by J. Thorn
Ken didn’t move. He held his breath. He couldn’t tell if the thing nearby was male or female, student or teacher. And he certainly couldn’t tell if it was a normal person… or one of the crazy things that had somehow supplanted normality.
The dark form remained as still as Ken. He could see its outline, lit by the flickering fluorescents in the hall below. But no features. Just a hunched, silent form.
Then it growled.
12
The thing lurched at him, jumping over the hole it had just opened in the ceiling. Ken turned away, still hunched in the tiny space in which he had taken momentary refuge, but not before he saw the face of the thing following him.
Not a person. Not a girl or boy. Just a thing. Just an it.
Its forehead and eyes were unscathed. High cheekbones that could once have belonged to a beautiful girl or to a fine-featured boy.
Ken couldn’t tell. Because everything below that was a travesty. The nose was gone, chewed to oblivion, just bits of flesh with sharp white shards of bone poking through. No upper lip.
The lower jaw was completely gone. Ripped away by some impossible force. The lower face sagged as though saddened by the loss of itself. Ken thought for a fraction of an instant that the student’s throat was cut, but then he realized that what he had taken for a congealing trail of blood was in fact a limp, loose tongue hanging against the neck of the once-teen’s shirt.
Then he couldn’t see it any more. His back was to the abomination, he was crawling along the metal framework of the drop ceiling. Trying to move as fast as he could while at the same time knowing if he put his hand down on a tile instead of on the ceiling grid he would plummet through into the hall below and death – or worse – would be swift and inevitable.
He tried to think as he spider-crawled from support to support, bunching his body up and over bundled A/C vents that squirmed over the drop ceiling like silvery caterpillars. Tried to think what to do, where to go.
And kept coming up empty.
The thing behind him snarled, the sound coming out strange and wet, saturated by blood and unmuffled by the enclosure of a lower palate.
Ken realized he was screaming, too, and wondered how long that had been going on. Wondered if it would ever stop.
He tried to think of Maggie. Of Derek and Hope and little Liz. He tried, but all he could hear was the pound of hands and feet behind him; all he could feel was blood dripping off his calves and his cheeks; all he could see was darkness.
He felt a hand at his foot. Just a brush. It didn’t grab him, it wasn’t close enough to get a grip.
But it was close enough to make him forget what he was doing. To make him panic.
Ken’s ongoing scream notched up an octave and he threw himself forward. His hand came down, not on the sharp edge of the ceiling grid but on the hard-sponge feel of the ceiling tile. He came to his senses in that moment, tried to stop himself from moving forward, but it was too late. Even in this screwed up version of reality, even in the madness that had replaced his universe, apparently physics still mattered.
He couldn’t arrest his forward momentum.
Couldn’t stop himself from pitching over the edge of the grid…
… hitting the ceiling….
Falling through.
13
Ken swung down into the hall, his hand reaching out as though to break his fall. One of the things below saw it and grabbed for him, blood-stained teeth gritted around chunks of something. He snatched his arm back and the thing missed him by a hair’s breadth.
Then he felt something at his feet, which were still laid out full-length in the ceiling space. He knew it was the thing that had followed him up there. And knew there was no way he could fight it off.
He swung his body up, arching his back and reaching blindly behind him, trying to find a grip on the ceiling grid that he had just fallen through.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t know why he bothered. He was going to be bitten. He could feel the thing on his legs. He didn’t have time.
Still, his body kept moving. Kept clawing for purchase. Giving up wasn’t an option, it seemed; survival as much a matter of motor memory as it was of will. He felt like he had no say in his own soul in that moment; like a creature greater than himself had briefly taken control and forced him to endure, to strive, to continue.
He grabbed the grid and started to haul himself backwards into the ceiling space. Like being born in reverse, going from blood and light into the darkness again.
He felt teeth on his leg.
And the thing didn’t bite.
Why?
He flipped himself into the plenum, and realized what had happened: the thing wasn’t biting him because it couldn’t. It only had an upper jaw. No lower jaw to grind against, no lever it could use to exert enough pressure to puncture his flesh.
Still, he was bleeding from where Picarelli had clawed at his legs. What if the thing bled into him? What if its saliva got into his wounds?
The thought sent Ken into a paroxysm of motion. His legs kicked out, catching the mewling thing in the loose sacks of flesh and fluid that were all that remained of its lower face. The thing screamed its wet cry, its hands raking toward Ken’s eyes.
He rolled away. The thing hit the ceiling tiles where Ken had been a moment before and went right through. A crescendo of screams sounded, the noise of feeding beasts interrupted in the midst of their frenzy.
Ken rolled back and looked through the hole in the tiles. He couldn’t see the thing that had attacked him. Just a carpet of moving monsters standing atop another carpet of blood and body parts and gore.
He felt his stomach lurch. Forced himself not to vomit.
Maggie. Derek. Hope. Liz.
He focused on them. On their faces. He pushed back to hands and knees and kept crawling across the grid. Vowing not to fall. Hoping he could keep his promise.
Outside, something exploded. He couldn’t tell exactly what. Whatever it was, it sounded huge. It shook the foundations of the school. He almost fell through the ceiling, almost pitched over with the violence of the invisible blast that felt both impossibly far and right next to him.
Something big. Something big just went up.
And Ken knew that whatever it was, it signaled the end of everything he knew.
His world disappearing.
14
Darkness rapidly became both armor and enemy.
In the empty space between the ceiling grid and the building superstructure, Ken felt safer than he had since first seeing Becca’s throat torn apart. But he also had a moment to think, a moment to wonder what was happening. The blackness all around him writhed like serpents, and all he could see was students pulling each other apart.
He vomited.
He tried to stop it, but it came anyway. Like he was trying to physically purge himself of the memory of what had just happened to his world.
He heard the wet splat of his lunch hitting the ceiling tiles. Waited for the sounds below to change; for one of the monsters to figure out he was up here.
Nothing happened.
He felt weak. He wanted to lay down. Just sleep, right there in the ceiling like a rat.
The thought of Maggie and the kids kept him going.
Slivers of illumination occasionally forced their way between warped ceiling tiles, shadow-traces of the brightness that had once been a way of life but was now merely something to be remembered. His reality now was darkness and pain. Pain in his legs, where Joe Picarelli had yanked gobbets of flesh away from his calves; pain in his face, where the newly-transformed Matt Anders had raked bleeding furrows in his cheeks and temples on his way to a three-story drop out the window.
He kept crawling. His hands and knees were on fire as well, the entirety of his body weight resting on the thin metal ridges of the drop ceiling grid as he hid from the nightmare below.
How am I going to get to Maggie and the kids?
Forget that, how am I going to get out of t
he school?
Something hit his head.
Ken’s heart felt like it was trying to pummel its way out through his face, slamming hard against his ribcage and then his throat. He dropped backward in the darkness and his teeth gritted as though in weak parody of the viciousness of the children he could still hear killing one another below him. But it wasn’t mindless savagery that made him clench his jaw, it was raw terror. The knowledge that something else had found him.
That he was going to die.
He held still in the dark, trying to ignore the terrible screams and somehow-worse growls below him. Trying to ignore the pain in his body, the pain in his soul. Trying to forget the fact that he had only minutes before killed one of his students.
Who was here?
Nothing else moved. Nothing else breathed.
Nothing growled.
He was alone.
After a moment he reached out. Felt for what had touched him.
His bruised and abraded palm sung on harp strings of pain as it brushed against something cool and unyielding and he realized that nothing had touched him. He wasn’t in danger – at least, no more than he had been a moment ago.
No, he was simply at the end of the line. He had run out of crawlspace. The plenum ended with a wall, and he had no way of knowing where he was in relation to the school’s layout. He could still hear growling, so he suspected he was over the hall, but he couldn’t be sure.
He waved his hands. Felt nothing. He began to move laterally, inching in the direction he hoped was the outer wall of the school. Nothing concrete in his mind, other than the idea that he didn’t want to descend in the hallway. That would be suicide, and he hadn’t stayed alive this long just to throw it all away in a painful splash of red.
He kept Maggie in the front of his mind. Kept her smile before his eyes. It was hard. The dark kept crowding out the image, kept replacing it with thoughts of what might have happened – what must have happened –
(she had three kids with her, do you think she could have survived this? could she possibly have survived this?)
– kept replacing the sight of her grin with a sickening view of her face ripped to pieces, her jaw gone like the student that had trapped him up in the ceiling.
He kept moving.
He lost track of time, moving inch by painful inch through the darkness. It could have been minutes or hours. All he had was memory and pain, a mixture of pleasure and distress.
Thoughts of asking Maggie to marry him. He hadn’t had the money for a diamond ring, so he’d bought a simple gold circle, but she cried like it was ten carats of perfect clarity.
Thoughts of Matt going through the window, a sullen growl the last thing the world would have to remember him by.
Thoughts of little Liz, taking her first steps and slapping her naked baby belly in pleasure, her mouth open wide in a grin that seemed to light up the whole world.
But could it light up the world now?
Ken stopped moving suddenly. He held himself motionless.
Everything was still the same. Darkness all around. Pain biting at his face, his legs, his hands.
Everything was still the same.
But somehow, it was all terribly different.
15
It took a moment for Ken to figure out what had changed. Longer than it should have, in fact. The darkness had become an audible force, a seething surf that pounded against his ears and deafened him to everything else. So he very nearly missed what was happening.
And what was happening was silence.
Or no, not silence. There were still screams and cries and whimpers. Sounds of pain and misery.
But the howling, growling cries of predatory rage were gone. Like the kids and teachers who had been afflicted by the hideous transformation had simply disappeared.
Was that possible? Ken tried to reach through a dark-sodden memory, tried to pinpoint the moment when the snarling sounds had ceased. Was it gradual? Sudden? Did it sound like they’d run out of the building?
He couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t remember.
Memory was a funny thing. It could make you remember your first kiss with fondness, even though it was a travesty of bumped noses. It could make you remember your baby’s birth with love, even though it resembled a charnel house. And now, when Ken needed his memory to function with sharpness and clarity, it was apparently playing hard to get.
Not cool.
He debated only a moment about what to do next. Because in that moment, even the cries and whimpers disappeared. He had no idea what that could mean – surely the wounded couldn’t have run out of the place, could they? – but knew it was probably bad. If for no other reason than because anything good happening at this point seemed highly unlikely.
He couldn’t stay here. Couldn’t remain in the comforting cocoon of darkness.
Ken didn’t let himself think about his decision. Just reached below his face and felt for the edges of the nearest tile. He intended to pull the edges up a few centimeters, enough to peek around and get an idea what was happening without being spotted.
Adrenaline betrayed him. His jittery fingers ripped the corners of the tile upward so hard he banged himself in the face with the tight square of recycled mineral fibers. He tasted salt and copper in his mouth. Almost grinned at the irony of giving himself a bloody lip in the middle of a city-wide apocalyptic event.
But didn’t. Because he looked down.
16
Faces. Lots of them.
Ken almost screamed, but managed to bite back the sound.
Kids, teachers.
Standing, sitting, some splayed out full-length in pools of blood. Others sat on top of what looked to be their own internal organs, as though they were playing the world’s strangest game of King of the Hill.
As Ken watched, several of those with the worst wounds closed their eyes and slumped. Their chests stopped moving. They were dead. They must be dead.
The rest, though….
They were staring straight at him.
A moment later – an eternally long moment in which he was certain he had at least three separate heart attacks – Ken realized that they weren’t staring at him. They were just staring up. Staring at the ceiling. And he just happened to be in the ceiling.
Their eyes were rolled back, the way Matt Anders’ eyes had been right before he went bugnuts crazy and attacked Ken. Only the whites showed, not even the tiniest traces of iris visible.
Their mouths were open wide, like they were straining to catch invisible rain.
They were all panting, and Ken realized that they were breathing in sync.
In-out-in-out-in-out-
(Two students slumped, blood loss too great to live….)
-in-out-in-out-in-out….
For some reason, the synchronized respiration made Ken feel like this was a nightmare. People going crazy en masse was one thing. That could actually happen, right? Mass hypnosis, too much MSG, everyone holding their cell phones too close to their heads while Googling porn on the internet… there could be an explanation.
But breathing in harmony?
Then he remembered the way Matt’s eyes had snapped back into place. How the boy had gone from normal to killing rage in the space of seconds.
Don’t do this, Ken.
There’s no other way.
There’s gotta be something.
But there wasn’t any other way. He could stay up in the ceiling and die like a rat, cowering and waiting for larger predators to hunt him down, or take his chances now.
He dropped down to the hallway.
Into the midst of the quiet monsters.
Quiet. But for how long?
17
When Ken dropped down, he found himself between a girl who looked remarkably unscathed, and one of the school’s security guards – only distinguishable by his yellow jacket with “SECURITY” written across it in bold black letters. The guard’s face was mostly gone, nothing but a single unmarred eye
in the midst of raw red meat that looked like it was already suppurating. The man’s cheekbones poked through the mangled tissue of his face. The air he breathed whistled in and out not only through his nostrils but also through flapping holes in what was left of his cheeks, through broken bones that allowed free access to his sinus cavities.
Ken didn’t move for a moment, frozen not by the awesome damage that had been done to the man, but rather by the single unharmed eye. It seemed almost profane, to have a part of him so perfect in the midst of such destruction.
He suddenly remembered a scripture from his childhood: If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.
Then he realized that shock was sinking in again. That his brain was making connections that weren’t necessary, that weren’t even there.
Move.
Move.
MOVE.
He turned. Took a step.
And knocked into another student.
He knew this one. It was a freshman he had in one of his classes, a kid named Ethan Miller. A good kid. He looked like he’d been bitten, staring up with white eyes at the nothing above him.
Ethan snapped at Ken, teeth clicking together a few inches in front of Ken’s nose. Ken had to swallow a scream, and was sure he was going to die; sure that everyone must be coming out of whatever creepy trance/fugue had bought him this little time.
But no. The kid went back to his upward stare, mouth open and panting, and Ken realized that the boy probably hadn’t been trying to actually bite his teacher. At least, not purposefully. It looked like this was more of an instinctive reaction, an animalistic response to unwelcome stimulus.
So don’t touch anyone.
He looked down the hall. Fifty feet to the nearest stairwell. Then down two flights of stairs and at least another hundred feet before he got to an exit of any kind.
And there were kids and staff everywhere. All of them face up, panting, mouths open. Some wounded, some whole. All ready to pounce and bite if he touched them, and God only knew when they could return to their rampages.