by J. Thorn
Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just fall down. Go unconscious. Die.
But he knew that was wishful thinking.
And he knew that Maggie and the kids weren’t going to get any closer to him if he stayed here and waited for the things around him to start moving again.
He took a breath, and started his slow movement through the hall.
18
Once, when Ken was a teenager, he played a game of Jenga at a party. The first person who lost – a girl who had had a bit too much to drink – removed her t-shirt. Strip Jenga was born.
The rest of the kids in the circle thought it was a great idea. Particularly since the inebriated girl seemed hell-bent on getting naked.
Ken, however, hated it. Hated the idea of a game that was supposed to be just plain-ol’ fun turning into something where he might end up baring himself in front of peers. Any titillation he might have felt at the idea of ogling partially naked girls nearby was completely lost in the embarrassment he was already feeling, both for the wasted girl beside him and for his future self.
Now, pulling himself through spaces far too small for his frame, he found himself desperately wishing for those days. Strip Jenga was eminently preferable to Death Pick-Up Stix.
Every time he got too close to one of them, the student- or teacher-thing he was near would snuffle. Its breathing would momentarily fall out of lockstep with the unified panting of everyone else in the hall. Its mouth would close, its teeth would grind. Ken would freeze, unsure whether it was better to remain motionless or inch slowly away.
As soon as the person – or the thing that used to be a person – looked back to the ceiling, he would keep on going. Inch by painful inch. Trying not to smell the coppery scent of blood, the musky odor of urine and feces that seemed to be everywhere; that pounded at his nose and made him want to vomit again.
He slipped. His hands went out, heading straight for a girl who stood ramrod still in the middle of the hall. For a moment he had the crazy thought that if he fell on her, if an adult male teacher fell hands-first against a barely post-pubescent girl the way he was going to, a lawsuit was a certainty. Then reality asserted itself. Lawsuits weren’t an issue. His survival was at stake.
He had the barest instant to force his body to one side. His back twisted unnaturally, and he felt something twinge in his spine. Pain ran up and down the length of his left leg.
He wanted to scream. Instead he just grunted, and even that sound was mostly swallowed.
He didn’t understand anything that was happening. Didn’t know what would make the things around him go crazy again. Sound? Smell? Psychic emanations?
He just didn’t know.
He didn’t know anything. Other than that he had to get to his family.
He half-slumped against another bank of lockers. Tried to convince himself that the sticky wetness he felt against his hands and cheeks where they pressed into the metal were nothing more than wet paint.
He focused on the pain in his leg. He had hurt himself lunging out of the way of the student. Whether it was a bad injury, something that would fatally slow him down or not, he couldn’t say. All he knew was that his left leg throbbed, then alternately sent spike-shocks of pain rippling from his pinky toe up to his hip.
He pushed himself away from the lockers. He knew he had to keep moving. Knew that if he let himself stop to “rest,” there was every likelihood he wouldn’t be able to start moving again.
He took stock of his position. Still in the midst of a frozen explosion of mayhem, still surrounded by people he had once known but whose humanity had mysteriously disappeared.
He was ten feet from the stairs. More importantly, maybe twenty kids and two adults clustered between him and the top of the steps.
Snap.
Like they were all part of some twisted remote system, every single mouth of every single person slammed shut. Their teeth clicked together audibly, and Ken didn’t think he’d ever heard anything so terrifying. Not even the sounds of the wounded, the dying, the transforming students and faculty competed with that single massive crack of thousands of teeth coming together in a single instant.
And one by one, the things started dropping their chins, looking down from whatever invisible sight had held them fast. Their eyes swung back into view.
They shook their heads as though confused.
Ken ran.
19
He made it to the top of the steps. Barreling through anyone who was in his way, doing his best impression of Stu Clancy at a home game.
Only no, that was wrong. Stu was crazy, he was gone, he was one of them now. So Ken wasn’t pretending to be a star tackle in a clutch situation, he was just himself, just a single normal person in a world that had tossed sanity out the window.
He hoped that would be enough.
He hit the first person in his way hard, lowering his shoulder and plowing into soft tissue that had begun falling from a deep gash in the student’s guts. The kid snarled and snapped, but didn’t seem to fully engage. Not yet.
But it was going to happen soon.
The kid fell back, knocked over two more of the creatures. They all tumbled to the floor in a tangle of limbs, snarling and nipping at one another like rabid animals.
Ken was already past them.
He sidestepped two more things.
Not students. Not kids. You didn’t kill a kid, didn’t kill Matt Anders, you killed something but not him….
Juked around a clot of four or five of them.
They all dropped their chins.
One focused its eyes on him. A hand reached for him. The thing – a thing that had once been a student, had once been someone’s daughter – growled.
The sound moved through the hall like a ripple in a once-calm pool. It bounced over the lockers, up and down the walls, growing louder and louder as it did.
Ken felt warmth on his legs. He didn’t know if it was blood from his wounds, or if he had just pissed himself. He didn’t know if it mattered, either.
The things were around him.
And they were, once more, awake.
He was at the top of the stairs. He threw himself over the lip of the steps, tossing himself bodily down and trusting to gravity to get him to the bottom faster than he could do if running. It was a good way to break a bone, he knew, but he also knew that broken bones would be irrelevant in the next moments. Speed was all that counted.
The growling behind him took on a heightened, fever tone. He knew somehow that every eye – or at the very least, every eye that hadn’t been gouged or bitten or otherwise mangled into oblivion – was swiveling in his direction. Orienting on a threat. On prey.
Then he realized that the bigger problem was in front of him. Two students, arms wide to catch him, stood on the steps at the landing a few feet below. He was pitching straight at them, no way to halt his fall. Their hands opened and closed spastically, their faces ran red with blood.
Their teeth chittered and snapped, eager for his flesh.
20
Ken didn’t try to stop. For one thing, he was sure it wouldn’t work. He had already fully committed to his headlong flight down the stairs, and the treads themselves were miniature waterfalls of blood that allowed next to no purchase for his feet. For another, even if stopping were technically possible, he felt his left leg cry out in anger as he twisted away for a moment. His knee buckled and he almost went down. The only thing more dangerous right now than falling into the arms of the things on the landing would be rolling into their arms, he reasoned.
So he didn’t attempt to halt his downward trajectory. Didn’t try to grab the blood-slicked banister with his own blood-slicked palms.
Instead he put his head down, his arms out. He felt like he must look foolish, like if his kids could see him they would think he was doing a funny dance of some kind. Some weird imitation of a crab with hip dysplasia meant to amuse them.
But there was nothing amusing about his intent. He didn’
t want to stop, he could only speed up. Could only drop his head between the two students, grabbing onto both of them with his arms, lurching forward as they grabbed at him, screaming as their nails drew red furrows in his back, screaming again as he felt them leaning down to bite him to tear him to turn him, then….
The tinkle of plate glass, double panes heavy enough to deal with winter storms but not prepared for the weight of three bodies hurled at them…
… shearing, screaming pain as glass fell all around him…
… growls, something tugging at him…
… falling…
… he hit something hard.
And then all was dark.
21
Something was tugging at him. Pulling his arm.
Ken opened his eyes. Or thought he did. He couldn’t see anything. What was wrong with his eyes?
He smelled smoke. Wondered what was burning. What was happening, where he was.
Where are the kids?
Is it my birthday?
His thoughts spun around in his mind like the lights on a police car, all atwirl and making no sense at all.
Have to go to the zoo.
The thing that was pulling at his arm yanked harder. Ken felt himself blink. Light started to make its way to his brain, started getting parsed and evaluated. Nothing concrete yet, but he thought it was only a matter of time.
The pulling at his arm was getting somehow more… serious? Severe? Like whoever was doing it was really wanting him to pay attention.
Probably Hope. She’s never been very patient.
He knew that wasn’t right. Knew that he was hurt, that his thinking was askew, but knowing it didn’t stop the flurry of nonsense that seemed determined to captain his mind for a bit.
The light he was seeing started to resolve into colors. Orange. Red.
Fire?
That was the first thought he had that he knew made sense. Something was on fire. Something close. It explained the smoke he smelled, the colors, the heat he suddenly realized was washing across his face and making his skin feel like dried parchment.
Then more detail. He swiveled his head.
Looked at his arm.
Screamed.
There was something there. It used to be someone, perhaps, but no longer. Not now. You couldn’t call it someone when it was only there from the waist up.
Another student, Ken realized. And with the realization came the return of memory, the recollection of what had happened.
How long was I out?
The thing next to him had been torn asunder somehow, and now lay in a blackened, curdled heap of its own innards. Ken looked around and saw that the student’s lower trunk and legs – still clad in a mini-skirt that was definitely not dress code-approved – were laying in the grass a good ten feet away. They were half-pinned under an SUV that was burning brightly, sending black puffs of smoke into the air like an old West smoke signal, like it was humanity’s last chance to ask for help.
Maybe it was.
Ken’s gaze went back to the girl. She was still alive. She couldn’t possibly be alive, couldn’t be moving. But she was. She was pulling at his arm, using him as an anchor to draw herself closer to him.
Her teeth were only inches from his fingers.
He screamed and rolled away. The motion made the world spin into darkness for a moment, made nausea and pain roll through him in competing surges.
He opened his eyes again. The girl was still there, a few feet away. She looked enraged, like he had broken some basic rule of the universe by refusing to be bitten.
“Screw you,” he said. He meant it as a personal buck-up. It came out as a whisper, as something that scared him.
How did I get here?
Then he remembered: the stairs. The window.
He must have gone right through. Not his intention, but whatever worked.
What had happened to the other two? To the ones he took with him?
He cast his eyes around, looking for them and seeing nothing. That was bad. Not knowing where the monsters were, he sensed, was a good way to a quick death.
Or worse.
He tried to keep looking, but sudden exhaustion gripped him and he went limp. He was on his back, and his eyes went skyward of their own accord.
He looked up, realizing he was still directly below the window – two and a half stories high – that he had come out of. Only the fact that the ground below was new-sodded grass, and a very lucky landing, had kept him from being killed.
He also saw the reason the two students he’d taken with him hadn’t followed him down and killed him.
They were hung up on the outside of the building. One had been pierced through the middle by a shaft of glass, hanging just outside the window itself. The other kid had somehow gotten tangled on a flagpole that bore the school’s banner. The teen-thing was snarling and growling like an oversized fly caught in a spider’s web, but at least it wasn’t paying attention to Ken.
For now.
He looked around. Didn’t see any more of the things nearby. But he didn’t think that was likely to last. Not that he had any basis for that assumption. For all he knew they would sit down and start composing beautiful haiku in the next few minutes. But it seemed to him that the safest course was to assume the worst. And the worst assumption included the things in the school making their way outside. And soon.
As if to congratulate him on his sound thinking, he heard a door open nearby. It was one of the emergency exits, the sound of the door slamming open against the brick façade of the school accompanied by a harsh electronic alarm.
Maybe it’s someone normal.
Whoever it was screamed. Not in pain, but in rage. The shriek of an animal hearing a hated sound.
Ken rolled to his hands and knees. The world kept sliding out from under him and he suspected he was probably seriously concussed. Maybe worse. He needed medical attention. A hospital.
The angry growl nearby suddenly changed. Now it sounded distinctly like a beast that had just caught sight of a meal.
22
Ken tried to stand. Made it to his knees before pitching forward face-first into the lawn. The grass was soft enough to save him from serious injury, but still felt bone-shatteringly hard as it ground his lips into his teeth.
He pushed himself up again. Blood and spit oozed out of his mouth. He saw a tooth, bright white in the sunlight, sitting naked on the grass.
Whose tooth is that?
The growling behind him was louder. Much louder. Like more than one voice, too.
Ken forced himself up. He felt sick to his stomach, felt like dying might not just be inevitable but welcome. The only thing that kept him going was a sense that he had to be somewhere. Was supposed to meet someone.
Where am I supposed to be?
He took several lurching steps. Vomited on himself but managed to remain upright. He seemed to recall that puking was a sign that a concussion wasn’t too bad. Or was it the opposite? Was he dying?
Focus.
One foot ahead of another.
He stayed vertical, but knew he was moving too slow. The things were out here. He could hear them.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, even though it made his already-spinning world start to whirl that much faster, like a carnival ride that hadn’t had a government safety check in decades.
There were three of them. Four. Now five. Coming out of the school’s side door. They looked confused, like they weren’t sure how they had gone from indoors to outside; like doors taxed their suddenly-altered mental states.
They wandered in tight circles just past the still-burning vehicle that had plowed into the school. Their movements were jittery, but somehow familiar. They looked like something Ken had seen before. He sensed it might be important, but didn’t have a chance to dissect the thought.
Because that was when they stopped being awed by the outside world; stopped being amazed by the magic portal that had brought them beyond the walls of the
high school.
They saw Ken.
They might have seen him before, but forgotten him in the strangeness of the outside world. He didn’t know. But now he saw them clearly zeroing in on him. He heard that strange, animalistic growl coming from all of them, that ratcheting cry that screamed of hunger, of rage, of need.
They ran for him.
He turned away and did his best to run as well. Not easy when the world felt like a Slip ‘n Slide coated in motor oil. His legs kept lurching in opposite directions, like his brain wasn’t sure which side should be dominant.
There was no way this was going to work.
He looked over his shoulder.
Four things that looked like they had once been students, and one that was vaguely recognizable as one of the front office staff. They had already halved the distance between him and them. They traveled in a tight group, coordinated as any group of special ops soldiers, within inches of each other yet never getting in one another’s way.
They were at the burning SUV. Maybe fifteen feet from him.
Fshhh-woosh.
It sounded at first like a giant inhaling. Then breathing out. Then….
Boom.
The SUV exploded.
The fireball went up twenty feet in the air. It hit the bodies of the two things tangled on the outside of the building and Ken heard them shriek in pain as their skin curled and sloughed away from their bones.
More important, the explosion also rocketed outward, completely engulfing the five monsters chasing him. They didn’t shriek. They didn’t make a single sound. Just disappeared in the high-intensity explosion.
Ken had an instant to smile, then the heat reached him. It felt like it seared all the hair off the back of his head, felt like it burned the shirt off his back. Instant sunburn.