by J. Thorn
And it was perfect.
He stopped whispering. Kicked at the thing below him. Aaron and Dorcas were talking in low tones. Aaron handed her something. She passed it to Ken.
A knife.
Ken stared at it. He didn’t realize what he was supposed to do with it for a moment.
“You’re not gonna die here,” said Dorcas. “You have a family waiting for you.”
“I can’t,” said Ken. He looked at the knife; knew that it must have come from the cowboy. About four inches long, one side a curved razor-edge, the other a serrated saw blade.
“I can’t,” he whispered again.
The hands grabbed his legs.
“You have to,” she said. “We can’t get by you, so you have to or we’ll all die.”
He took the knife.
69
Ken realized that he wasn’t completely trapped. He realized the crack hadn’t completely sealed around his hand. He realized only his left pinky and ring fingers were pinned. He realized that he couldn’t even feel them.
He realized none of that mattered. Cutting off a part of your body – any part – was not something the human race was equipped for.
Something scraped at his lacerated legs.
“Move it, boy,” said Aaron. The cowboy sounded composed as always, but Ken heard terror seeping in around the edges of the calm tones.
He leaned into the wall. He wiggled the knife blade between the two stones that had clamped him in place. He couldn’t just take a swing at himself – the angle was bad, there was no way he’d do it right. He’d end up bleeding to death and still be pinned there on the side of the wall.
Instead, he pushed the knife blade under his fingers. Using the knife hilt as a fulcrum and the blade as a bar, he levered the knife upward just behind the point where the fingers disappeared.
The pain bit him hard and deep. He screamed. Leaned down harder on the knife. He couldn’t even saw. Just had to use his body weight to drive the knife upward, parting flesh and tendon and bone a millimeter at a time.
Warmth trickled out of the gap between the stones. The things below seemed to delight in the life raining on them. They raked at his legs. He had to stop, his fingers half-severed, and step to higher footholds.
Three shadows fell from above. Dorcas screamed. She fell back but Aaron grabbed her and managed somehow to yank her back to safety. They both climbed a bit higher.
Ken leaned on the knife again.
The last bits of tissue separated. The knife blade flew upward as resistance disappeared, and the knuckles of Ken’s right hand scraped against the stone below as the hilt went down.
He realized at that instant that his wedding ring was still attached to his dismembered finger. The gold circle crushed between stones. He would never see it again. That fact hurt almost as badly as the physical pain.
Then he felt himself falling. He let go of the knife so he could grab onto the wall. His entire soul ached at the idea of putting his right hand – his remaining good hand – in another gap, but he had no choice.
He pushed his bleeding left hand against his chest. He felt the pain, but it was cloaked, like a fire under a blanket. It was there, it would consume the blanket and be all the brighter for it in a moment. But for now it was only a hint of itself.
Ken moved quickly. He didn’t know how long he would be able to keep climbing.
He moved across the rest of the span of the inverted corner. He reached around to the adjoining face of the building. He could hear Dorcas and Aaron, grunting and shouting almost nonstop now as they fought off the waxing tide of zombies that were reaching for them.
Ken pulled himself around the corner.
70
The growling fell away the second Ken turned the corner.
It was still there, but so much less. The weight of the sound, of the call to lay down and die or become one with the horde, fell off Ken’s shoulders and suddenly he felt like he could get through this. The fact that he was in a very real sense less than he had been a moment ago was something to be considered and dealt with… but it could be dealt with.
He also realized that the scrabbling, grabbing hands that had been reaching for him an instant before were no longer doing so. His legs hurt, and it seemed likely they always would, but the pain was less an immediate thing. More a memory than a now. Something that had receded into the background wall of noise, not a tidal wave but merely storm surf crashing nearby.
Ken looked down. This face of the One Capital Center building rested on the rubble that had once been the northeast side of this portion of Idaho Street. The mountain of debris was covered in jagged forests of rebar and concrete, glittering glasswork shrubberies. The zombies crowded behind Ken, but they clearly couldn’t climb it. At least, not as fast as they had climbed each other and the smoother sides of the decapitated skyscraper.
Nor could the zombies above reach them: the ones that threw themselves off the roof or the floor above were impaled on rebar, or shattered on concrete pieces, or simply fell brokenly down the mountain that had once been a monument to human industry. A few stayed close, but they seemed hurt badly enough that they couldn’t move quickly, couldn’t grab at their prey or bite them.
A reprieve.
“Come on!”
Ken looked over and saw Christopher, waiting about twenty feet down the side of the building. He was holding tight to a mullion, pulled in close so as not to be grabbed by any of the falling creatures. But he was still grinning. Just a walk in the park.
Ken pulled himself toward the kid. The building kept shaking, and he wondered what came next. They couldn’t keep going around the skyscraper indefinitely – even if there hadn’t been zombies on the front and back, he didn’t think the thing was going to last much longer. Especially not if more and more zombies were climbing into the stressed structure, which seemed likely given their single-minded pursuit of anything human.
It struck him that he had started to think of himself as human, and them as something else. Not simply human and once-human, but human and other. Human and alien. Human and less.
He slid over the last few feet to Christopher. The numbness in his left hand was starting to recede, that blanket starting to be consumed by the underlying pain.
“What now?” he asked. He heard the muffled sounds of Dorcas and Aaron behind him. Realized with macabre amusement that all three of them were operating one-handed. Only Christopher looked fine, like he had rolled out of bed, gotten ready for the day, and then decided to hang on the side of a beheaded skyscraper rather than go to the mall or become a movie star.
Christopher looked up. Another zombie fell, shrieking, and just missed pulling the kid over the slope of the rubble and glass mountain.
“You kinda gotta time this right,” he said. “And I can’t really come back to show you twice, so be careful, okay?”
A zombie flew past them. Rolled over the piles of glass and steel. Impaled itself on a long spike of rebar, the metal going through its face and out the back of its skull. It didn’t die, just as the other zombies that Ken had seen suffer major head trauma had failed to expire. That viscous pink fluid spurted, and the zombie began screaming and dancing a strange dance on the side of the mountain, madness on chaos.
Then the zombie did something new. The rebar spike entered its face through its cheek, emerging just above the thing’s hairline in back. It couldn’t get off, but it stopped shrieking and twitching. Its jaw opened, dropping down while its upper head remained pinned in place by the rebar.
It coughed, the same coughing that Ken had heard in the dark stairwell minutes before. A strange noise, one that sounded like pieces of gravel were grinding together in the zombie’s throat.
The thing vomited, expelling ropy strands of bile. Some of the fluid splashed against the concrete that held the rebar in place, and on the rebar itself. Black smoke poured upward from the concrete and steel, and even from this distance Ken could hear the acid hiss of materials being broken d
own.
“Good God,” said Dorcas.
They were all transfixed by the sight for a moment. But only a moment. Another zombie pitched itself off the top of the building, sliding away to oblivion – but only after nearly grabbing Aaron on the way down.
“Time to skedaddle,” said Christopher, tearing his eyes away from the zombie. Its flesh was now smoking, whatever acid it had expelled eating away at its own skin and bone as it screamed.
“Watch close,” said the kid. “Remember: no second chances.”
And he jumped off the side of the building.
71
At first Ken thought Christopher had just chosen an outrageously extravagant way to commit suicide: rather than face the end of the world, he’d find a few struggling survivors, con them by pretending he could save them from a conveniently placed pair of zombie hordes, blow up half a building to do so, then convince them to throw themselves into the equivalent of a thirty foot tall pile of knives and broken glass.
In the next moment Ken changed his mind. The kid wasn’t a suicide, he was a magician. Christopher slid down the mountain about seven feet, narrowly missing hitting the same jutting rebar that had skewered the still-jittering, still-melting zombie… and then he disappeared.
“What the…?” said Dorcas.
Christopher’s head popped into view. It seemed like it just appeared out of nowhere, the world’s largest groundhog taking stock of the apocalyptic winter the world had spun itself into. “Come on!” he shouted.
Ken shimmied over a few feet. Moved quickly. He didn’t give himself a lot of time to think about what he was doing.
When he was a senior, he and some high school friends had found a pair of thick pads that the wrestling team left out. They dared each other to greater and greater gymnastic attempts. One of Ken’s buddies bet him a crisp ten-dollar bill that he couldn’t do a backflip.
Ken stood on the pad. Flipped. Earned himself ten bucks.
Another friend asked him to do it again. Awestruck and disbelieving at Ken’s athletic prowess.
Ken, more than a little surprised himself, stood on the mat. But he wasn’t worried – he’d just done it five seconds before, so no big deal, right?
And not only did he fail to land the backflip, this time he was completely incapable of even moving. The other guys jeered him about it, riding him mercilessly about his complete lack of balls for most of the year, apparently forgetting that he had knocked their socks off moments before.
Ken couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. Couldn’t figure out why he could do it the first time, the time he didn’t know what he was doing, but not the second time, when he did.
It wasn’t until reading about World War II landing invasions in college that he realized what had happened. Reading about them, reading how the first wave guys weren’t the bravest: it was the second wave soldiers. The soldiers who knew what was going to happen. What waited. The enemy, the bullets, the death.
His body and mind had realized what could happen. That he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and could have broken his neck. He got lucky once, but they weren’t about to let him risk it again.
Sometimes reckless action was the best way to proceed. Sometimes it was the only way things could possibly work out.
Ken jumped.
He realized he hadn’t bothered looking up, and hoped none of the rooftop zombies had chosen that moment to come lurching down after him.
Reckless action saved him. He hit the concrete mountain untouched. His feet slipped in dust and pulverized concrete. They went out from under him and he slid headfirst toward Christopher’s still-waiting head.
He passed the spiked zombie. It seemed to be wilting. The black acid it had vomited had melted most of its front, and Ken’s nose twitched as something that smelled like vinegar seared his nostrils.
He looked back at Christopher. At the kid’s grinning, disembodied-looking head.
The head disappeared.
A moment later, Ken did, too.
72
Ken fell into strong arms, and immediately lashed out. He knew it was zombies. Because what else could it be? What other thing would there be in this place, in this new earth, that would hold him?
“Easy, man.”
The arms righted him. Held him until his feet found purchase on solid ground. Then shoved him away. Ken wheeled his arms as something dark slid between him and the silhouette he recognized as belonging to Christopher. He heard Dorcas hiss as the kid caught her as well, probably knocking her broken arm painfully.
Aaron fell down into their hidey-space a moment later, not needing Christopher to steady him but landing gracefully as a cat with the barest of sounds as his cowboy boots hit the dusty material underfoot.
“Where are we?” Ken said.
Christopher didn’t answer right away. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief that he handed to Ken, gesturing to him to wrap his hand. Ken did, grimacing as the pain of his missing fingers – both of which were still spitting blood out of stubs that ended just past his knuckles – hit him anew.
He also thought it strange that a kid this age should have a pocket handkerchief. Even before the world came tumbling down, that would have been weird.
Aaron reached over and tied a quick and efficient field bandage around Ken’s hand, knotting the handkerchief so tightly it ached. Ken tried not to groan. Mostly because Aaron didn’t make a sound about his own mangled fingers, using his one good hand and his teeth to tie the handkerchief and moving so quickly it seemed he had been born doing so.
“We’ll have to deal with this soon,” said Aaron, looking at the already-reddening fabric on Ken’s hand.
“Sure, we’ll just stop at St. Luke’s on the way downtown,” said Ken. He meant it as a joke. It came out thin and pallid, almost hopeless-sounding.
Aaron nodded as though taking Ken’s statement seriously. And Ken suspected that if anyone could find a working hospital in this mess of a world, it might be the cowboy.
“Come on,” said Christopher. He pulled a small flashlight out of his back pocket and started leading Ken and the others into a narrow passageway. On all sides were bits of cement, metal, glass, wood. Everyday life reduced to formless nothing. Reality crushed by forces it had been neither designed nor prepared to meet.
“I saw some people come out of this hole a few hours ago, so I explored it,” said Christopher. For a moment Ken didn’t understand what the kid was saying, then he realized he was responding to Ken’s earlier question regarding where they were.
“Why would you do that?” said Dorcas. She sounded winded, but Ken was amazed at the woman’s stamina.
“Why not?” Ken didn’t have to see Christopher’s face to know the kid was smiling. “Not much else to do, other than stay alive.”
Ken didn’t know whether he was hearing sublime wisdom or utter stupidity. On the one hand, it sounded like Christopher was handling the collapse of humanity better than anyone here. On the other hand, Ken thought he would have found something better to do than just go exploring. Hell, he was doing something better.
“What happened to the people?” asked Dorcas.
“Some of the creeps got ‘em.”
“The what?”
“The things.”
“So you went in to explore?” Incredulity spiked Dorcas’ voice.
Christopher didn’t sound offended when he replied. “Sure. Lucky for you I was doing it, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted you guys getting into trouble and wouldn’t have been able to do my Knight in Shining Armor act.”
“You were all alone? Where’s your family?” said Ken. He wanted to slap himself as soon as he said it. It was the kind of thing you asked about before. Not now.
Christopher sighed. “Lucky us, we were all together when it happened. Dad killed Mom, she took him down as she died.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dorcas.
Christopher’s shoulders bounced up and down. “I think they
’d been wanting to do it for a while. The only reason we were together was for a photo op. The marriage was mostly for electoral purposes, you know?”
Behind Ken, Aaron chuckled. “Thought I recognized you. Your Elgin’s kid.”
“Guilty as charged.”
Ken kept following the kid – the young man, he corrected; he now knew that “the kid” was in fact twenty-two years old – but his footsteps stuttered a bit.
“You’re Bud Elgin’s son? Governor Elgin?”
Christopher didn’t answer. He clicked off his light, but Ken could still see enough to make his way through the fissure in the ruined building. Light clawed at them from somewhere ahead.
There was a huge rumble, then a thud that shook Ken’s teeth in his jaw. He fell into the side of the narrow passage, leaning against what looked like a desktop that had been thrown sideways and embedded in a wall of gravel. He kept his wounded hand buried against his chest, but even the vibrations of the collapse that made it through to his absent fingers wrung a cry from him.
He looked back at Dorcas and Aaron. Aaron had his feet planted wide, his mangled hand clutched to his chest but otherwise looking fine. Dorcas had fallen down.
“I think we left that building just in time,” said Aaron as he helped Dorcas to her feet. Her face tautened, but Aaron just looked like he was providing basic information: it’s eighty degrees out, today’s a Tuesday, and… oh, yes, the world’s ending and the building we were in just collapsed.
Ken turned back to Christopher. The young man was making his way toward the light. “I’m not the Governor’s son,” he said. “There is no governor. In case you hadn’t noticed, the United States disappeared a few hours ago.”
73
“Sorry about leaving you guys on the side up there, but I saw the floor looked like it was collapsing, and figured if you were hanging out there as bait none of the creeps would notice me sneaking in and dropping off a care package.”