(GIVE UP)
– NEED.
(GIVE IN.)
Sally was still. The leopard was male, had been adopted by and named so ridiculously by Hope. Ken suspected that the beast had adopted the girls as well. Certainly there was something about the animal that changed the effect the zombies had on his children. Lessened it.
But not now. The things’ call was too strong.
Derek was too strong. His son was in some strange but undeniable way the leader. His boy had come to kill him.
The zombies were rushing them.
Ken opened his arms. Just like little Liz. No agony, no ecstacy. Only welcoming. He was throwing himself to his boy. Even though his boy hated him, despised him, wanted only his death.
(daddy please run)
The voice was too small, or the growls of the beasts too loud. The urge to flight was lost in Ken’s mind.
The first of the zombies was only perhaps ten feet away.
The zombies in the tunnel behind them – small bodies wriggling through the flowing water in the storm drain, tiny hands and feet impossibly clinging to walls and ceilings – were reaching out.
Ken didn’t care.
He couldn’t.
He was giving up.
Giving in.
Gone.
3
The leading edge of the zombies reached out. Their hands – some whole and human-seeming, others bent bloody, still others covered in the waxy yellow substance that seemed to serve as both poultice and building material – reached for the survivors. Buck was closest to them. He would be taken first.
Ken wondered, briefly, whether they would turn him or just kill him.
He wondered what they would do to Hope, who was still in the big man’s arms.
The closest zombie was one of the whole creatures. A thing that had once been a boy with bright red hair and thick glasses that now hung askew from one ear, propped up on his nose in a way that looked impossible in the same way Escher drawings look impossible.
The redhead touched Buck.
Buck was still screaming.
All of them caught by the scream. By Derek.
Give UP.
Give IN.
Then the redhead’s hand was red. Red as something splashed it, and then an instant later it disappeared and Ken fell back into his own mind as the scream cut off.
He heard a series of thuds and thumps.
Yellow streaked past his vision. Yellow and black. Ken thought of bees, of the insects that first clustered around his class window, then the bees that tried to kill him and Dorcas –
(before she Changed)
– before dying en masse.
But… bees were small. Not bigger than an inch long. Certainly not twenty feet long. Thirty.
Something hissed, a sound Ken vaguely remembered from his past life, his life when he was a teacher and his biggest problem had been getting the kids to do homework, maybe discovering one of the seniors copping a feel off his girlfriend during passing period.
What is it?
Ken couldn’t focus. He kept thinking about Derek and bees and the laugh/scream/moans of his daughters.
And the thumps. The meat-smacks of bodies hitting something hard. The penny-smell of blood aerosolizing. Pink mist in the air.
He realized he couldn’t hear Liz or Hope anymore. Nor could he hear his son’s –
(no not Derek, not anymore, Derek’s gone)
– thoughts in his mind. He took a breath. Felt blood puff into his lungs.
Will that infect me?
The bee stopped moving. It stopped right in front of Ken, humming with a strangely rhythmic thud-chug-thud-chug that also touched memories of times before the world fell to its knees.
Ken stared at the bee’s black lines. Vaguely aware that the monstrous insect had slammed into the zombies, but that they were regrouping. Would come again.
The ones in the tunnel were still coming.
He didn’t move. Just looked at the stripes on the bee’s sides. Two black lines. The words Boise City Public School District sandwiched neatly between them.
There was another hydraulic hiss, this time smaller. The school bus had hugged up so tightly to the wall where the storm drain access door was that when bus door folded open Ken felt the wind of it on his face.
A voice punched out. Raspy and jagged as a saw with broken teeth, and there was something else beneath it. Something Ken couldn’t quite place….
“Get in,” said the driver. “Two seconds and I leave.”
The bus engine gunned, and Ken knew the owner of the voice was not bluffing.
4
Ken used to sing a song to Derek. Not always. Only when he was a baby, and then only when the baby was so colicky it seemed death was imminent. Not his death, not the baby’s. The parents’. Ken’s and Maggie’s. On those occasions, Ken picked up the little ball of writhing arms and legs and bunched him up so tight that movement was all but impossible and sang about wheels on the bus that spun around and around and around. He sang and sang, and sooner or later Derek always calmed.
The wheels on this bus were not spinning. They weren’t black, either. They were gray from dust, red from blood, brown from where the two came together to form a mud-blood-mess of dirt and death.
One of the wheels had a hand on it, holding tight to the lug nuts and the gaps in the heavy duty rim.
No arm, no body. Just a hand. Torn raggedly apart mid-forearm, stump crusted over with the waxy substance that built and healed.
The hand twitched. The pad of a finger ran over the edge of the rim, like it was questing for something. It probably was. Ken had been grabbed by a similarly disembodied hand a few days earlier; had seen a head with no body crying windless screams.
The zombies didn’t stop.
“Move! Ken, move!”
Aaron punctuated his shout with a yank. He’d been half-dragging Ken thus far, propping up Ken’s broken body with his own strength, even though he was far from untouched by the chaos himself.
Ken stepped into the bus.
He thought about the wheels on the bus.
He saw Derek. Not the baby Derek, not the child he rocked until sleep stole the pain. Not even the older Derek, who was a real person, on his way to becoming a real man.
Not even the Derek who had saved his mother by taking the bite meant for her.
No, this was the new Derek. Not the kind Derek-that-was but the broken (though rapidly unshattering as that yellow shit pushed out of his pores and coated his broken bones and flesh) and hungry Derek-of-now-and-forevermore. The boy was standing next to piles of zombies that had been plowed to the side by the massive weight of the bus.
The wheels on the bus.
Babies crying.
Derek’s lips pulled back from his teeth. Some of them had shattered away, probably when he fell from the crane. Not a gap-toothed grin the way kids had had before the world fell down in ashes –
(ashes we all fall down like he fell down
DIE
run daddy)
– around them, but with the serrated grin of a saw blade. Rusty, spattered with darkness that might be blood. Hungry.
Ken felt the clank of feet on metal. He realized they were his.
He was getting on the bus.
He wondered where the wheels on the bus would take him.
Derek ran toward the bus.
Beside him, the black/white monster and the creature that had once been Dorcas did the same.
Ken looked at the driver. According to the song the driver would tell him –
“MOVE YOUR ASS!”
5
Ken didn’t move. He just stared. A mental stopwatch clicked past the two seconds they’d been allotted, but the driver didn’t start the bus moving. Ken didn’t know if that was because they weren’t all on yet or because they were half on and the guy didn’t want to scrape anyone on the side of the wall beside which the bus had shuddered to a halt.
So he stared. Not
long. Maybe a second.
Too long for what was going on outside. Not nearly long enough to understand what he was seeing.
“Holy shit, we’re being rescued by Darth Vader!” said Christopher. Ever the most emotionally-resilient of the group, he said it as a joke and his tone almost sold it as such. He could have been poking fun of a friend at a party. Though this would have been a very strange friend indeed, and a completely terrible party.
“Language!” snapped Maggie in a tone that made it clear she was speaking out of habit more than sincere remonstration. In the next instant she pushed onto the bus and said, “Holy fu –“ She managed to stop herself.
Buck rammed his way down the aisle with Hope in his arms. Ken’s oldest daughter was screaming, reaching for the side of the bus.
For Derek.
There was a gentle tap, just the tiniest shifting of the bus. The only sound of a snow leopard hopping on board.
“You’re shitting me,” said the driver.
“You should talk,” said Christopher.
They were all inside.
The folding doors extended. Closed.
5
The driver faced forward. It didn’t matter. Ken was still anchored to the spot by surprise. He had seen a lot of things on buses just like this: kids groping each other, kids chewing tobacco, kids getting into fistfights they apparently hoped would go unnoticed.
He had never seen someone dressed in blood-crusted full-body armor with the words “Boise Police” across the back, a pair of machetes strapped to his back, and a gasmask that looked like it had stepped through a wormhole from World War II.
“Siddown.”
That was how the driver said it: one quick word. Not “sit down” or even “sit the hell down” but rather the most efficient distillation of the words: “Siddown.”
It was still enough for Ken to hear what he had missed in the first moments after the seven-ton bee smashed right through the throng of zombies. Still enough for a small surprise to find its way through the madness.
Ken wondered if the others had heard it. Had noticed.
He turned to the back of the bus. Aaron was already gone, and Ken hadn’t even noticed. But the cowboy must have guided Ken to a support rail because that was what he was now holding onto. The vertical rod was bolted to a seat, welded to ceiling and floor.
Ken felt his grip twist across blood and fear-slick sweat as he caught a glimpse of what was outside, what was now behind them.
Derek, running over the crushed bodies – all of them still moving, still twitching, some of them struggling to stand on feet and legs that corkscrewed around to point behind them.
Dorcas, snarling and shrieking as she did the same. She and the black/white zombie were running a strange kind of interference for Derek, pushing the wounded out of the way. Not that Ken’s boy – his once-boy – noticed. He ran across the pavement, the dead, the blood, the innards with equal abandon.
And the tunnel. The access door.
Tiny fingers circled the jamb. Tiny hands appeared.
Tiny bodies came to light.
6
Ken hadn’t seen them yet.
He saw their fingers, saw their eyes glimmering behind him as they caught what light there was and threw it back at him. Saw eyes blinded by armored scabs, others reflective as those of a hyena come to tear at a carcass in the night.
But what he had seen had been too little to sink in. Or maybe it had been enough, but his mind had rejected it. Had refused to acknowledge what it was seeing.
Now, in the harsh light of day, under a sun as bright as this, he had no choice but to see, to believe.
Even if he didn’t understand.
The things that crawled out around the doorframe like roaches running out of a strangely vertical drain were tiny. Not just children like Ken had thought, but most of them babies. Toddlers at best. They had pushed into the tunnel, the tiniest of them looking barely big enough to have fought their way into this world in the first place.
Ken was struck with a horrific thought: what if they hadn’t? Half of humanity had changed in a period of ten minutes. What if one of the Changed had been pregnant?
What if one of the Changed had yet to leave the womb?
He shuddered.
Shuddered again as he saw what the tiny creatures did when they came into the light. They blinked, and he saw –
(It’s not possible, Ken, not possible
What of this is possible?)
– that most of them did not have scabbed-over eyes; rather, their eyes were enormous. Perhaps half the surface area of their faces. They were black and shiny as wet obsidian, though some of them had mottled crusts beginning to creep over the dark orbs: the scabs that were appearing on more and more of the creatures.
Some of the scabs seemed to be growing right out of the centers of the eyes. Not the skin surrounding the dark orbs, the scabs erupted like volcanic islands from the dark seas of the eyes themselves.
As he watched, the things blinked and cringed. He couldn’t see what they were cringing from, but then they scampered back into the tunnel, again seeming more roach-like than human.
The light. They couldn’t stand it.
He turned away. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about babies changing to something so deadly and bloodthirsty and alien and ugly.
What if that’s what’s happening to little Lizzy?
What if it’s something worse?
He had no answers to that. He looked at Maggie. She was sitting on one of the puke-green seats that were required fixtures in school buses worldwide, cradling Liz’s head. Liz’s eyes were closed.
Maggie met Ken’s eyes. “She’s asleep,” she said.
Ken noticed that Sally was laying in the aisle at Liz’s feet. He wondered what the he-leopard would do if he ever came to understand how misnamed he was.
Maybe he’d like it. The world’s first transgender cougar.
Though that couldn’t be. Ken knew from visiting the zoo with the kids that Sally and his mate were trying to breed. He wondered if Sally knew that his female was gone. Maybe dead, but certainly out of reach.
Sally raised his head and looked at Ken as if to say, “You have worse things to worry about than my love life.”
Ken had to admit this was true. But knowing he was hiding from reality in a series of half-inane thoughts didn’t mean he could come back. He had to escape from the skittering, chittering roach children outside, if only for a moment.
Buck was sitting across from Maggie. Like Liz, Hope was asleep or unconscious. Lolling in the big man’s arms. One of her hands trailed down to Sally’s fur, and Ken saw her fingers clench reflexively.
Sally purred. Put his head down.
Aaron and Christopher were in the back of the bus, rooting through something.
“It’s like Christmas,” whispered Christopher.
Aaron looked at the young man. “I worry about you, boy.”
Ken didn’t have the mental capacity to worry about what would excite Christopher. Once the son of Idaho’s governor, the kid had saved them all many times over, usually by finding a way to set something on fire or blow something up – be it something small like a firecracker or something slightly larger like a skyscraper or a passenger jet.
Movement beyond the two men caught Ken’s eye.
The zombies that had almost killed the survivors were still running after them. He couldn’t hear the things’ growl over the thrum of the school bus diesel engine. But he could feel it. Could sense it digging into his mind like a wedge into a split tree trunk, widening a rift to the point where….
What?
What would happen when he split wide open?
He didn’t know.
He saw Derek. He remembered holding his son on a long night when the child had a double ear infection. Little Derek, only three and weeping, asking Daddy to make it stop, make it stop. And Ken held him and rocked him in a dingey second- or third-hand glider c
hair he and Maggie bought from the Deseret Industries Thrift Store. Singing “Hush, Little Baby” over and over, praying silently to God to take his son’s pain away.
The Colony: Velocity (The Colony, Vol. 4) Page 2