Christopher nodded and resumed digging.
They pulled bodies and dismembered bits away. Piled them along the corners of the hall. Ken tried very hard not to think about what he was doing. And failed miserably.
He wondered what he would do if one of the hands he touched turned out to be small. Soft. The hand of a child. A hand he recognized.
He kept digging.
Slow going.
It was harder than Ken would have thought. Partly because it was just emotionally taxing to grab ahold of a piece of what had once been a person, to pull it out of a pile of other pieces. To drag it behind you and try not to think of what you were doing, of the reality of what was happening.
Part of it was because everyone stopped every minute or so. Just stopped as one, no words spoken. Listening. Trying to hear the sound of thunder that would indicate one of the hordes of thousands of once-human killers that now ruled the world. Or perhaps listening for the growl, that otherworldly sound that the things made. As a single voice it was disquieting, a sound like someone gargling a mixture of gravel and razor blades. In a large chorus it had a strange power, a psychic effect that encouraged you to just give up, to give in and die.
But there was also something else at work. Something making their job more difficult. At first Ken thought it was his imagination, this last obstacle – a literal wall of gore between him and a goal that he didn’t even know for sure still existed – just pushing him over the edge and making everything seem harder than it really was.
Until Dorcas grunted. “What the…?” she said. As with all words in this place that was bookended by death, the words were whispered. And as with all the words thus far, even whispered they seemed far too loud. Ken felt like they were screaming in a church. Any life here had become an obscenity.
The dead ruled this place. The living were interlopers. Were profane.
“What is it?” said Christopher. Even his ever-present smile had waned in the gory environment, though he had somehow managed to keep his clothing less spattered with filth than should be possible.
Dorcas hesitated. Then she held out the piece of former humanity – now reduced to so much ghastly masonry – that she had yanked out of the crumbling wall of death. “What is this stuff?” she said.
The others moved closer. Ken wanted to keep pulling at the bodies at this end of the corridor. He knew that taking a break was a bad idea; that if he stopped, getting started again would be that much harder.
But he did stop. He looked with the rest.
Dorcas was holding an arm. It looked like it had once belonged to a woman. The long, elegant arm of a woman in her twenties or thirties. Thin and beautiful. Fingers with several rings. Arm covered in a once-tailored suit sleeve that had been shredded.
The shoulder ended in a stump. It glistened. But not with blood. A pus-yellow substance coated the end of the arm, the flickering lights above them reflecting dully off the waxy patina.
Christopher reached out to touch it. Aaron stopped him. Grabbed the kid’s hand. “Don’t,” said the cowboy.
“What?” said Christopher. “It might be important.”
“So you’re just going to stick your finger in it?” said Aaron. “You remember that thing that puked acid before we came up here?”
Christopher stopped. But only for a moment. Then he poked the yellow substance. Dorcas yipped in sympathy, as though expecting his finger to melt off.
Christopher grinned. “Nothing ventured.” He removed his finger, touching it with his thumb. “Tacky,” he said. “Feels like….” He searched for the words. “Wet Play-Doh?”
“What do you think it’s for?” asked Dorcas.
Aaron shrugged. The older man turned around and grabbed the next piece of the wall of body parts. Another hand.
And he screamed, a strange scream that he bit off, muffled it the way they were all learning to do, the way they were learning they had to do in order to survive.
But the rest of the survivors heard.
They turned.
Ken saw what had scared the normally imperturbable cowboy.
Saw the hand that Aaron had grabbed.
The hand that was moving.
Ken stumbled back from the movement, falling into Dorcas and Christopher even as Aaron backpedaled as well.
And what remained of the wall of the dead collapsed.
There was a crackling sound that reminded Ken of ice crunching underfoot on a winter day, and then the bodies that had been so hard to pull apart only a moment ago just seemed to… drift like so many snowflakes caught in a windstorm.
All that was left was the hand. Still moving. Attached to a middle-aged man who stood in the place just beyond the wall. The man was dressed in the ragged remains of a gray business suit. Expensive-looking glasses hung askew from his blue face.
His chest and arms were coated in the waxy substance that Dorcas had just found.
He looked at the survivors. And even without seeing the bite marks that seemed to glow like brands along his neck and the right part of his jaw, Ken would have been able to tell from the look in the thing’s eyes.
It wasn’t a man at all. Not anymore.
The four survivors froze. Running for the elevator was out of the question: even if they got inside, there was no way they could get the doors closed and get the thing moving before the zombie was on them. And a single bite would end the struggle.
“Think we can take it?” whispered Christopher. Ken didn’t look, but suspected the kid was still smiling. Only this would be a death-grin, the kind of smile worn by a man about to kill or be killed.
“Let’s hope so,” said Aaron. “There’s just one.”
The thing in the suit held up its arms. It made a strange sound. Not the growl that Ken was used to. More of a cross between a dentist’s drill and something you might hear during a recording of exotic birds. Loud and thoroughly unpleasant.
An instant later, ten more of the things shuffled into the hall.
All of them pushed into the corridor, the flickering lights making them appear at once ghostly and all-too-solid. Six men and four women joined the original business-suited thing.
They all made that same strange chirping.
Dorcas started whimpering. A noise that Ken didn’t expect from her, not from the woman who had saved his butt repeatedly. But then, she’d never been pushed up against a wall of corpses, facing certain death – or worse – like this.
The things stepped toward them. As with other groups of the things, these moved in a coordinated fashion. Not lockstep or synchronized, but they never bumped into each other either. They seemed to be aware on some level beyond sight or sound where each of their fellows were and would be.
Aaron pulled out his gun. A .357 Magnum with two bullets. The draw was a bit awkward since he had to pull it with his left hand and it was set for a right-handed draw.
Aaron looked at Ken, and Ken saw in his eyes the question: “Are you brave enough to face them?”
Ken nodded minutely. He knew what the cowboy was saying, what he was asking.
Aaron turned to Dorcas. He smiled to her. “Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was soft. Not just quiet, but soft. The cowboy sounded like a father saying good night to a sick child. Like a husband saying goodbye to a beloved wife.
He clicked back the hammer.
Dorcas pulled her gaze away from the approaching beasts long enough to see what Aaron had in his hands. To see what he had in his mind.
Ken saw her shake her head.
Then the motion turned to a nod. Acceptance. Better to die than to become one of the things.
Aaron pointed the gun at her.
Ken wondered who would get the last of the two remaining bullets. He supposed it would be Christopher. He thought that was what Aaron’s look had meant: an old-fashioned request to let the women and children go free. Even if the children were simply the young men, and the only freedom available was the promise of quick death.
Dorca
s closed her eyes. A trace of a smile played along her lips. She looked at peace.
Aaron’s trigger finger clenched.
“Wait!”
The voice spun Ken around like a top. He expected to hear the deafening blast of Aaron’s gun discharging, the sound of Dorcas’ brains exploding through the already-defiled hallway.
But there was nothing. No sound. Aaron must have caught himself. Waited on Christopher’s shouted word.
One of the things had reached the kid. It had leaned in. Its teeth were chittering, snapping as though attacking the air itself. Christopher held so still he almost appeared to be a statue.
The zombie before him – a woman in a skirt and blouse that were so bright red they seemed offensively out of place – leaned in even closer.
And did not bite him.
She bent over. Picked up a dismembered leg. She coughed. The last time Ken had heard that ugly, gagging cough, the zombie doing it had vomited a black acid that had melted concrete. He tensed, waiting for Christopher to be splashed with the tarry substance, waiting for the young man to start screaming.
It didn’t happen.
Instead, the red-garbed monster vomited up a slick yellow substance. Ken realized that the thing had it all over the front of her clothes. Just like the first one they had found in the corridor. And, he saw, just like the other zombies that had crowded into this space.
The woman rubbed the end of the leg in the yellowy bile and then lay it on the floor before turning away, looking for another gory building block.
Ken realized that the yellow was some kind of biological mortar.
The things were building.
But what?
And why weren’t they attacking him and his friends?
“We should go,” said Christopher.
Ken was torn. He needed to find his family.
But there was bravery… and there was suicide.
He turned back to the elevator. Dorcas turned with him. They both stepped together, as synchronized as the monsters all around them.
And the zombies growled.
Ken froze. He looked behind him. The original monster, the one in the gray suit, was now staring right at him and Dorcas. Eyes looking at and through them both. Madness and rage battling for supremacy in its gaze. Ken waited for it to attack.
A moment later, it returned its gaze to the body it was trying to pull back into place.
Ken took another step toward the elevator.
Another growl. He looked back again. This time it wasn’t just the gray-suited zombie, but more than half of the things that had crammed their way into the hall.
“I don’t think they want us to leave,” said Christopher.
Christopher waved, gesturing for the others to follow him as he began walking down the corridor, threading his way between the eleven zombies that were now hiccupping and puking that waxy substance all over the place, using it as an adhesive to begin rebuilding the wall that Ken and the others had torn down.
After walking a few feet, Ken realized that the beasts had shifted subtly. Before, they had been simply working to rebuild the wall of corpses. They were still doing so, but had moved down the hall toward the elevator. Building so the wall would be between the survivors and the elevator.
Cutting them off.
Ken caught Dorcas’ eye. Her jaw was clenched. No longer whimpering, back under control like the tough farm girl he had always taken her to be, but clearly unhappy about this new development.
The things kept working. Every so often one of them would make that weird chirping sound. Ken couldn’t tell if it was an unconscious noise or a communication.
Then the beasts all stopped moving.
The survivors halted as well, as though their muscles had been intertwined with those of the beasts in the hallway.
The zombies raised their faces heavenward. Their mouths opened and they started breathing in time, panting.
In-out-in-out-in-out….
Ken had seen this, too. Each time it got shorter. Like a countdown.
This time the pause barely lasted ten seconds. And when it was over something different happened. Something new. And new was always bad.
The zombies shook their heads. Not like a person might do upon waking from a pleasant nap. No, they whipped their heads back and forth so violently it was like they were trying to shake their skulls free. Several of them started slamming their faces into the nearest walls, hitting so hard that the brittle crunch of breaking bones could be heard.
Ken braced for the madness that came whenever one of the beasts suffered head injury. It didn’t come. The things all stopped moving again. Simultaneously. Completely. Ken wondered if the things everywhere in the city, the state – the world – were similarly silent.
Then they moved. They went back to rebuilding their structure of bodies as though nothing had happened, vomiting up the glue-like substance and sticking pieces of what had once been people together in a wall that crept ever higher.
“I don’t think we should be here when they finish,” said Aaron.
“Yeah,” said Christopher.
They walked the rest of the way down the hall. It ended in a T-intersection, allowing them to move to the right or the left.
“Which way?” said Dorcas.
Ken looked around. He didn’t know.
Then he heard the scream.
There is no way to explain some things. No way to explain what it feels like to hold a new baby in your arms. No way to explain the joy of a new life.
There is also no way to explain the ache that takes hold of your heart when you hear one of your children cry in pain.
Derek broke his elbow when he was five. Nothing critical, just the typical little kid things that happen to everyone. Just a wrong move on a new bicycle. A moment in time that divided perfection from pain. One moment he was smiling, the next he was screaming.
Ken was home. It was summer. He saw it happen, and all he could think when it happened was how much he wished he had been working. Because the look on his boy’s face was too much to bear. The look of pain – of real pain for the first time – coupled with the unspoken question, “Daddy, why did this happen? Why did you let this happen?”
Ken would rather have broken his own elbow than suffered through that moment for another instant.
Derek forgot about it. He was up riding his bike again the next day, trundling along in a bright purple cast that he seemed to pick precisely because it clashed with his red bike helmet. But Ken didn’t forget. That scream became something that he heard in his dreams. The thing that signified the dangers of parenthood, the moments when you found that your children were vulnerable to the world.
It was that scream that told Ken that his children were as mortal as he. That they could be hurt. Could be killed.
It was the scream he heard now.
He ran to the right. The others pounded down the hall after him, but he was in the lead. And that was right. It was the way it had to be.
He had to get there first.
He was the daddy.
There were doors on either side of the hall. Some were closed, others were open. A few were missing: ripped off their moorings by hands far more powerful than they should have been. Blood stained the walls, but there were no bodies anywhere: all the corpses seemed to have been moved to the area near the elevators.
Ken ran past everything. The scream didn’t repeat, but he ran without question for the door at the end of the hall. It had to be that one.
That was the one that was sealed. Not by locks or bolts.
No, it was covered by a thick curtain of that same tacky secretion. That yellow wax that the things in the halls were using.
Another scream.
Ken’s child. Alive. Beyond the door.
And in pain.
10
Ken’s own injuries and agonies disappeared.
There was nothing but the sound.
Before, when the zombies had come together in m
asses, their growls had made him and the others want to lay down and quit. To give up and die. He had thought that was the most devastating thing he would ever hear.
He was wrong.
The high-pitched trill of Derek’s scream was worse. The scream of a little boy in extremis tore Ken’s own aches and pains away in an instant. He bounded down the hall and was at the doorway full seconds ahead of the others. Pounding against the waxy substance with his hands, even the handkerchief-bound hand that ended in three fingers instead of five. Slamming at the tacky, glue-like secretion all over the door.
He left red streaks behind. He knew he should feel it, should feel the pain of one more attack against an already overburdened system. But he felt nothing.
“Derek!” he screamed.
“Daddy!” The call came back even higher than before. As though hearing his father’s voice had not provided peace, but rather an increase of terror.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!”
But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t get a purchase on the slick wall of waxy mucus left behind by the monsters that had God-knew-what planned for his children.
Whump.
Something slammed into the substance beside Ken’s head. He looked over as it was drawn back.
It was Christopher. The kid had found a tall, cylindrical trash can somewhere and was ramming it into the yellowish wall. Pieces of the secretion came off in flakes, then chunks, then sheets.
“Shit.”
The word was whispered, but intense. Intense enough that it even managed to pull a grief- and terror-stricken father away from his single-minded task, if only for a moment.
Ken looked over his shoulder.
Whump. Whump. Whump. Christopher kept driving the trash can into the yellowed wall. A door began to emerge. Solid-looking, save for the glass window on the top where the words “Law Firm of Stacy Gomberg, Attorney At Law” could be vaguely made out, stenciled in gold lettering.
Whump. Whump.
Aaron and Dorcas had turned around. Facing behind them down the hall. Aaron still had his gun drawn, and had pulled the woman behind him in a gesture – useless – of protection.
The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2) Page 2