by J. Thorn
There was some blood on the sidewalk below his feet. Nothing like it had been at the school, but more than you could write off as a passing nosebleed.
“Turn. Into one of… one of them.”
Dorcas swiveled to stare at him with wide eyes. “You mean if you get bit you turn into one of these crazies?”
Ken nodded. “It happened to one of my studen – I saw it happen,” he amended, trying not to think about Stu, screaming as blood streamed through the bite on his shoulder, staining his letterman jacket even as his eyes drained of their humanity. It was an impossible thing to try. Ken suspected that moment would be present in every moment he experienced for the rest of his life, like a horrible stained glass window through which he viewed the world.
“So they’re zombies,” said Dorcas.
“What?”
But she was already moving away, almost dancing down the sidewalk, hugging the walls of the building as long as she could. She looked like she’d trained for this. Maybe she had. Ken again regretted not going hunting.
He also wondered at what she’d said. Zombies?
He was a history teacher. He believed in facts and events, in what actually happened.
But he also knew that much of history was a lot closer to fiction than to fact. Often “history” was simply what the winners of major conflicts got to call their propaganda.
So… zombies.
Zombies – at least in the movies and stories he knew of – were mindless. That certainly matched up with the things that had taken over Boise. The trouble they obviously had with doors seemed to bear that out, as did their lack of speech and their incapacity for fear – the ones that had come out the window with him hadn’t been afraid, just angry.
Zombies were hard to kill. Ditto the things here. They had been bashed, blown up, pulled to pieces. And still they kept coming.
So how did you kill a zombie? Ken tried to remember the few zombie movies he’d watched. He preferred light comedies or straight action to horror films. But he thought it was shooting them in the head. Major brain trauma.
And that didn’t jibe. When Becca hit her head she went berserk. When Ken kicked Joe Picarelli’s skull bones back into his brain, the gym coach rampaged throughout the hall of the school. Neither died. They just went even crazier.
So no. Not zombies. Or if they were zombies, then the stories had gotten some things very wrong.
He realized that Dorcas was holding up her hand, motioning for him to stop. He skidded to a halt, instinctively drawing as close to the nearest wall as he could. It was an ice cream shop. Baskin Robbins. The neon sign that usually bragged about its “Thirty-OneDerful Flavors” was dark.
Come to think of it, Ken realized that the lights had been off in the accounting office where Dorcas had taken refuge.
Were lights on anywhere in Boise?
In Idaho?
How far did this go?
Dorcas spun around. “Go!” she whisper-shouted. “Go, go, go gogogogogo!”
She looked terrified. Ken would have bet she could play a game of high-stakes poker against a room full of Bond villains. He had no wish to see what had scared her.
So he ran.
27
Ken thought they were going to end up back in the office of Brooke Gale, CPA, but before he’d taken more than a few steps Dorcas grabbed him and propelled him sideways. He thought she had gone crazy; was going to ram him into one of the cars whose alarms was screeching away. But at the last second she swung him and instead he found himself shoved through the open door of the passenger side.
A moment later, Dorcas was slinging herself in after him, jabbing at him with her elbows and screaming, “Get over, get over!”
He heard something clang. Her monster-sized lug wrench. He wondered why she had dropped it, then realized she’d done so to make room, to make it easier to close the car door.
As soon as Dorcas had clearance, she slammed the door shut. Ken heard a meaty thud as it closed and Dorcas grunted. She must have closed it against her foot or hip. She didn’t seem to care, though. Nor did she appear to mind the loss of her formidable weapon.
She just hunkered down in her seat and motioned for Ken to do the same.
Ken was still half-straddling the gear selector, so he lurched over until he was fully in the driver’s seat, then he slunk down as well.
The car alarm was deafening inside the vehicle. Even so, he thought he could hear a strange sound. A low, vibrating drone.
“What is that?” he whispered.
Dorcas looked like she was about to respond, but instead of answering she said, “The vents!” in that whisper/shout that Ken was starting to associate with the new normality of his existence. She batted out her hands, seeming to punch at the dashboard. A moment later Ken realized she was slamming the air conditioning vents into their closed positions. He did the same for the ones on the driver’s side, still unsure what was going on but trusting in Dorcas’ sense of what should be done.
The sound grew louder. And with it, screams.
A moment later, Ken saw. He understood why Dorcas had done what she had done.
And hoped it would be enough.
28
Ken thought at first that he was seeing a sentient cloud. That a piece of the smoke that had engulfed much of Boise must have broken away, gained intelligence – at least on a rudimentary level – and begun prowling the streets.
It was an insane thought. But the world had very recently gone insane, so he didn’t think he was too out of line having things like that in his mind.
Then he realized that what came into view – what he glimpsed over the edge of the car door and the dashboard – wasn’t a cloud of smoke. It was black and constantly shifting. Composed of millions of bits of what looked like particulate matter.
But it wasn’t smoke.
It was a swarm.
The low humming he had heard when Dorcas pushed him into the car: the buzz of millions of wings.
And the screams were coming from deep within the cloud. Shrieks that sounded like someone being burned alive. Worse.
The swarm paused in the middle of the street, as though having a committee meeting about which direction to move next. Ken realized he was holding his breath.
The bees hovered an eternal moment. Then headed right at the car. Right for them.
Dorcas started muttering under her breath. Ken couldn’t tell if she was cursing or praying.
He started tearing off his shirt. Buttons popped.
Mags gave me this shirt. She’s gonna be pissed.
“What are you doing?” hissed Dorcas.
“The vents!”
“We closed ‘em.”
“You wanna trust that?”
She hissed. Started to take off her own blood-spattered flannel shirt, leaving her in a once-white tank top that had already turned cataract gray.
Ken shoved the fabric of his shirt against the air conditioning vents on his side of the dashboard, trusting Dorcas to do the same. In almost the same instant, it sounded like a hailstorm had engulfed the car. Sharp raps and taps against the windows, lower thunks against the roof and side panels.
The swarm had engulfed them.
29
He felt like screaming. The only reason he didn’t was that Dorcas was perfectly silent beside him. Providing a sense of calm that he could not have maintained on his own.
No, that wasn’t true, he realized. He wasn’t screaming because he was sure if he started, that would be it. He would just keep on screaming until whatever madness had infected the world made its way fully into his mind as well. He would scream until the world ended.
And then what would become of Maggie? Of the kids?
He knew he was deluding himself. Knew they were probably dead already. But he also knew that he had to cling to something. Sanity hung by the slim thread of hope. He wouldn’t be the one to snip it.
The bees were so thick outside the windows that he could see nothing else. Just mass
es of black and flashes of orange-yellow in the dark cloud. Just millions of stingers punching ineffectually at the windows.
He felt something under his fingers.
Please, dear God, please don’t let that be –
Another movement.
“They’re getting in,” he said. He practically had to scream to be heard over the din.
Dorcas nodded. “I feel ‘em.”
Ken looked around the car, trying to spot something else that would provide a better seal than their shirts.
Something buzzed. Not outside the car. Inside.
And he realized that they hadn’t covered the lower vents.
A moment later he felt the first insect buzz by his ear.
A moment after that Dorcas shouted in pain.
And a moment after that the first face appeared at the window.
30
It was one of the things. One of the zombies. Dressed in the outfit of a motorcycle cop, the rounded helmet making him appear almost as insectile as the bees that surrounded him. His mouth was open, and Ken could see bees crawling around the thing’s gaping maw.
They didn’t seem to be stinging him. Or rather, it.
The thing’s mad eyes oriented on Ken. It growled that horrific growl, and started to pound a gloved hand against Ken’s window.
Ken felt a searing pain at the nape of his neck. Bee sting.
He wondered how long it would take for either him or Dorcas to just lose it and drop their shirts from the vents, allowing more bees to flood in and hastening their deaths.
He wondered why it mattered. Maybe it would be best to just let it happen.
Another thump, another face. This time at Dorcas’ window. It was a little girl, barely tall enough to look into the car. She had blonde hair that had been braided into pigtails. Ken was sure before all this happened she had probably been beautiful, a shoo-in for the next Swiss Miss ad campaign. But now her pigtails had been dyed red, and her lower face was caked in gore.
Her teeth started clicking together, chittering, a sound that penetrated the thick hum of the bees and made Ken feel like someone was stabbing his soul with a psychic icepick. Like the cop, she started pounding on the window. She had to reach up to do it.
Bees crawled over her skin. Her open eyes. She paid them no heed. Only scrabbled at the glass, trying to get inside the car.
Liquid heat poured over the skin on Ken’s knee. Another bee sting. A groan escaped his lips. He glanced at Dorcas. She was still holding her shirt against the vents, but she was white-faced and shaking. She had blood running down her chin, and Ken thought she might have bit clean through her lip.
Whump.
Ken looked back at his window. The cop wasn’t hitting the glass with his gloved hands anymore. He had switched to headbutting the window with his helmet.
Whump.
He rebounded off the window. Growled and hit it again.
A crack appeared in the safety glass.
One more hit and the window would shatter. The bees could come in and Ken didn’t know if he’d die in a flood of stings, or if he’d survive long enough to turn into one of the things outside.
The once-cop reared back.
31
The final hit didn’t come. The cop leaned back, but didn’t punch through the glass with his helmet. He just kept leaning and leaning, until he was almost bent over backward. A glance out the other window showed the child doing the same.
Their mouths opened. They were breathing in unison.
“What the hell – Ow!” said Dorcas.
“I’ve seen this before,” said Ken. “I don’t know what it means, but we have a couple minutes before they start pounding us.”
“Fat lotta good that does us with the bees.”
A noise that sounded half solid, half gaseous, drew their attention. The windows cleared of the millions of bees. They hadn’t flown away. They just fell to the ground in a carpet of bodies that was inches thick for fifty feet in every direction.
“What the hell…?” Dorcas said again.
“Come on,” shouted Ken. “We don’t have much time.”
He threw his door open. It knocked into the cop, who fell to the ground. Ken jumped out of the car. His feet came down on the bees and crunched through them to solid ground. He felt sick to his stomach at the sound.
The nausea increased when he saw the cop, flat on his back in a sea of insect bodies, panting that strange pant, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolled back to white.
Ken couldn’t tell for sure if the bees were dead, or just stunned like the zombies. He thought dead, but he didn’t plan to stick around and check for tiny pulses.
A thud sounded behind him as Dorcas got out of her side. He looked over and didn’t see her, then she rose into view, shaking motionless bees off her super lug wrench with a grimace of disgust.
She looked at the little girl. “What’s this?” she said. It was a question to herself, Ken was sure. Just a whispered bit of reflection that he had overheard. But it made him ask as well.
What is going on?
He still didn’t know. Didn’t even know if this was the same thing he had seen before, or something totally different.
It didn’t matter. He was alive. That mattered.
Dorcas was alive. Another thing that mattered.
He hadn’t found his family.
That mattered most of all.
“Time to go,” he said.
Dorcas nodded. “Hell, yes.”
32
They ran to the street first, heading in the same direction they had before Dorcas spotted the bees. Ken led the way this time. He suspected they only had a few minutes of peace before the zombies came out of their trances and resumed attacking anything that moved. So he ran as fast as he could, given his injuries and the exhaustion that was starting to creep in like a dark smudge at the edges of his vision.
But as fast as he wanted to move, he was compelled to slow down when they came to the three lumps in the middle of the street.
“Bees,” was all Dorcas said. Then she was past, gesturing for him to come on.
Ken nodded, sparing one more glance at the three things in the road. They were only recognizable as people because of the clothing that wrapped their bodies like too-tight sausage skins. The rest was a bloated, swollen mass. Thousands of stings covering every inch of exposed skin. He shuddered to think how close he had come to looking like this.
Day’s still young.
He ran. Caught up to Dorcas. He didn’t know if she was slowing down due to age or exhaustion, if she was simply letting him keep up, or if he was getting some extra charge from the fear for his family that kept nipping at his heels. No matter which it was, he was soon in the lead.
He didn’t know how long they had to run. He had been in the high school ceiling last time this happened. Had it been seconds? Minutes? Time and panic had bled any sense of time from his mind.
They ran toward the Wells Fargo Center. Bearing east.
One block. It took forever, moving around the shattered remnants of cars and debris fields that looked like they belonged in warzones and not in middle America.
Two blocks. Ken tried not to count the bodies he saw. It was a lot.
They passed a clot of about fifty zombies in the street. Some of them held pieces of a recently torn-apart person in their hands. All stared at the sky. Breathing in unison.
Three blocks.
Two more zombies in the street.
Ken ran past.
And Dorcas screamed.
33
They were awake. The zombies were awake.
One looked like it had reached out for Dorcas as she passed and now it had a tight grip on her arm. She couldn’t swing her lug wrench, either, because the zombie – a fat, middle-aged man wearing board shorts and no shirt – had grabbed her on the side where she held her weapon. She couldn’t get a swing.
The other zombie was another man. Younger, with tattoos running up and down thick
ly muscled arms. He was reaching for her from behind as Dorcas struggled to keep away from the fat man in front of her.
Ken moved without thinking. He ran to Dorcas, grabbing her wrench. She resisted for a fraction of an instant before realizing that it was him grabbing, then let it loose and used her now free hand to keep the fat man at bay.
Ken didn’t have time to swing the wrench at the younger of the monsters. He just flipped it sharp end up and jabbed. The flat end of the lug wrench slammed right through the zombie’s head, going up through the base of its nose and then out the back of its skull.
Pink ooze flowed down the length of the lug wrench. Ken wanted to drop the thing, but forced himself to keep hold. Even when the goo ran down onto his fingers and arms, feeling like a thick, warm, melted milkshake. He had to hang on. Because the zombie – or whatever it was – didn’t die.
The wound was mortal. There was no way for something to survive a hit like that. But the strong young man didn’t fall. Didn’t die. He started shrieking, screaming, snarling, and gnashing his teeth.
He grabbed Ken’s hands, effectively pinning them to the lug wrench. And started pulling himself down along the length of the iron haft. The flat end of the wrench seemed to grow like an iron plant out of the back of his head. His jittering teeth came closer and closer to Ken’s hands.
And Dorcas was still screaming. A good thing, he supposed. It meant she was alive; that she hadn’t been bitten. Hadn’t turned.
The tattoed zombie was still sliding itself down the lug wrench. More and more of that pink goo welled from the zombie’s wound, and the more that dripped across Ken’s hands and arms, the more the thing seemed to go completely insane. Its body spasmed, its head tried to whip back and forth even though pinned in place by the bar.