sign that said “Exit” in what had probably once been brightly-lit green. Now, in the darkness, it looked like it was written in frozen ichor.
They ran down the side hall. Ken hoped they weren’t just running to an elevator – one that was probably still lodged somewhere in the rest of the One Capital Center, a block away. Or that if they were heading toward a stairwell, that that stairwell was going to be usable: no guarantees the rest of the building’s upper levels would be in as good a shape as the part they had already passed through.
So many things to go wrong.
Just run, Ken. Worry later.
He ran.
The corridor ended in a bank of elevators. One of the sets of steel doors was shut, the other featured doors that had been twisted and bent by the massive forces that had sent the building here.
“Shit,” said Dorcas.
“Here,” said Aaron at almost the same moment. A small door they had already passed. They had missed it in the near-darkness of this part of the building.
The zombies were behind them. Ken could hear them in the darkness. Moving slower, as though searching more carefully in the depths of the structure.
Something creaked. The building lurched under their feet. Ken shouted.
The zombies screamed as though in answer.
Lights in the darkness. Ken realized he was seeing the zombies’ eyes. They glinted like those of hyenas around a tribal fire. Hungry. Lapping up the light and holding it inside.
“Go!” Aaron cried. He sounded nervous. Ken did not feel at all happy about that fact.
The three survivors ran through the stairwell door.
58
The hall had been dark.
The stairwell was black.
Ken froze automatically. As though the lack of visual input was a wall that he had walked into face first. An immovable object met by a very stoppable force.
Then he heard the noises. The things.
He reached out. One hand feeling for a banister, the other for Dorcas. He found both at the same moment. “You guys with me?” he asked.
Dorcas said, “Gotcha.”
Aaron grunted. Ken took that for a yes.
He started up. He had no way of knowing what lay before him. He could be marching them straight at a sheer drop-off. And worse than the sense of physical disorientation was the emotional vertigo. A few hours ago he was part of the human race; a member of the top link on the food chain.
Now he was a blind grub, running through the torn remnants of humanity’s iron trees, blindly burrowing for shelter from the new apex predators.
He drew Dorcas and Aaron up, up, up. Climbing – slipping, tripping – up unseen stairs toward an equally dark future.
Below them, the fire door opened.
Snarls. Growls. The unspoken imperative to give up, give in, give up, GIVE IN.
Ken kept pulling, kept climbing.
The banister twisted under his hands. He thought it must have warped in its strange flight through the air. Then realized it was just the turn at the landing.
The things below began climbing. He could hear them, but it seemed like they were quieter. His own labored breathing almost overpowered the noise of the throng pressing into the stairwell behind him and his new friends.
The near silence of the zombies scared him. Badly. Things were changing in the world. And the changes were all for the worse.
One of the zombies coughed. The sound seemed to be swallowed up by the stairwell. But not before the others began making the same sound. It wasn’t a normal cough, not the kind of thing Ken associated with a cold or a bit of dust gone down the windpipe. It was hacking. Painful. It sounded like the things behind them were in the throes of some horrific ordeal.
Dorcas’ hand crushed his knuckles. He guessed she was trying to keep from screaming. He knew he was.
He kept moving up. Step after dark step, the blind literally leading the blind.
The coughing, chewing hack-sound remained below them. Whatever was happening was keeping the zombies locked in their place.
Then the coughing stopped.
The growling started again. And maybe it was just Ken’s imagination, but to him the sound was deeper now. Stronger.
“Faster,” whispered Aaron.
Ken rounded another landing. Stepped forward. His foot slammed into something hard and unyielding. It was his left foot, of course, the pain of the hit mixing with the pain he was already feeling in his left leg. He almost yelped. Bit his lip and swallowed the sound.
Dorcas, moving quickly behind him, slammed into his back. The momentum drove him forward, and then another, softer hit as Aaron hit her and pushed them both into whatever Ken had knocked into.
Ken pushed himself away from the thing. Felt it with his free hand. It felt like a file cabinet. A big one, made of heavy sheet metal or maybe even steel. Ken pushed it. It didn’t budge.
“Back,” he whispered.
The growling below was closer.
He hoped that there was a door at the landing they had just passed.
He hoped that they could get to it before the zombies got to them.
59
Ken did not like to race. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed the martial arts: there was no running. At least, not to see who could get to the finish line first. His body type was just a bit on the thick side to be effective as a sprinter. Not that he was fat, but he didn’t have that long, lithe form that enabled people to knife through a hundred-yard dash in record time.
Now he was running the most important ten feet of his life. Down stairs, in pitch black, to a finish line that might or might not hold the hoped-for door. And even if there was a door, what if it was warped in its frame, like the elevator doors had been? Or what if something was blocking it from the other side?
He ran like Maggie was on the other side of the door – the door that he hoped was there.
He heard the growling, the tramping of more feet than he could count. His pulse thundered in his ears, but did not take away the sounds of the things coming straight at him.
Forget about them. Think of Maggie.
She’s dead, you know.
Maggie. In her bathing suit, like she was in Kauai.
Like she was in your dream. Dead and pulled to pieces.
He slammed into the wall. His whole body hit at once, nose and groin and knees and toes. He groaned.
The growls seemed to orient on the sound. He felt a hot hand on his arm, a hand slick and wet and lacerated.
A gust of warm air as something moved past him. He heard a grunt – a reassuringly human sound. The thud o
f flesh on flesh. Then Aaron bellowed, “Get the door open!” from just to Ken’s side.
Down the stairs, in the midst of them.
Ken tried to yank his wits back into place, one hand reaching out to fumble around on cool concrete, the other moving around his face of its own accord, as though he was worried he might find that parts of him had fallen off with the impact.
There was another thud. A screech that disappeared into nothing. One of the zombies must have fallen – or been thrown – over the stairwell. Not that there could be far to fall – the decapitated building only went down to the street level thirty feet below. But the screech cut off with a wet smack as the thing hit whatever rubble and wreckage served as the non-building’s foundation.
Not that it mattered. There were probably a hundred – a thousand, ten thousand – more of the things. A single one falling wouldn’t make a difference to the survivors’ chances.
Ken’s fingers found a seam. A steal plate that probably covered a locking mechanism.
A doorknob. His hand closed around it at the same time Dorcas’ did. They both twisted. The doorknob rattled…
… but didn’t turn.
“No, no, no!” screamed Dorcas.
Another zombie shrieked and fell. Aaron was silent, and Ken wondered how he was functioning in the darkness. How he was fighting. How long the man could survive.
The cowboy screamed.
60
Dorcas screamed, too, and pulled away from the door. Her hand got tangled in Ken’s, and that’s how they found out that the door was locked, but not locked shut. The knob wouldn’t turn, but when she pulled away and her hand knocked into his arm, he pulled back automatically without letting go of the doorknob… and the door just swung open.
He grabbed Dorcas, who was lunging toward Aaron, by the back of her tank top. Yanked her backward. She screamed, reaching for the cowboy.
Aaron had his right hand clutched to his chest. His left circled the neck of a zombie. The cowboy slammed the beast’s neck into the stairway railing, hard enough that the crunch of the thing’s windpipe collapsing was audible over the roar of the hundred-plus other zombies that were pushing up the stairs.
“Aaron!” Ken called, backpedaling frantically through the open door.
Aaron followed, kicking and punching so fast that Ken almost couldn’t see the movements. Ken was a decent fighter. But he wouldn’t have wanted to face off against the old cowboy.
Aaron threw another flurry of punches with his good hand, then turned and threw himself through the fire door. Ken slammed the door shut, looking around for some way to barricade it.
Something battered at the door from the other side. Hard enough that Ken bounced a foot off the door before pushing back. But he couldn’t get the door to meet the jam. It was a full four inches away from meeting that safety point.
Hands – big and small, light and dark, whole and mangled – curled around the door. Reaching for him. He shrank from them, but couldn’t move too far or he would give up the frail leverage that was letting him hold the door this close.
“Help!” he screamed. The scream came from somewhere deep within, from a place in his soul so dark and profound that it had never before been given to light. More than panic, more than terror. It was a lust to hang on, a need to live, to continue. “Help me, dammit, someone help me!”
Aaron launched himself at the door. The cowboy’s strength stopped it from opening any further, but didn’t get it closed. And even if it had, Ken didn’t know what they’d do to keep it closed: the thing was unlocked, and he didn’t see a locking mechanism on this side.
Dorcas was nowhere to be seen. Ken wondered if “the right thing to do” had finally been to run away.
Aaron’s face was pale. The old cowboy still held his right hand against his chest. The fingers of that hand were curled and twisted, broken in too many places to count. The thumb hung loose, sprung free from its socket and wagging grotesquely with every movement Aaron made.
One of the zombies’ hands snaked out from behind the door and grabbed a hank of Ken’s hair. He screamed as the thing pulled him toward the edge of the door. Toward the darkness beyond.
He gritted his teeth and pulled back. Felt wads of hair separating from his already bruised and bloodied scalp. But the thing’s hand was too strong, and had too good of a grip on his hair. It pulled Ken closer. He couldn’t get away.
He heard the moaning growl of the zombies, only inches away.
The chittering click of teeth, snapping toward him.
Felt hot breath on his skin.
Closed his eyes.
61
“MOVE!”
Ken’s eyes snapped open. He reacted instinctively, a final surge of adrenaline enabling him to yank his head a few inches to one side.
“Close your eyes!”
Again he acted instantly, conscious thought an interloper that would only have gotten in the way. His eyes shut again, even as he registered that the shouting voice did not belong to Aaron or to Dorcas. It sounded young, the voice of a teen or a man in his early twenties.
The world caught fire.
Even through closed eyes, pink blooms of flame burst across Ken’s vision, burnt his retinas and made him feel like he’d just stepped face-first into a laser show at a rock concert.
There was an explosion, then a scream. Another sparkling fireball, another explosion.
The wet hand that had been pulling at his hair shook suddenly, then let go. The door fell shut behind him. Something that sounded like a stampede was happening beyond the steel fire door.
Ken opened his eyes.
It was a kid. Ken guessed he was eighteen. Good looking in the way that only the rich can be: well-scrubbed, well-coifed, well-dressed. A visual triple threat and a danger to any woman within ten years of his age. Unlike Ken, Dorcas, and Aaron, the kid had somehow avoided getting his clothes trashed. He looked like he had just happened along in between college classes. Or during a break at his fashion photo shoot. As though the impending end of the world was something that probably inconvenienced him, but not to the point that he would leave without doing his hair.
The kid held up three colorful cardboard tubes, each over a foot long and several inches wide. Blue-gray smoke curled out of their blackened edges. The pungent smell of gunpowder – almost a perfume compared to the ever-present scent of death that had so consumed the world – pricked Ken’s nostrils.
“My dad always buys too many fireworks on the Fourth of July,” the kid said with a lopsided smile.
The growling beyond the door started again. So did the horrible, hacking coughing.
The kid’s smile dissipated but didn’t disappear. “I think we should vamoose,” he said.
62
The kid spun around, revealing a backpack crammed full of lumps that Ken assumed were more fireworks. The kid ran down the hall, toward a shattered window where Dorcas was waiting. The older woman looked on the verge of a heart attack. She must have gone to look for some way to block the door… and found a strange, pyrotechnic guardian angel instead.
Ken pushed away from the door. He helped Aaron stand as well. The cowboy nodded thanks, then the two of them ran after the kid.
They joined Dorcas at the window. It was a hard run: unlike the lower floor, this one had not escaped the destruction of being flung a block over and two hundred feet down. The floor was uneven, gutted. It creaked and groaned under Ken’s feet, and at one point Aaron’s right leg fell through completely. His leg just disappeared up to the knee.
He didn’t make a sound. But his white face grew several shades paler.
Ken helped him pull himself free. Hard because he didn’t even dare touch the walls on either side of the corridor. They looked on the verge of collapsing, and he suddenly felt like he was in some strange above-ground mineshaft that might simply disintegrate around them at any moment.
He helped Aaron up. The cowboy’s leg came out of the floor, and as it did the entire struct
ure shuddered. As though Aaron had loosened some hidden keystone that the architects had put just under this particular spot with instructions never never ever to touch it or the entire thing would come down.
He and Aaron both froze. The rational part of him realized that if three entire stories of a skyscraper were about to come down around you, the last thing you wanted to do was freeze. But rationality wasn’t always the commanding impetus. Sometimes instinct ruled. Sometimes we stood still in the face of danger. We played dead in the hopes that the destroying angel would pass us by.
The building stopped shifting.
But now Ken thought he heard the rattle of something reaching for the doorknob of the stairway door they had just left behind. He and Aaron looked at one another.
They ran again.
They reached Dorcas, who was still waiting at the end of the corridor. The hall turned into an L-intersection, branching to the left, a solid wall hiding a bank of what Ken assumed were offices to the right.
The kid was gone from view, but Ken heard him scrabbling around the side of the broken floor-to-ceiling window. Ken leaned out and felt his jaw fall open.
Each window of the One Capital Center was taller than a man, and several of them hung together in floor-to-ceiling sheets. Every six windows, a thick concrete mullion separated the next set of windows. Most of the windows were gone, or at most holding a few razor shards like angry teeth grimacing at the unfairness of what had happened to this once impervious-seeming structure.
The kid had moved out of the window the hall faced, shimmied onto the outer sill, and then moved right across the outer face of the building, clinging to the muntins that remained – many little more than jagged bits of metal and weatherstripping – and then slipping past the concrete mullion to the next bank of windows.
He showed no inclination to go inside the building. When he saw Ken gawking at him, he grinned. He still looked like a cover model for a teen magazine, and Ken suddenly hated him just a little bit.
