He looked up.
The star had returned to the sky.
The light was coming down.
Ken looked over.
And saw the zombie clinging to the wall of the shaft directly across from him.
42
The thing was facing away from him, hanging to the wall. Ken couldn’t tell what it was clinging to: in the brightening light he could see that parts of the shaft were wrecked, huge pieces of concrete barely hanging to their moorings. Other areas looked smooth and unmarred.
The part of the shaft where the thing was climbing looked relatively whole, and Ken couldn’t tell if it was holding to something as a man would, or if it was somehow adhering to the smooth surface of the shaft.
He could see the thing’s head was tilted back, though, and it was easy enough to observe that it was tracking the light above them both.
Hope inhaled. She was going to scream. When she did, it was over. The thing would notice them. Would come for them. Would leap to them and knock them into the void, or would simply pull them to pieces right there on the cable.
Or it would bite them. Would change them.
A scuttling noise aborted the little girl’s scream mid-breath. Ken looked over and saw another zombie pull itself through a crack in the side of the shaft. The crack was too small for something its size, too small by far. The zombie didn’t care. It yanked itself through the crevasse, seeming to shed what remained of its clothing and the skin below it like a snake, and when it came into the shaft it was bleeding along its entire length and breadth. Impossible to tell if it was even a man or woman. Just a growling, chittering length of pulpy blood. A thing that stuck impossibly to the slick interior of the shaft.
Twenty feet away from Ken and his daughter. Empty air the only thing separating them.
It hadn’t seen them yet.
Yet.
The two things scuttled along the wall of the shaft. Drawn to the light that was still dropping closer, closer. They climbed upward, and as they did Ken realized he could hear a subtle popping noise every time they moved their hands. It sounded like the noise you might hear pulling your foot out of a wet bog. A suction seal breaking.
They were moving toward Dorcas. He could see her now, dropping toward them. He didn’t know if she was aware of them. He doubted it.
He didn’t know what to do, either. Did he call to her? If he did, he would draw their attention. And die.
What would that gain the group?
He pulled Hope tighter. So tight he thought he heard her bones creak.
The two zombies, ever clearer as the star of brightness dropped closer and closer, climbed. Chittered. Growled.
Dorcas stopped her descent.
She must have seen them.
One of the zombies shrieked. That trilling call that Ken thought was meant to summon others.
Sure enough, a moment later another one of the things began pushing itself through that same crack. Peeling off its outer layers of clothing and skin on the jagged edges of the concrete rift as it yanked its way into the shaft.
And then another.
Another.
Another.
He heard something skitter behind him. Trilling.
He turned his head.
There were more of the things behind him.
They were everywhere.
43
For some reason, Ken was less frightened than he was disturbed. As though his fear had been short-circuited by some internal sense that what he was seeing was not just horrifying but wrong.
Humans should not be able to scale sheer, unblemished walls.
They should not be able to do what these things were doing.
They moved strangely in the pseudo-illumination of the small light above. Seemed to jump from place to place. One moment in one position, then Ken blinked and when he opened his eyes their configuration had changed.
There were more and more of them, too. At first just five or six, then ten, then a dozen, then twenty. Then the walls of the shaft started to disappear under a shifting blanket of torn and bleeding flesh.
Many of the things had the same tumorous growths that he had seen on the zombies that exploded out of the webbing in the attorneys’ offices in the other building. Dark masses that were covered in thick hairs and looked strong as armor plating. They appeared in random blotches all over the things’ bodies, and for some reason they, too, struck Ken as deeply, innately wrong. They made his skin crawl, made acid creep up into the back of his throat.
The things clambered up and down the shaft. Some of them looked at him, others stared at Dorcas. Still others seemed to be focused higher and lower – no doubt putting their sights on the others who hung helpless on the cables in the shaft.
What would happen when they were ready to strike?
Ken had his answer a moment later.
One of the zombies screamed.
And jumped.
44
The things had jumped before. When Ken, Dorcas, Aaron, and Christopher had found themselves hanging off the side of a building the things had thrown themselves off higher floors in an effort to capture them. But that had been different. That had been almost as though the things had simply shambled to the edge of the floors above, then lobbed themselves over as though reaching for their prey and having no awareness of the fact that their floor space had run out.
Now, only a few hours later, the things were leaping at the survivors in a different way. No jumbled falls, these were bursts of uncoiling energy that brought to mind pouncing jungle cats.
Not only that, but the jumps were much farther than they should have been. The monsters bunched against the shaft walls, then shoved off into space, pushing out not a foot or two, but five or six or seven or ten feet into the nothing of the shaft before falling with a shriek.
And even as they fell, their fingers reached, struggling to grasp what they sought. They screamed, they clawed at the air.
Above Ken, Dorcas was screaming. Below him, he could hear Maggie doing the same. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear his wife calling out, screaming his name.
“I’m here, Maggie. Hold on!”
He didn’t know if she heard him. Not over the sound of her own screams and those of the shrieking, falling things everywhere around him.
Hope was suddenly, oddly silent.
He looked at his daughter. She was peering at the things that filled the air around them. Her eyes almost glittered, but not with fear. He couldn’t tell what the look was, but it wasn’t fear.
It scared him.
“Hope?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
That scared him, too.
It started to get dark.
He looked up. The star, the one bit of light in the darkness of the shaft, was disappearing. Going upward.
Soon all was black. All was starless, moonless night. A night unbroken by any illumination, filled only with the screams of hidden monsters throwing themselves at the survivors as they hung motionless in space.
45
There are many kinds of darkness.
There is silent darkness, in which you are left to wonder what may be around you, in which your mind is given free rein to improvise new nightmares and imagine new horrors. Then there is the kind of darkness where the nightmares have already been seen, and now are unseen. Where the nightmares are indisputably real, but cannot be found with any sense but that of sound and – for the most unlucky – touch.
Ken found himself in that latter darkness, holding tightly to the cable with one hand, to Hope with the other. His right leg was pinned straight down by the tension of the cable, his left leg stuck into space. He swung ever-so-slightly in the deep black nothing of the elevator shaft, and every so often he felt a breeze pass by him at the same time as he heard a zombie’s scream grow loud and then soft and knew that one of the things had tried to capture him.
He was safe. They couldn’t reach him.
The others were safe. The monsters couldn’t
reach them, either.
The shaft was a good thirty feet square, with the survivors hanging pretty close to dead center of the space.
Brightness again.
“Move down!”
It was Christopher’s voice. That surprised Ken. He had thought it would be Aaron. But of course, the cowboy wouldn’t have been able to climb up, not with only one good hand. So Christopher must have volunteered to come last. Must have gone back up.
But for what?
It didn’t matter. He was crying out for everyone to get moving again.
Ken did, letting the cable he’d been holding onto with a death-grip start reeling out once more. He looked at Hope as the light bloomed around them again.
She still said nothing. She just watched as the zombies flung themselves into void in their rabid attempts to destroy what hung in the shaft.
Hope was mesmerized by the sight. She looked like Ken imagined a moth must look right before it threw itself headfirst into a candle, right before it erupted into a suicide of flame.
She actually started leaning away.
“No!” he shouted.
She reached for one of the things.
And it grabbed her hand.
46
Ken saw it unfold, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing he was going to be able to do. The thing was going to either rip Hope away from him, or it was going to use her as an anchor to climb up and tear both of them apart.
He honestly didn’t know which would be worse.
A sound tore through the artificial night of the shaft. A tearing, rending noise. It sounded like a combination of thread unspooling on a sewing machine and meat being torn apart.
Something hit the zombie in the face. A moment later, something hit Ken in the head.
He almost lost his grip on the elevator cable. Almost forgot where he was for a moment. He’d fallen out of a two-story building today, hit his head on a freeway abutment, and concussed himself Heaven-only-knew how many times. This last was nearly the straw that broke him.
He slid a few quick feet before the pain in his neck, the agony of metal cable fibers ripping at his throat, awoke him from the half-trance he had fallen into. His good hand clenched automatically and his fall arrested. He stopped.
What had happened?
Screams. Everyone – everything – was screaming.
The monsters. The survivors. Hope was shrieking, reaching downward as though for a fallen toy.
And he heard someone calling his name. “Ken! Ken, you okay?”
Dimly, he realized that it was Dorcas. That she must have seen the monster jumping at him and had slid down the cable and kicked it in the face before it could grab Hope away from him. Her other foot must have caught him in the head.
“Ken?”
“Yeah!” He snapped the word. Realized he was sounding ungrateful to a woman who had just saved his life and that of his child, and tried to soften his tone. Not easy when your daughter is screaming bloody murder and trying to throw herself to her death while monsters toss themselves at you from every direction. Still, he managed somehow. “Yes. I’m okay. Thanks.”
Her answer was typical Dorcas. Good-natured in a to-the-point sort of way. “You can thank me by getting your butt in gear.” She kicked at a falling zombie. The kick missed by a mile, but the motion seemed to make her feel better. It certainly made Ken feel better, knowing that the farm woman was as full of fight as ever and ready to protect him.
He started going down again. “Where’d Christopher go?” he called as he dropped. Trying to ignore the monsters, trying to ignore how weird it was to be having this conversation, or any conversation, under these circumstances.
Hope was still screaming. Still trying to jump away from him. He was finding it ever harder to hold onto her. What had happened to her?
“Beats me,” shouted Dorcas. “How much farther down?”
Ken tried to see below them. Darkness swallowed the shaft only a few yards under his feet. “I can’t tell.”
“I hope it’s soon.”
He didn’t like the tone of her voice. He looked up. Realizing at that instant that the things were no longer falling like screaming autumn leaves around them.
And he saw why Dorcas sounded worried. And why he should be worried, too.
47
Ken had observed how the things seemed to function better when they were with others like them. How when they were in ones and twos and threes they seemed somehow more awkward, less fluid. As though what had changed them had stolen not merely their ability to speak and reason, but to be alone.
As though they feared solitude.
So he had seen them grow stronger, more agile, when they were with others. He had seen the zombies cluster around one another and then crawl over and crush one another so that they could create ramps of themselves, so that they could reach higher and higher in search of their prey.
But he had never seen anything like this.
At first he wasn’t even sure what it was he was seeing.
Then he understood, and wished to God he could forget.
One of the things scampered across the wall of the elevator shaft to where a piece of exposed metal had thrust through the concrete. It was jagged and sharp-looking, but the zombie didn’t seem to care. It grabbed onto the metal and then just hung there.
Another zombie joined it a moment later. Running along the walls with that sickening plop-plop-plop as its fingers held, then let go, then held, then let go of the sheer surface of the shaft.
The second zombie crawled along the length of the metal spear, then onto the first beast’s head and shoulders. It wrapped its arms around the other’s chest, its legs around the legs of the first. Both the monstrosities were nearly bereft of skin, flayed by their entry into the shaft, their flesh torn away by the edges of the too-small rift in the concrete. It was impossible to tell if the creatures were women or men – they were only things, just masses of wet muscle and bone in the permanent night of the shaft.
Blood dripped off them in thick streams. It looked almost black. Ichorous. Ken couldn’t tell if that was a trick of the un-light of the shaft, or if their blood, like everything else about them, was changing.
Another zombie pulled its way onto them. This one had once been a man, identifiable by the tattered remnants of a business suit and what looked like part of a tie thrown over its shoulder. The third zombie crawled onto its brother/sister things and, like the first, held tight.
Ken watched a fourth climb into the middle of the shaft and hold to the growth, then a fifth. The excrescence seemed to pulse as the zombies in the middle of the mass shifted slightly, the ones on the outside layers adjusted their grips. It was like watching a beating heart coming into being from nothing. An unholy vision of creatio ex nihilo.
“What are they doing?” said Dorcas. The woman’s voice was low; clearly she was speaking to herself.
But with the question came an answer. Ken looked at Hope. She was still reaching out. Reaching for the dark tumescence just above them. Reaching and now she was groaning, almost….
Ken’s blood ran cold.
She was almost growling.
And he knew what the things were doing.
“They’re building a bridge,” he said. “Building a bridge to the cable. To us.”
48
Ken felt… dark.
His wife and baby were somewhere below him. Below and unseen.
(Dark.)
His daughter was reaching out for the things that tried to kill them. Hands lifted up as though in praise or prayer.
(Darker.)
His son was gone. Bitten. Changed. Dead.
(Darkest.)
And then he realized with a start that the feeling wasn’t merely a mood, it was a reality. That the light in the vertical tunnel that had become a sudden deathtrap was fading once more.
He looked up.
The light wasn’t just fading. It was departing. Christopher was leaving them. Again.
The light dimmed to almost nothing. Almost. And perhaps complete nothingness would have been better. Would have been a gift. Because as it was Ken could see just enough to make out the glistening, pulsing mass that added to itself bit by bit, that reached out inch by inch, foot by foot.
How long until one of them reaches the cable?
How long until one of them reaches us?
The things worked in near-silence, not even trilling or growling anymore. There was only the moist sloughing of flesh on flesh, of raw muscle fibers sliding across one another as they gripped and clenched with strength that was just one more impossibility in a world where the impossible had come to snuff out the once-real.
And yet, though silent, still the things moved in preternatural harmony. As though each could not only see what the others needed, but read the others’ very thoughts.
Move, Ken. Move, dammit!
He knew that to stay would be to die. The things were reaching out. Grappling half-blindly in the ever-darkening stillness of the long coffin-shaft. Perhaps ten feet above where he and Hope and Dorcas hung, perhaps another seven or eight feet away from the cable. Only a few feet, only a few moments.
But he was frozen. Frozen by the sight of the monsters that were coming for him. By the things that were happening all around him. By his wounds. By his exhaustion, his hunger, his thirst.
Most of all by his daughter, his Hope, reaching for the beasts.
“Go.”
Ken didn’t know whether he was the one who said it, or if it was Dorcas urging him on. He didn’t know if it really mattered, either. He didn’t see how they could possibly outrace creatures willing to slice themselves to ribbons and able to stick to featureless walls.
Then he felt Hope’s heartbeat. She was reaching for the things above them. Reaching, growling, groaning, almost moaning in what sounded like pleasure.
The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2) Page 8