Mo's face grew stern, the lines of his tattoos straightening into a death mask. Then they curved again. He smiled.
"I nearly forgot myself. Thank you, e kare." He stepped through the false wall hatch and into the corridor beyond.
Christopher felt something touch his arm. Amulek. The teen was gazing at him with something new in his eyes. He dipped his head low. A near-bow. A thank you that was beyond mere thanks. It was a pledge from one warrior to another. A promise to stand together, friend to friend.
Christopher bowed back. He gestured for Amulek to follow his grandfather through.
Something else cracked in the entryway. He couldn't tell if they were noises beyond the metal walls, or if the things had already chewed their way in. Regardless, time was almost up.
He stepped back through the hatch as well.
And heard the screams.
54
"How long has that been going on?"
"It started –" Mo said, then stopped as the noise hit them again. The screams waxed and waned, bouncing through steel hatches and the space between them and Ken's family.
Not just Ken's family. Buck and Sally, too.
All of them. Lizzy, Hope, Maggie, Buck, Sally. They were all shrieking in their separate spaces. Christopher tried to remember what Mo had said: "Mama and baby and kitty are in the sleeping room. Big sister and your large friend are in the kitchen." Two groups separated from each other and from Christopher by thick steel hatches. But they were all screaming so loudly it sounded as though they stood just down the hall.
That wasn't the weirdest thing, either. Tops on Christopher's list of things that were currently One Fry Short of a Happy Meal was that the screams started and stopped together. A long, writhing shriek began in unison, even Sally yowling at the top of his lungs, then the ululating cries would drop off as one, falling to nothing in the space of a single heartbeat.
Each scream lasted about five seconds. Each pause lasted the same. The silence was almost as bad – a promise of future madness worse than madness itself.
Christopher's feet planted themselves firmly on the floor panels for the first two cycles, then Mo said, "This is why I was outside."
"Good thing you were," said Christopher. The screams had probably saved his and Amulek's lives as Mo took refuge from them and so saw the danger they faced and covered them as they ran to safety.
Not safety. This. Whatever this is. But it's not safety.
Nothing's safe. Not even my friends. My family.
Another scream-chorus shook his body. Made his insides cold, his outsides try to crawl into his stomach. The shrieks were just wrong, they rattled him –
He was already standing still. Even so, he felt himself go even more rigid.
"You feel that?" he said.
"What?" said Mo.
The shrieks rose again. And with them….
Amulek caught Christopher's eye. He nodded. The teen understood. Maybe Mo didn't because he hadn't really comprehended what Christopher was telling him before. Maybe because he didn't want to understand.
The zombies were changing.
They evolved to what was needed.
The shrieks rose. And as they did, so did the drilling, jackhammering sound of the things outside.
Buck, Maggie, Sally, Liz, Hope.
They were calling the tunnelers. Calling the buzzsaws.
Calling doom.
55
"We have to shut them up." But even as the words came, Christopher knew they were wrong. It was too late for that. The monsters had been summoned. The worst ones: demons called up from the Deep, from Hell itself, to burrow into their last place of peace. To kill Christopher, Amulek, and Mo – or Change them.
And what of the others? What was happening to them? What would happen to them?
Something worse, surely. Worse even than merely shifting from normal to the zombies, to the things. Because the girls, Buck, Sally – they faced something different, and all different things were worse things by definition in this world. There was no good from the new, only evil.
"Shut them up?" said Mo. "Kua whakatīwhetatia te tangata kōhuru e tāna i patu ai."
The words flooded out of the big man in a rush, and though Christopher didn't understand any of them, he recognized the hard mask that the man's face became, the tone. Hell if I'll let you murder some little kids or guests in my home.
"I don't mean kill them or anything," said Christopher. "We don’t –" He stopped as another shriek took over his senses. Another roll of drill-sounds-hammer-sounds rattled his mind a bit looser from moorings already damaged by too many shocks and surprises. "Forget it," he said. "We can't stop this." He was talking as much to walk through his own thoughts as to communicate them. He couldn't be inside himself – everything inside was shaken, unsettled. He had to talk to think. "We just have to stop the things from getting in."
Another shriek/rattle. Pings came from the other side of the hatch beyond the false wall.
"How do you suggest we do that?"
For some reason Christopher thought of Headmaster Grossman. Leering as he pushed Christopher down on his desk. The pain of what followed. The shame of knowing that no one would believe him. The helplessness of day after day.
Then… the power of the first match struck.
Fire had always been his friend. Maybe it was time he gave it a final embrace.
"Where are your weapons?" he said.
56
Neither Mo nor Amulek spoke a word. They just moved. Fast and ready as though they had prepared for just this eventuality.
Emergency Number 52 in the Underground Māori Survivalist Manual: Attacking Mutant Tunneler Buzzsaw Zombies.
For a moment, Christopher was seized by the conviction that such a book probably existed. And he wanted desperately to see it. Then his brain gave itself a stern shove.
They're moving. You move, too.
He followed Mo. Amulek had already moved toward the sealed hatch that led to the decoy room, and was now shoving pallets of food in front of it. Christopher didn't know how much good that would do. He doubted Amulek believed it would accomplish anything – the kid had seen what the burrowers were capable of, and if they could get through steel walls and an even thicker steel hatch, piles of Ramen probably wouldn't slow them down much. But it was something.
Sometimes something was the only thing. The only thing between you and hopeless helplessness and the mad damnation that was only a step beyond that last moment of despair.
Maybe that was why Christopher was moving, too. Why Mo was moving. Just wrong-headed hope.
It was enough. Had to be.
Mo was staring at him. "Are you coming, e kare?"
"Hell yeah," said Christopher. He moved. Movement was something.
It would be enough.
It had to be.
You're lying to yourself. It won't be enough.
I know.
Then he stopped moving after Mo. Looked back for a moment. Amulek was still working. Ramen and candy bars and jars of peanut butter everywhere.
Christopher smiled.
It still won't be enough.
Shut up, me. Don't be a dick.
The smile widened.
He ran to Mo.
57
Mo ran to an unexpected place: the toilet.
Christopher was about to rebuke the big man for thinking of taking the most inappropriately-timed twosie in the history of dumpkind, but managed to tamp down on his usual sarcasm. Mo didn't have the symptoms: no hands on his crotch, no pee-pee dance.
Something else was going on.
Mo flushed the toilet. Then he jiggled the handle in a weird pattern that Christopher suddenly realized was "Shave and a Haircut": Jig-jig-a-jiggle-jig. When Mo danced the handle up and down twice ("Two bits!") to answer the silent couplet, the toilet fell apart.
The tank separated, moving on some kind of hydraulic system. It shifted to the right. The bowl moved left.
Below were a pair of
holes: one was the pipe leading to the septic system. The other was a shallow circle with an iron ring.
Mo caught Christopher's look. Smiled tightly. "I hope those who come here will be family. But I will not trust them all with weapons. Not right away. Perhaps this lack of trust is my failing."
The girls, Buck, and Sally screamed again. Mo stopped for a moment. He swayed. Looked like the scream was calling him somehow. Christopher worried about that.
Then he felt himself, weaving slowly back and forth. He worried even more.
The scream ended. Mo shivered, a full-body shudder. Then he grabbed the iron ring and yanked it. The floor split into two pieces, revealing….
"Awesome," said Christopher.
58
Christopher wasn't big into guns. He'd fired one a few times – hard to get along as an Idaho governor's son without having that experience for a photo op or two – but other than that and a basic knowledge that the end with the hole was the dangerous one, he didn't know much about them. He understood fire, things that went boom in a big way – he always had, since Headmaster Grossman, maybe before. But guns were something of a mystery. Like his computer: he understood it on a basic level, could use it when he needed, but he didn't know how to build one, break it down, or even how to tell the best ones from the mid-range models.
Still, even he could tell that what he was looking at now was an awesome arsenal. There were easily a dozen handguns of varying sizes and makes. Another half-dozen long guns – some with scopes, some with ugly bulges sticking out of them that he couldn't pretend to understand. A pair of bright orange flare guns. Five shotguns, all of them black and looking like they had been pilfered from the bodies of angry special forces guys.
Aaron would probably flip his jinkies over this.
That was a sobering thought. Not just because of what Aaron had done, what he had become – an enemy who was still somehow also a friend, and all the more terrifying for that fact – but because Christopher hadn't had a chance to see what became of him.
He hoped Aaron had escaped the attack.
On task, son. Winners focus.
The voice in his head this time was his father's. Which made Christopher want to tell him to suck it, but Father had a point for once.
Another scream rippled through the air. The jackhammers, the ripping metal, sounded closer. Too close.
Inside? Maybe.
Beside the guns sat what Christopher needed. What he understood on a basic level.
He looked at Mo, and an honest-to-God grin shoved its way onto his face. "What I'm about to tell you is gonna sound weird. You'll have to go with it."
59
Dirt. Remember dirt on buzzsaws.
"You are sure of this, e kare?"
"No. Keep shoving."
"I have not stopped."
"Good. More peanut butter, Amulek."
When he told his plan to Mo – all ten sentences of it – the Māori had been skeptical –
(Of course. Because he's not insane.)
– but he had gone with it. Christopher thought he did so mostly because Amulek had nodded when Christopher explained it to him. But that was enough. Any port in a storm.
Amulek tossed him another family-size jar of peanut butter.
Christopher ripped it open. Rammed a handful of bullets and as many shotgun shells as would stick into the brown goop. His hands were greasy and slick with peanut oil, and the mixture of smells – gunpowder, peanuts, soup, MREs – was making him sick to his stomach. Not to mention the screaming that still wracked the air every few seconds, the sound of metal being chewed apart.
And then… sudden silence.
The screams ceased. The digging ended.
He looked at Mo. The Māori's hands, also covered in a slick mass of foods that had never meant to be mixed, had also frozen.
"They are inside," he said.
60
"I hope this works," said Mo. Any tension he felt was belied by his tone: offhand, like he was talking about nothing more important than programming his DVR to record a show he particularly enjoyed.
He and Aaron should play poker together.
Christopher grinned. "Of course it'll work."
And he knew it would, too. At least, the boomy part would. He was good with boomy things.
They were backed away to the end of the passage that led to the wet room. Mo took up most of the hatchway, but had left enough room for Amulek and Christopher to peek around.
The false wall/hatchway at the opposite end of the passage was closed. But he heard movement.
Why don't they just come in around us? Through the walls?
And he knew why: the girls had called the things. Lizzy and Hope, maybe Maggie and Buck and Sally, too. But their calls, whatever they were, had somehow funneled through the open doors that Mo had left behind. The sound or radiation or whatever they used had left some kind of breadcrumbs that the monsters were following, like ants following a leader.
He had seen a nature show on ants once. Saw what they did when a cricket got in their way when they were following a trail home.
It wasn't pretty.
He gulped. But didn't move.
He had to see.
The hatch at the opposite end of the tunnel started clicking.
The boomy part would work.
He just didn't know about the rest.
The hatch started screaming.
A moment later, it began to glow red.
61
It took almost no time at all. Or maybe it did. The time it took for the things to burrow through solid steel could have been measured in seconds, minutes, hours. It could have been a lifetime. Christopher didn't know. He didn't feel like he even had time to blink, but when the hatch started peeling outward he realized tears were streaming over his cheeks because he'd kept his eyes open so long.
The things pushed through.
This was something he'd seen, too. They were like roaches, squeezing into spaces far too small for their bodies. But where roaches seemed to bend and shift to make their way in, these things simply pushed until their outer skin peeled off.
That was something he hadn't counted on. And it could be a disaster. If the things' outer skins sheered away, if they left those spinning skin-saws in the decoy room behind them….
Mo shifted. Readying.
"Wait," breathed Christopher.
"Mahi atu," breathed the warrior. The words sounded like warnings – whether to Christopher or to the thing now pressing itself through a six-inch hole, he couldn't say.
The sickening ichor that passed for blood in so many of these things spilled over the edges of the hole. Thick, black, like motor oil congealed by cold.
The thing's head was halfway through. Raw bone visible on its misshapen temples, a skull oddly rounded so as to pass through the earth.
Then it stopped moving. Writhed a bit.
"Stuck," whispered Mo.
The thing pulled back.
The hatch began to glow again. The hole began to widen as the tumorous saws began working on it.
Wider. Wider.
No chances this time. They would open it all the way. Pour in as a stream of monstrous creatures that brought only death.
Mo got ready. Aiming down his weapon's sight.
The hole was wide.
The things didn't just enter. They poured in.
"NOW!"
62
A moment.
Just a single moment.
It was long enough for Christopher to question. Not just his plan, but himself.
The only things he'd ever been good at were looking good, moving fast, and blowing things up. The first had been a surprisingly helpful gift. The second had given him freedom. The last had saved his life.
Now, his clothes were torn, his body abraded. He didn't even want to think about what his face looked like, not with a nose that had been broken more times than most prize fighters'. His first skill was history.
His second
seemed diminished somehow, lost when compared to the warriors who worked so well together, who danced and seemed to know where each foot fell with perfect precision.
And now, for a long moment, he thought his final skill had failed him as well.
Then… it happened.
Christopher didn't know about the scope of Mo's talents, but apparently the guy could shoot anything with a trigger. The flare gun popped, and the flare brightened so quickly that Christopher's eyes streamed tears and his vision disappeared for a moment in a field of white.
When they cleared, he saw the flare buried on one of the monsters. Stuck to the peanut butter, the soup mix, the sticky foods that they had piled up in front of the hatch in the hopes that, when the monsters tore through, they would also tear through the provisions. Christopher had seen the way the dirt clung to them when they pulled through the ground like dangerous grubs seeking food, and he hoped the food would do the same. It did.
And so did the ammo that he and Mo and Amulek had shoved into the peanut butter, had jammed into the soup packets. The bullets weren't going to go off, not even with a flare gun hanging off them.
But the black powder they had gotten out of the shotgun shells…. The powder they had laced all over the noodle-and-peanut-butter mix, drizzling it like deadly frosting on the world's ugliest cake….
The flare was dying. Christopher had another moment of doubt.
Then the flare brightened. The monster the flare had stuck to screamed. Not in pain, Christopher got the impression it was telling the other half dozen things that had already entered the tunnel to get out get out get OUT!
Mo threw himself backward.
Threw the hatch to the wet room shut as he did.
And… the boomy.
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