Focus.
One foot ahead of another.
He stayed vertical, but knew he was moving too slow. The things were out here. He could hear them.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, even though it made his already-spinning world start to whirl that much faster, like a carnival ride that hadn’t had a government safety check in decades.
There were three of them. Four. Now five. Coming out of the school’s side door. They looked confused, like they weren’t sure how they had gone from indoors to outside; like doors taxed their suddenly-altered mental states.
They wandered in tight circles just past the still-burning vehicle that had plowed into the school. Their movements were jittery, but somehow familiar. They looked like something Ken had seen before. He sensed it might be important, but didn’t have a chance to dissect the thought.
Because that was when they stopped being awed by the outside world; stopped being amazed by the magic portal that had brought them beyond the walls of the high school.
They saw Ken.
They might have seen him before, but forgotten him in the strangeness of the outside world. He didn’t know. But now he saw them clearly zeroing in on him. He heard that strange, animalistic growl coming from all of them, that ratcheting cry that screamed of hunger, of rage, of need.
They ran for him.
He turned away and did his best to run as well. Not easy when the world felt like a Slip ‘n Slide coated in motor oil. His legs kept lurching in opposite directions, like his brain wasn’t sure which side should be dominant.
There was no way this was going to work.
He looked over his shoulder.
Four things that looked like they had once been students, and one that was vaguely recognizable as one of the front office staff. They had already halved the distance between him and them. They traveled in a tight group, coordinated as any group of special ops soldiers, within inches of each other yet never getting in one another’s way.
They were at the burning SUV. Maybe fifteen feet from him.
Fshhh-woosh.
It sounded at first like a giant inhaling. Then breathing out. Then....
Boom.
The SUV exploded.
The fireball went up twenty feet in the air. It hit the bodies of the two things tangled on the outside of the building and Ken heard them shriek in pain as their skin curled and sloughed away from their bones.
More important, the explosion also rocketed outward, completely engulfing the five monsters chasing him. They didn’t shriek. They didn’t make a single sound. Just disappeared in the high-intensity explosion.
Ken had an instant to smile, then the heat reached him. It felt like it seared all the hair off the back of his head, felt like it burned the shirt off his back. Instant sunburn.
The shockwave came next, knocking him off his feet again, back down to his hands and knees. He heard a voice in the dark hollows of his mind – a voice that sounded suspiciously like his own – complaining petulantly about that fact.
Hey! I just managed to get up!
Then Ken heard something new. His mind, shocked, bruised, tossed, concussed, had trouble figuring out what it was.
Thwap.
He looked over and realized that a half-melted SUV door had just landed a few inches from his head.
He was in the debris field.
He started to lurch to his feet. Only one thought in his mind: to get away from the fallout of the explosion. What had just saved his life might still kill him.
He got as far as a half-squat before something hit him in the back of the head.
Ken’s head tilted forward instantly. He felt sticky wetness running down the back of his burned neck.
Darkness wrapped a shroud around his sight, and his last thought was, No fair, I just got up!
23
“STAY WITH ME. STAY with me.”
Ken heard the words, but they made no sense to him. Not where he was, floating in the blue-green water of Kauai. It was his honeymoon. He and Maggie were floating, drifting. Everything was perfect. Perfect....
Except for the damn sunburn.
He must have been laying on his stomach too long. His back felt positively blistered.
He turned over on the raft, flipping over so that he could give his chest an equal chance to bake. He’d never been one to tan – he wore sunscreen with the same SPF level as lead paint and still ended up looking like a lobster – but at least he could embrace the burn.
He looked over at Maggie. Floating there in a two-piece bathing suit on her own inflatable raft. A local kid had let them borrow the rafts when Ken told him they were newlyweds. “Just float, man,” said the kid, with the mellow tones of an island-born. “Just float, feel the ocean. Let it carry you a while.” Then his deeply tanned face seemed to split in two, cleaved by a smile so bright it rivaled the perfect sand underfoot. “Just don’t do the nasty on my rafts, man. My sister uses these things.”
Then he was gone, apparently trusting in two strangers to find him and return his property when they were done.
So Ken and Maggie floated. Drifted. And he stole glances at his new wife and wondered how serious the kid had been about his injunction against nasty-doin’ on his rafts.
Maggie didn’t look at him. But apparently she had some special sense that women had when in the presence of overblown hormones. “Cool down, Don Juan.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We’ve had sex, like, sixteen times today.”
“Not more than twelve.”
“You’re going to have to find an entire rhino horn and grind it up in a gallon of Gatorade.”
“Totally worth it.”
“You sure? You could just dry up and blow away.”
“I’ll chance it.”
He paddled over to her. She still had her eyes closed, but her smile rivaled that of the kid who gave them the raft.
He reached for her.
Whoomp.
Something exploded in the distance. He looked over his shoulder, but all he saw was surf and shore, leaves and the too-green-seeming plants that he was still trying to convince himself weren’t some kind of Hollywood special effect.
He shrugged and looked back at Maggie. She was still smiling, but now her face was wrong. It took him a moment to realize what it was about her, but then put his finger on it: her lower face was missing. The bottom half of her jaw was gone. Her tongue wagged freely against her chest.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, though suddenly he didn’t feel so okay.
“C’mere.”
He leaned in to kiss her.
Another muffled explosion sounded. He looked at the beach again. The boy who had loaned them the rafts was there. He was on fire, waving at them and shouting.
“Go with the flow, man!” Then he turned to ash and glowing embers, a solid outline of what had once been flesh. “Just give up!”
Ken turned back to Maggie. She shook her head. “Stay with me,” she said. But now she didn’t sound like his wife. She sounded old, used up. Spent.
He blinked. And where Maggie had been, now there was someone else. A woman he’d never seen before, looking down at him –
(Down at me? I was on top of the raft, on top of her. How can she be looking down at me?)
– through eyes that peered at him with concern. The eyes seemed to shine, and it took Ken a second to realize that it wasn’t so much that they were bright as that the rest of the woman’s skin was so dark. Dirty.
No. Not dirt.
Blood.
His lips moved.
“What’s... what’s happening?” he said.
“Shh,” she hissed. She looked up and away as though waiting for something to pass. Then she looked back at him. “End of the world, sonny.”
24
END OF THE WORLD.
End of the world.
End of the world. Apocalypse. Go directly to jail, and d
efinitely do not collect two hundred dollars.
Ken blinked slowly as the words danced an electrified jitterbug through his mind.
It felt like his eyelids had gained weight. He didn’t remember blinking being this hard before.
Before what?
And then it snapped back. Images of Becca clawing at her torn throat, of Stu with his blank stare, of Matt flipping out the window. Joe Picarelli pulling looping coils of guts out of a student.
Falling.
The SUV exploding.
He looked at the woman above him. She was crouching, her palm parallel to the floor in the universal sign for “shut-the-hell-up-bad-shit-is-happening.” Ken didn’t say anything, just studied her.
She looked like she was in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. It was hard to tell through the blood and dirt that coated her skin and clothing. The only real clues were the hints of gray that peeked through her matted hair, and the wrinkles on her face that had caught thick streaks of gore.
Ken’s gaze moved from her body to her hands. One was still outstretched, still signaling quiet. The other held what looked like an L-shaped lug wrench, though it was much longer than any other such tool Ken had ever seen: nearly four feet of solid metal. The socket end looked clotted with blood and hair, and the other end terminated in a flat, blade-like apparatus that was probably supposed to be used for wedging tires off of rims. It was bloody as well.
The woman looked down at him. “They’re gone.”
“Where are we?” said Ken. He tried to sit up. Pain sprinted from the base of his spine through the top of his head. He winced.
The woman squatted beside him. “Easy,” she said. “We’re in some tax office. H&R Block or something.”
“Tax office?” Ken couldn’t quite make sense of the words. He looked around. All he saw was beige ceilings, a beige wall, and some sort of desk/reception setup that hid everything else from view.
His benefactress seemed to think he was challenging her choice of refuge. “It was open and it was empty,” she said. “Not like I had a lot of choices, draggin’ your ass.”
“No, I....” Ken shut his mouth. Tried to order his thoughts. “Thank you. For whatever you did. I just don’t understand what exactly that was.”
She smiled then, as though he had said something tremendously funny. “Understanding went out the window about an hour ago, kiddo.”
He smiled back. “I’m Ken,” he said. It felt weird to say it. He was laying on his back, possibly badly hurt, looking up at a woman who looked like she followed the Countess Bathory bathing regimen, and he felt compelled by some sense of good manners to introduce himself. He laughed.
She laughed, too.
“I’m Dorcas,” she answered. She shook the lug wrench at him at the same time. “And if you make fun of my name, I will brain you.” She was smiling as she said it.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He held up a hand. “You mind helping me up?”
She nodded, and her free hand clasped his. She had a very strong grip. A lot of the women in the area worked farms, and Ken guessed Dorcas was one of them. She certainly had the attitude of a woman accustomed not just to rowing her own boat, but chopping down the tree and making the damn thing in the first place.
He got halfway up, proud of himself for not vomiting all over the desk, and then was stopped by Dorcas’ hand on his shoulder. “Slow up,” she said. “It’s not smart to be in full view.”
Ken straightened a few more inches. Just enough to see over the reception desk. He wanted to see where in the world he was.
What his world had become.
25
AT FIRST HE DIDN’T see anything. Just a wall of windows with “Brooke Gale, CPA,” and “Got Taxes?” and “Se habla español” written across them in large white letters.
He recognized the signs. He’d never been in the office – never had a need to, since the kind of money he made as a teacher generally insured that his taxes could be figured out on the side of a cereal box and squared by sending Uncle Sam a roll of shiny nickels – but he drove past it every day.
It was a quarter-mile from the school.
A quarter-mile closer to the Wells Fargo Center.
A quarter-mile closer to Maggie and the kids.
“How did we get here?” he said.
Dorcas favored him with a look that made it clear she thought the question an exquisitely stupid one. “I brought you,” she said.
“How?”
She grimaced. “I was fixing a flat on the side of the road when everything started to fall apart. Couple cars crashed, couple more stopped and the people in ‘em came after me.”
“How’d you...?” Ken’s voice drifted away. He didn’t need to ask. “That’s quite some tire iron you’ve got.”
“Yeah,” she hefted it in both hands for a moment like a star hitter about to go on deck. “My ex-husband made this for me. He was a walking penis, but good with tools. I think it was his way of letting me know he didn’t actually want to have to be around to help me with anything ever.”
Ken was saved from having to figure out how to respond to that by the fact that several figures ran by the windows. Dorcas grabbed him and hauled him a bit lower, so they could barely see over the top of the reception desk.
The figures ran lithely, with a grace and speed that Ken normally associated with professional athletes. But one of them looked like a soccer mom and the other two were dressed in fast food uniforms. All three were spattered with blood. The soccer mom was holding onto something that looked like a human spine.
They were gone as fast as they came. Just a few streaks of red across the glass.
“How did you get me here?” asked Ken. He was speaking to speak, he knew. Talking to keep his mind off what had just happened, off the pain that was still roaring through his body.
“I found you by the high school. You looked pretty bad, but alive.” Her eyes never wavered from the front of the office. She looked like a hunter, eyes ready for any sign that would lead her to what she sought. Ken had been invited to go hunting several times over the years, but had never gone. He was regretting that fact now. Something told him it might have offered him a few useful skills.
“Anyway,” Dorcas continued a moment later, “there had been some kind of explosion, looked like –”
“An SUV blew up.”
Dorcas nodded. “Yeah, but it looked like maybe more than that. Maybe hit a gas main or something as well. Wasn’t a whole lot left of that side of the school.”
“What?” He was dumbfounded. Somehow the idea that the school had fallen prey to whatever sickness – attack? infestation? – that had altered everyone was easier for him to deal with than the concept of the building suffering a gas explosion.
All those kids dead, he thought.
Then he thought: they were already dead.
Of course, he didn’t know that. He didn’t know anything. He was just guessing. And guessing was a terrible way to go about making life and death decisions.
Dorcas was nodding slowly. “Yuh,” she said. “Good thing for you, too, ‘cause I don’t think these whatever-they-ares would have left you alone if you’d fallen over in the middle of anywhere else. You being in the middle of a big ol’ kaboom is what saved you.”
Another one of the things ran by. Dorcas waited until it was gone, her hands tightening on the lug wrench to the point that Ken worried the thing beyond the windows would see her knuckles glowing.
It didn’t, though it stayed at the windows for a very long time, smelling along the glass like a two-legged bloodhound. Ken looked around for something to use as a weapon. The receptionist’s desk was clean to the point of being irritating. The only things on it were a few post-it notes, a pencil, and some letters. Ken thought about opening the drawers, but he didn’t know how well-developed the things’ hearing might be.
After another few breathless moments, the thing ran off. Ken noted that it looked less sure on its feet than had the first t
hree, though he didn’t know why. It hadn’t appeared injured. He filed away the information.
“So anyways,” Dorcas continued, as though they had been interrupted by nothing more than a minor annoyance, a glitch in the day’s proceedings, “even though you hadn’t been torn to itty-bitty bits, I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to leave you there, so I grabbed you and brought you here.”
“But how? No offense, but I’m a bit too big for you to pick up.”
A cloud of smoke drifted by the window, as though to underline his question.
Dorcas grimaced. “Yeah, I had to drag ya. You’ll probably find a fair amount of gravel in the back of your head, legs, and ass tonight. Sorry.”
Ken tried not to gawk at her. She had dragged him for a quarter-mile? She had to have done it one-handed, too, or she wouldn’t have been able to retain her XXL lug wrench. And she was apologizing?
“Why?” he said. And even as the word escaped him, he wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Why had she cared to stop for him in the first place? Why would she apologize when she’d done nothing to warrant an apology? Why had he survived when so many had not?
Why was any of this happening?
Dorcas lavished another one of her “my, aren’t we the idiot?” looks on him. “It was the right thing to do,” she said. “Jesus said ‘Do unto others.’” Her eyes flashed to the side. “You’re head’s bleeding again.”
Ken touched his temple. His fingers came away red. The sight of his blood made him woozy. Or maybe it wasn’t the sight, but the fact that he’d probably lost so much of it. Either way, he once again found himself riding a Tilt-a-Whirl that nobody had bothered to ask him if he wanted a turn on.
Dorcas put a hand on his shoulder. “You should lay back down.”
“Can’t.” He closed his eyes, willing the vertigo to stop. It didn’t. He opened his eyes and concentrated on seeing through his dizziness. He seemed to have better luck with that, if only marginally. “My family’s out there.”
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 6