“What’s the plan?” said Christopher, peering into the darkness beyond the elevator doors.
Aaron smiled oddly. And then, in an imitation of an old-fashioned elevator operator, he said, “Going down.”
35
Ken did what everyone else did when Aaron said that: he let his mouth hang open for half a second, then he pushed forward to see what was beyond the elevator doors.
He wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised at the fact that Aaron was saying they were going to go down, or the idea that the cowboy had done it in a joking fashion. Aaron had never made a joke before. Maybe the ongoing apocalypse was convincing the older man to let his hair down. Maybe he was just determined to go down smiling. Maybe Christopher was a bad influence on him.
But no matter his reasons, the idea of “going down” had to be a joke.
Because there was nothing beyond the doors. At least, nothing that looked like it could be used to go down. Just empty space and some mangled machinery.
“Are you nuts?” said Dorcas.
Buck nodded, looking a bit irritated for a second, like Dorcas had stolen his line in the play.
Aaron shook his head. The joking now gone from his expression. “Safest way down. We already know they go up stairs faster than we do, and now they’re climbing up the walls, for goodness’ sake.” He gestured at the darkness beyond the elevator doors. “Nothing to climb in there.”
“Uh….” Christopher raised a finger as though he was in a classroom, waiting to be called on by the teacher. “Yeah, so how do we get down then?”
Aaron took Buck’s light. He pointed it at the machinery. It looked like a large spool, hung up on the side of the elevator shaft, partially embedded in the concrete wall. Several thick metal cords trailed off it, disappearing into the darkness like the limp limbs of a giant daddy longlegs that had been smashed by an even larger boot.
“That there,” said Aaron, pointing at the spool, “is called the greave. Those lines sticking out of it are the elevator cables.”
“And?” said Christopher.
“And by federal law, each one of those cables is required to be strong enough to hold up the entire elevator at full capacity.”
“So?” said Buck. A bit of the haughtiness back in his voice.
“So that’s more than enough to hold each of us,” said Aaron.
Silence.
“How do we hold on?” said Dorcas. She motioned at her broken arm. “We got broken arms, banged-up hands. Kids.”
Aaron grinned tightly. “I happen to know a few tricks.”
“Tricks?” said Dorcas. “For going down a dark elevator shaft using elevator cables with one arm, holding onto kids?”
“Something along those lines.”
More silence. Broken only by the groans filtering up from below. Finally Christopher said what Ken supposed they were all thinking.
“Who are you, man?”
36
Aaron tipped an imaginary hat. “Aaron. Pleased to meetcha.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” said Christopher. “What do you do?”
“Honest answer?”
“Yes.”
Aaron sighed. “Most recently… and this is God’s truth… I was a rodeo clown.”
No one spoke for the space of perhaps ten seconds. Finally Buck said, “You. Are. Shitting me.”
“Language!” Maggie snapped the word, holding her hands over Hope’s ears. Ken almost laughed. It was absurd. They were fighting over whether or not to climb into a vertical coffin, climbing down – in some cases one-handed – into darkness in order to avoid zombie hordes that to all appearances had taken over the world. And Maggie was worried about Hope’s exposure to profanity.
But then, wasn’t that the point? What was the reason for living, if not to show our children at the very least the possibility of a better world? If life became nothing more than survival, then humanity was already dead. Homo sapiens might go on as a biological classification, but it was only in the expression of our better selves that we could find something beyond existence. That we could find meaning.
He squeezed Maggie’s arm.
“No, sir,” said Aaron. “I was a rodeo clown. Last few years. Good job.”
“That’s not where you learned to do this,” said Dorcas. Her voice was quiet. Intense.
Aaron looked at her, and even in the shaky illumination of the small flashlight, Ken could see the cowboy’s face change. The older man wouldn’t lie to Dorcas. But nor would he tell her everything.
“No,” said Aaron. “But that’s a story for another day.” He looked back into the shaft. “For now, just trust me.” He swung back to stare at them as the growling grew louder. “Please. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Buck shook his head.
“You’re all insane.” He stepped back the way they had come. Toward the waiting corpse of his mother.
Ken thought he might be right. This… how could they do it?
Buck looked at them. “Well?” he said. “Anyone coming?”
And at that moment the world fell in on him.
37
Like everyone else, Ken had visions of 9/11 burnt into his mind from news images, repeat airings of first-person footage, countless ratings-grabbing “special reports” over the years. He remembered seeing people emerge from clouds of dust and ash, covered so completely in the stuff they looked like ghosts. And that was what Buck looked like when he stumbled out of the vast white cloud a moment later.
“What…?” he coughed. “What happened?” He almost collapsed. Christopher caught him, pounding the man’s back as he hacked and spit to clear his throat.
Aaron was swinging his flashlight at the huge cloud that had enveloped Buck. The powder and dust refracted the light weirdly, seeming almost to eat it. “Collapse,” said Aaron.
He turned the light back on Buck. “He all right?”
Christopher nodded. “I think so.” He looked at Aaron. “Any way out through there?”
“Not anymore.”
“You have a helluva way of convincing people to do things your way,” said Christopher. He was grinning as he said it, but the grin looked a bit fractured to Ken.
Aaron nodded as though taking the words at face value. He returned to the elevator doors and disappeared into the narrow crack in the darkness.
Ken could just see him, shuffling around a narrow ledge that rimmed the edge of the shaft. He went to the greave and leaned down, inspecting the cables that trailed off it, pulling on each with his good left hand. Then he nodded to Christopher and the young man joined him out on the ledge.
“Rodeo clown my – uh, butt,” said Buck. Then dissolved into another round of gasping coughs.
Ken didn’t particularly like the bald older man, but he agreed. Whatever Aaron’s story was, there was more to it than dressing up in silly paint and hiding in barrels to keep angry bulls from killing thrown riders.
Christopher laughed inside the shaft. Not a happy laugh. The kind of laugh when you’ve just heard something deeply disturbing. Along the lines of “You’ve got terminal cancer,” or “You should think about getting your affairs in order.”
Then Aaron said, “Buck?”
Buck looked at the others. “I guess I’m the guinea pig.”
Ken expected the man to resist. But he stepped through the crack between the doors. Went over to Christopher and Aaron. The two talked to him for a moment, then Christopher lowered him into empty space. Buck disappeared from Ken’s sight.
Ken expected to hear a scream. Long, fading. Then nothing.
Instead, he only heard the continuing sound of the things coming closer. He couldn’t tell where they were: the open shaft bounced their growls and groans around and made it impossible to pinpoint a location.
Maggie grabbed his arm.
“Dorcas?”
The older woman shook her head. “Take the kids first,” she said.
“Dorcas….” Aaron’s voice carried a warning tone. Not of thre
at, but the sound Ken associated with a long-married man warning his wife he didn’t want to get into an old argument again.
Dorcas’ voice came back with the same tone. “I’m not going until they do.”
Aaron sighed. “Fine.”
“Who do you want?” said Ken.
“Dealer’s choice.”
Ken kissed Maggie, and pushed her through the doors.
38
Maggie disappeared, and Ken felt like he was losing himself again. He heard her voice, saw pie-slices of her face through the crack in the doors. She didn’t sound happy, and she gave a little cry when Christopher grabbed her and helped her drop down.
Then she was gone from view.
“Where is Mommy going?” said Hope.
“She’s going down where it’s safe,” said Ken. He hoped he wasn’t lying.
“Is Lizzy going to be okay?”
“Sure she is,” he said. He tightened his grip on his daughter. Sometimes he worried that he might hold her too tight, sometimes he feared he would hug her so close that he would crack her ribs – wouldn’t that be something fun to explain at the emergency room?
But there were no more emergency rooms.
No more hospitals.
He didn’t know if there’d even be a tomorrow.
So he held her as tightly as he could. Held her until she groaned.
“Ken,” whispered Christopher. “Your turn.”
He loosened his grip on Hope, then made sure her arms were securely around his neck. After a moment, he took the belt off his pants. He slung it around his chest, and it just went around her narrow torso as well. He cinched it through the last hole on the belt. Not much as far as safety harnesses went, but it was better than nothing.
“Hold on, okay,” he whispered.
She nodded. “I’m scared.”
“Me too. But if you hold on tight, maybe I’ll be less scared, okay?”
She looked at him. Serious eyes that shone in the darkness. She nodded. “I’ll hold you.” Her arms tightened.
Ken thought of Derek. His children were good. Genuinely good people.
Please, God, let me save her. Let me save Liz. Let me save what’s left of my family.
He stepped through the elevator doors. Onto a ledge, six inches wide and nothing below.
Please, God.
39
He only stepped in a few inches before Christopher grabbed him. The young man seemed unaware of the fact that he was dangling only inches away from a dark nothing that extended probably over a hundred feet below them. Ken remembered the way they had met, only maybe an hour – and what seemed like a hundred years – before. Christopher had saved them all from a small horde, blowing up a floor of a building, and showing them how to scale the outside of it to escape. He seemed equally at ease hanging onto a vertical surface as he did on terra firma.
“Where’d you learn to do this?” Ken asked.
Christopher laughed. “Parents kept shipping me off to taller and taller boarding schools.” His smile widened. “New York was the highest.”
“Come on,” said Aaron. “No time for jabbering.”
“Shouldn’t there be a ladder?” said Ken.
Christopher pointed. There was a ladder. It ended about ten feet above their heads, sheared off mid-rung. Above that was a pile of rubble that didn’t look very stable. Probably the remains of whatever motor room had housed the elevator equipment.
“Come on,” said Christopher. He helped maneuver Ken into position, then he and Aaron dropped Ken below the greave.
Beneath the spool that held the elevator cables, things got dark in a hurry. Dark, and torn up. What Ken had assumed was a normal elevator shaft proved to be marred by tears and gaps, the cylinder obviously crooked even in the small area that he could see before darkness claimed the tunnel.
Ken felt around with his feet. The side of the shaft was crumbling nearby, and he was able to stand on some partially-pulverized concrete that formed a foothold. He didn’t know how stable it was, but it was all he had.
Better than nothing.
A ghostly wail came from the darkness. The zombies in the building, searching for them.
“Now what you’re going to do is rappel down,” said Aaron. The cowboy was leaning down, whispering only a few inches away from Ken’s face.
“I don’t have any gear,” said Ken.
“You ever rappelled before?” asked Aaron.
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t know what to do with the gear anyway. So we’re good either way.”
The cowboy grabbed one of the cords and pulled it over to Ken. It didn’t have much give, and when the cowboy pulled it over Ken’s neck the steel cords bit into his skin.
“Ow!” Ken said.
Below him, the groans intensified. And now they sounded like they were even with him, too. Were they on the same floor?
“It’s better tight. It’ll tear your neck up, but better that than falling, right?” said Aaron. Ken nodded. “Now step over the cord. No,” said the cowboy as Ken clumsily complied, “with the other leg.” Ken adjusted. The groaning of the things was getting louder.
“They’re coming,” he said.
“Then move faster.” Aaron instructed him on how to wrap himself up in the cord until he was cinched in a tight curl of the steel cable. There was almost no play in it, and it bit painfully against his crotch and his neck.
“Now,” said Aaron. “Listen close. Step back. The cable’ll hold you. Hold on with your right hand – your good hand – onto the cable that’s between your legs. That’ll keep you from going down too fast. You can hold your girl with your left arm.”
“Okay.”
“Just remember – the heights are nothing to worry about. Falling never hurt anyone. Hitting the bottom is the problem. So don’t let go.”
Ken waited for more. Silence. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Aaron looked over. Then back at Ken. The cowboy’s face was pinched and nervous. “I’d appreciate it if you got a move on, son.”
Ken nodded. “Hold on, Hope.”
Hope’s arms tightened around his neck.
He suddenly remembered countless cartoons from his childhood, hearing animated animals say, “Look out for that first step, it’s a doooozie!”
He stepped back.
40
He held on tight. Tight to Hope. Tighter to the wrapped steel cables in his right hand. The fibers bit into his flesh, and he could feel the skin tearing away from his neck as he let himself fall down through the air.
Down through the darkness.
He wondered how far he should go. And answered the question as soon as he asked it of himself.
You go as far as you can, Ken. You go until you can’t go anymore.
He dropped into nothing. Looked up and saw he had already fallen farther than he thought. The light where Aaron and Christopher had been was nothing but a point above him. A star in the darkest night he had ever experienced.
There was nothing else. Nothing but black and the weight of his daughter against his chest and neck.
And the groans. The growls.
The zombies sounded like they were everywhere. They sounded like they were above, below.
They sounded like they were in the shaft.
“Daddy,” said Hope. Her voice was low. A whisper. As though she sensed danger’s propinquity, and even her child-mind knew that silence was critical.
“Shhh,” he said. Gentle. He didn’t want to scare her worse than she must already be. Worse than he was, for that matter.
Still dropping, still letting steel threads slide through his clenched hand. The cable was covered in some kind of thick grease, but even that wasn’t keeping friction from rubbing his skin raw. He felt like his hand was bleeding.
How far down?
As far as you can get.
He wanted to shout. To see if Maggie was near. But what if he was heard by… other things? What if his sh
outs drew danger rather than comfort?
He looked up. The light that had been a star was now just a hint, a dream of a memory. Then a black shape came between him and the memory and all light was gone.
He figured the dark thing must be Dorcas, lowering herself one-handed. Christopher and Aaron would be following her.
All the way down.
As far as we can get.
As far as we can go.
But he didn’t go any farther. He stopped.
Because he heard another sound. Another growl. And this time it wasn’t bouncing up from some unknown place below them. It wasn’t reverberating off broken walls, thrown to his ears by the acoustics of disaster.
No, it was here.
A moment later the sound came again. And with it the smell, the warm, rotten smell of one of the things.
Inside the shaft.
41
Ken couldn’t tell if the thing was on a ledge like the one that had circled the shaft behind the elevator doors above, or if it had found some piece of ladder to climb, or if it was just scaling the bare walls of the concrete tube the way the zombies had climbed the walls of the buildings outside.
Nor was there any indication how it had come to be in the elevator shaft in the first place. Maybe it was some hapless maintenance man, caught in here when the change came, converted to a mindless monster and stuck since that first instant. Then Ken realized if that was the case the others who had come this way already would have made some kind of noise of warning.
No, the zombie was a new arrival. Had to be.
The things were like cockroaches, sliding into any available crack or crevice, squeezing in to search for food.
Ken held his breath. He continued letting the cord reel through his hand, praying that Hope would remain silent.
He realized the area was starting to brighten. What had been a pitch black mystery had turned into a thick gray fog.
The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2) Page 7