“Mommy,” he shouted. “Mommy, wake up!”
“Move,” said Dorcas. She yanked the kid out of the way, and Ken saw that she had found a bottle of water somewhere. He looked over and saw that Christopher had taken over her position, pulling the last webbing away from the old lady and her son. They were a dour pair, both dressed in shredded business attire, both gray of hair and countenance. Neither helped him pull the webbing away, they just waited for the young man to do the work, like he was a servant.
The conference room door started pounding, almost bouncing against its frame. It was a solid door, with a steel frame and perhaps even a steel core if the law firm was particularly security-minded. But how long would it last?
Dorcas unscrewed the water bottle she had found, wincing as she used her bad hand for the movement, then tossed some against Maggie’s face.
Maggie’s eyes fluttered. Dorcas repeated the movement, this time drenching Hope and the baby as well.
Hope sniffled. Started making noises. Maggie coughed.
“Maggie?” said Ken.
The door started crackling. The growling on the other side of it got louder.
Christopher moved next to Ken and started tearing the three girls loose from their bindings.
Maggie opened her eyes fully. They moved in circles, unfocused. Unseeing. He wondered what had been done to her. Wondered if she would wake up as his wife.
A moment later she saw him. Smiled.
“Ken?”
He smiled back. “She’s awake,” he said to no one in particular. Then spun as though to announce it to the world. “She’s awake!”
No one seemed to share his excitement. He couldn’t blame them. The door was shaking in its frame. Cracking and shimmying. Then he heard one of the zombies outside the door cough. There was a wet blat, muffled but audible even through the thick office door.
The door started to smoke. A hole appeared in the wood, eaten through by the acid the things were now producing. An eye could be seen, enraged and insane.
It seemed to focus on Ken.
The things shrieked.
More coughs.
More smoke.
They were coming in.
17
“Help me!” Ken started yanking more of the thick, gooey threads from his wife and children. Hope woke up as he did so. More when Dorcas emptied the rest of the water bottle on the six-year-old’s head.
Little Liz did not wake up. Her head lolled forward, limp and boneless-seeming. Her blonde curls plastered against her neck and her sheet-white forehead.
She was alive, Ken knew she was alive. Because she had to be alive. He couldn’t have done so much, suffered so much, to find his family less than whole.
What would he do without his baby?
She’s alive, Ken.
But she’s not waking up.
“What’s going on?” Maggie’s voice was slurred. Drifting on tides of whatever drug had been administered to her and the other girls. Ken slapped her face. Not hard, but not particularly lightly, either. It probably hurt him worse than it did her, but they didn’t have time for her to wake up gracefully.
The door was rattling harder. Smoke filtered into the room, prickling Ken’s nostrils. It smelled like vinegar and gunpowder: the smell of the acid these things made.
“Daddy?” Derek looked terrified. Staring at the shaking door, at the snapping teeth that were pressing through the cracks, one of the things crushing itself against the tiny opening so hard that the sharp edges of the wood were flaying the skin away from its skull. Blood flowed.
The thing coughed, and more black acid spewed. Aaron barely managed to get out of the way, the acid landing where his feet had just been and eating a hole right through the floor.
The things outside the office starting shrieking. Not growling, not trilling. Screaming. A new sound, one that Ken had not yet heard. Anger and alarm.
Ken touched Derek briefly on the shoulder. It was all he had time for. “You’ll be okay,” he said.
“I’m not worried about me,” said Derek. The kid was staring at his sisters and mother. Looking far too old for his age.
What are we going to do?
Hope coughed. “Mommy?” she said. Six years old, her voice was normally high and beautiful, but now it was thick and muddled. She looked around and Ken could tell she didn’t know where she was or what was happening.
“Ken, what’s going on?” Maggie was sitting forward, pulling away from the last bits of webbing that had bound her. Little Liz hung from her chest still, but Ken saw that it wasn’t just webbing that had fastened them together: the toddler hung from a front-facing baby carrier that Maggie must have slipped on sometime after abandoning the stroller in the building lobby. Technically Liz was probably a bit too big for the sling, but Ken supposed that government safety guidelines were out the window for now. Certainly it would have let Maggie move faster and not have to worry so much about keeping hold of the two-year-old on top of the two other kids.
It was a miracle they were alive.
Chut. Another gout of acid hit the floor somewhere behind him.
“Guys, we gotta come up with something.” Christopher sounded like he was about to panic.
Ken wanted to join him. Wanted to just start screaming. But he didn’t. He couldn’t afford to do that. He was a father, a daddy, and daddies didn’t have the luxury of giving into panic. Not if they wanted their children to stay alive.
He helped Maggie to her feet. “I don’t have time to explain,” he said.
She looked over his shoulder. Saw the creature that had peeled most of the skin off its face to get in. Saw the other things behind it, clambering to get through the rapidly-deteriorating door. She went pale, and gasped, and he knew her well enough to see the scream in her gaze, the shriek that wanted to come out.
She held her hands in front of her. Cupping them around Liz’s still-unmoving form. And she didn’t scream. Mommies can’t afford the luxury of panic any more than daddies can.
“What do we do?” Maggie said. She helped Hope to her feet. The little girl was listless, confused. A far cry from the bright, perpetually smiling child she had been the last time Ken saw her.
“Daddy, can I help?” said Derek.
Whump.
Ken looked over and saw that Aaron had grabbed one end of the coffee table, Dorcas the other. They battered it into the face of the zombie that was pushing itself through the door like a hideous mockery of birth. The thing screamed and coughed again. The coffee table fell in half almost instantly, the soft wood succumbing to the acid. But underneath the zombie was now writhing and shrieking as the acid it had expelled ate into its own flesh as well.
Smoke filled the room.
The things outside the office were still screaming their mad, enraged scream.
And a shudder rocked the building. It felt like an earthquake.
Only there were no earthquakes in Idaho.
18
“What was that?” shouted Dorcas.
“Hell if I know,” said Aaron. Soft-spoken as usual, though his words seemed a bit more clipped right now. He picked up one of the pieces of the broken coffee table with his good hand. Dipped it in the fizzling pool of acid that was eating a hole in the web-coated floor nearby, then slammed it through the widening slit in the door.
The wood punched right through the chest of the half-melted zombie on the other side of the door. The thing shrieked, but other than that didn’t even seem to register the attack. It kept thrashing wildly, madly, pushing ever farther through the door, ever farther into the room.
Ken looked at his son. Derek was staring at him with that look that was reserved for superheroes and daddies: that look that said, “You’ll save us. I know it.”
Ken tried to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. Tried to ignore the knowledge that they were doomed.
He ran to the only possible way out. The window. He, Aaron, Dorcas, and Christopher had climbed outside another building to
escape zombies.
Of course, that was before they added six more people to their group. Several of them drugged. Three of them children.
Shut up, Ken. Just look.
He looked. Rushed to the window and pressed his face against the glass. He couldn’t see anything but the reflections of the gray woman and her gray son, standing there and staring at him like they were irritated he hadn’t come better equipped to handle the situation. There wasn’t a good angle to see anything on the outside face of the building.
The building shuddered again. More violently this time, fairly rocking on its foundation. Maggie had to lean on the web-covered desk, Derek and Hope fell into their mother for support. Christopher and Dorcas weaved on their feet. The gray mother and son pair went down in a pile, both complaining about the weight of the other on legs and arms.
Only Aaron didn’t seem to notice the impossible tremor, simply stabbing another piece of wood through the disintegrating door as though hoping to pin the reaching zombies in place.
Ken spun. Picked up a chair. He swung it as hard as he could. It went through the office window and kept going, careening through with the pealing crash of glass shearing apart. The window sailed away.
“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the gray man, still writhing under his mother on the floor. “You got glass all over me!” He was a big man, tall and broad and solidly-built, but he sounded like a spoiled child who had just been told his party was over early.
A sound came through the now-open space. Deep. Thrumming.
The building rolled again.
Ken leaned out. Looked to his right. His heart sank.
There was no way to get out. Nothing to cling to. No footholds, no handholds. Just sheer concrete and glass.
Behind him, the door to the office sounded like it was about to fall apart completely.
“We gotta do something!” shouted Dorcas.
Ken looked left. His heart caught in his throat.
He looked down. And his heart stopped.
19
“You’re kidding.”
Maggie didn’t scream the words. Ken almost would have preferred it if she had. Instead, they came as a whisper when he explained what they were going to do – what they all had to do.
Boise had been undergoing “improvements” to its downtown area for the last few years – between five and fifty, depending on whether you asked someone who was paying attention, or one of the old-timers who just liked to bitch about things. Traffic that had once been sparse at all times of the day and night, even in the most crowded parts of the downtown area, had grown congested as it was rerouted to avoid construction areas. Scaffolding had sprouted like skeletal fungus, protecting construction workers from traffic, and vice versa.
The Wells Fargo Center they were in had been undergoing some kind of construction. A crane that was anchored somewhere in the street far below and extended beyond the top floor had been moving house-sized pieces of steel and concrete for weeks. In the first minutes of the change, the first moments when everything ended, something had blown up at the base of the crane. It tilted, then slammed into the side of the building.
Now it was still hung up against the face of the high-rise, slung at a drunken angle as though even the inanimate objects of the old world were in a state of shock about what had happened around them. The many supports and braces of the tower crawled like a ladder up the side of the building, extending past the top level.
The bottom was engulfed in smoke, a smoldering fire still barely-visible within the billowing clouds of black.
The working jib, the long arm of the crane, extended across 9th Street, hanging like a bridge over toward what was left of a ruined building. Touching, or almost touching….
“You think we can make it?” said Christopher.
“We don’t have a lot of choice.” Dorcas looked at the tower, and Ken knew she was wondering what he was: if the crossbars were close enough to jump to from the window. If someone with one good hand could climb up a good sixty feet, then another hundred feet across the jib, then over to the ruined remains of the One Capital Center. Assuming the jib even extended it that far.
And could they make it with children holding on? Ken knew she was thinking that, too, because her eyes kept flicking over to Derek and Hope. Not Liz: the baby was still knocked out – he hoped – in the sling on Maggie’s chest. But the other kids.
“I… I can’t,” said Maggie. “I can’t go up.”
The zombie at the door had its head all the way through. Its shoulders. The door was seconds away from cracking in half.
Ken sighed. “We have to.”
“Why can’t we climb down?”
No one else had seen it yet. No one else had noticed.
The building shuddered. Dorcas, still looking out the window at the tower, finally looked down.
She gasped.
20
Dorcas turned away from the window. She didn’t say what she had seen. And Ken was grateful for that. “I’ll go first,” she said.
“Like hell,” said a voice. The new guy. The gray-haired man. He was a fairly big guy, maybe six-foot-two and stocky to boot, but he jumped quickly to the window, elbowing Dorcas out of the way.
“Wait for me, Buck!” said the guy’s mother.
Ken thought, Buck? The guy seemed more like a Sherman or a Eugene than a Buck.
Buck grabbed his mother with one hand and a web-covered chair with his other, stepping up onto the chair and then from there to the sill. His eyes widened.
“What’s… what’s…,” he stammered. He was looking down.
Buck’s mother was more direct. She just screamed.
Maggie started toward the window. Ken stopped her. “You don’t need to see what’s there. We just need to get going.” He looked at Buck. “If you’re going, go. If not, get out of the way!”
Buck looked over his shoulder at Ken, terror and irritation warring on his features, then he and his mother jumped out the window. There was a thud a moment later. Clanks.
The building rumbled again. This time the tremor didn’t stop. It just kept moving through the entire building, looping rolls that made it hard to stay standing.
“How are we going to take the kids?” whispered Maggie.
“I’ll take the girl,” said Christopher, stepping forward. “You’ve got the baby.”
Maggie started to protest. Ken cut her off with a gesture. “He’s right. I’ll take Derek, he takes Hope. You take Liz. The others are working with one good hand each, so they can’t do it.”
“Is he…?” Maggie’s voice drifted off.
It didn’t matter. Ken knew what she was trying to say. “You can trust him with Hope,” he said. “You can trust Christopher with her life.” He turned to Derek and said, “Can you hold tight to me, champ?” Derek nodded. “Okay. We’re gonna go climbing. Don’t look down.”
“I won’t.”
The door shattered. Snarls – multiple growls – rammed their way into the room.
“Go!” shouted Aaron. “Go now!”
21
Ken yanked Derek upward, and at the same instant Derek’s arms wrapped around his neck in a death grip, so tightly he would have worried about suffocation if he hadn’t already been holding his breath.
The door fell to pieces. Completely. Utterly. Only the remains of the huge conference table between the beasts and the survivors kept them alive.
Ken propelled Maggie toward the window as Christopher picked up Hope and slung the six-year-old over his shoulder. She started screaming, kicking. Not understanding what was happening, still half-dazed from the effects of whatever had been done to her.
And Ken had to ignore it. He was only one man, there just wasn’t enough him to do more than what he was already doing. He had to trust Christopher to save his daughter.
He shoved his wife out the window. Barely a moment to let her get her grip on the sill, get balanced.
She jumped.
She
screamed in mid-air. Not because of the jump – the crane tower was only a few short feet to the left of the window, an easy jump even with an unconscious toddler strapped to you. He didn’t even think it was because of the heights involved. They were on the ninth floor, easily one hundred and twenty-five feet above the ground. More. But that wasn’t the frightening thing.
Not frightening at all. Not compared to what was happening. Not compared to the thing that had caused the building to rumble.
Ken and Christopher went to the window next, both of them squeezing into the opening. He glanced at the young man, once the son of Idaho’s governor, now just another person running a series of wind sprints against the Grim Reaper himself.
The kid had settled Hope into a death-lock under one arm. Holding her so tightly she could barely move.
“Thank you,” Ken mouthed.
Christopher nodded.
Something shoved them from behind. A not-too-subtle reminder that the zombies were in the room. That Dorcas and Aaron needed to get out, too.
Something scraped behind them. There was a scream, what Ken guessed was the sound of someone shoving the remains of the conference table against two dozen surging zombies.
Ken and Christopher jumped.
They hit the crane’s tower with twin thuds. Ken was holding his son with his bad hand, the one that was missing two fingers. Agony speared up through his wrist and his arm. His other arm felt only marginally better, the impact making his shoulder feel like it was on the verge of twisting out of its socket.
“Daddy, I can hold on,” said Derek.
Ken looked at his son. The boy didn’t wait for an answer, just spun around Ken’s midsection like he was on the jungle gym at the playground. Then his hands went around Ken’s neck again. “Gotcha,” said his son. He could almost hear the kid smiling. “Don’t cry,” shouted Derek, and Ken realized his son was trying to cheer up Hope. “The man looks nice!”
The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2) Page 4