Ken didn’t ask where the other bullets had gone. Probably expended before Aaron had found him and Dorcas. Regardless, two was not enough to help whoever was in the car.
He wondered if he should try to help anyway. If there was any way to take on the four zombies that seemed intent on beating their way into the vehicle.
Then the question became moot with a sound of thunder.
A horde had arrived.
49
HE HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING how many there were. Hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands – however many it was, one moment there were only the four brawny zombies pummeling at the car outside the bank, and the next moment the car was gone, drowned in a sea of once-humanity. The growling, snarling mass of monsters were all focused on the car, and even over the noise of their shouts Ken could hear the louder sounds of the car being hammered by hundreds of fists.
Ken dropped back behind the deposit slip station. He looked over at Dorcas and Aaron. Only ten feet away, but they seemed to be in another world.
Dorcas was staring at him. Her eyes alight with terror. Aaron cocked the hammer on his gun, readying one of his remaining two rounds.
Glass crashed. Ken winced, expecting to hear the growling invade the bank. But it was the sound of the car’s windows smashing in.
Another scream – all-too human. And all-too short.
Then, silence.
Even the growling that was the zombies’ apparent trademark ceased.
Ken peeked over the top of the counter, suspecting what he would see.
Faces. Bloody and broken. Whole and unblemished. A strange mix of the perfect and the profane.
Every one of them tilted upward, every one of their mouths open wide.
Every single person breathing in unison.
He dropped back down. Looked at Aaron and Dorcas. “We should go. Now.”
Dorcas didn’t move. Aaron shook his head.
“Trust me,” he said to Aaron. “I’ve seen this before.”
“So’ve I,” said Aaron.
“When you were out it happened again,” whispered Dorcas.
“Twice,” added Aaron.
“So you know, now’s the time to go,” said Ken. “What happens if they wake up and we’re still here?”
“The times they spend doing... that...,” said Dorcas, motioning vaguely at the mass of zombies only a dozen feet away. “It’s....” She searched for words.
“It’s getting shorter,” said Aaron. “Each time, it gets shorter, like there’s some internal countdown happening.”
A shudder ran through Ken’s frame. His head thudded in time with his speeding heartbeat. “What happens when the countdown reaches zero?” he asked.
No one answered.
Outside, the horde could still be heard breathing: in-out-in-out-in-out....
Then snap.
The growling began again.
And Ken knew if he’d gone out there, he would have just been stepping into their midst when they came back to reality – or whatever passed for reality in their minds.
A few of the zombies began knocking on the bank windows. Tapping gently, almost tenderly.
Tap, tap, tap....
Fingernails coated with gore, hands slick with blood.
Tap, tap, tap....
Ken felt like he was in a children’s fairy tale. Like he, Aaron, and Dorcas were the three little pigs. He remembered very clearly that things ended badly for two of those pigs.
And that was with only one Big Bad Wolf. Outside this particular house of straw, there were thousands of them.
Tap, tap, tappppp....
The tapping grew louder as more hands slapped the glass.
“Little pig, little pig, let me in,” he whispered to himself.
50
KEN SAW DORCAS SHIFT slightly, saw her getting ready to run, to make a break for the back of the bank and the safety of the vault. Aaron put his free hand on her shoulder, and Ken saw the cowboy’s knuckles whiten as he silently urged Dorcas to stay put.
He also noticed that Aaron had his gun pointed at Dorcas’ back. He wondered if that was accidental, or if the man planned to use one of his two remaining bullets on her before letting her be turned.
And who gets the other bullet? The last bullet?
The tapping at the glass grew louder, hands and fists battering at the heavy windows. The growling was a rippling, surging undertow, dragging Ken into a place where despair and death were the only possible outcomes – and became, in their way, the only welcome options.
He felt himself start to rise. The power of the sound, of so many of the things made it impossible to do anything else. His knees popped, and his left leg twinged, the pain from when he had twisted his back to avoid falling into a student in a hall only a few hours and a million years ago yanking him suddenly back into reality.
Had he really been about to stand up? To give up?
Yes.
He fell back to the floor. Almost to his belly. Looked at Dorcas and Aaron. Dorcas was gripping her broken arm, her face white and her jaw clenched. Under other circumstances Ken would have guessed she was in pain, holding herself to abate the agony. But now he suspected that she was causing the discomfort. Using it to keep her grounded, to counteract the strangely hypnotic effect of the zombies’ shrieks.
And Aaron.... Aaron had his eyes closed. Showing no outer signs of turmoil or stress. He almost seemed to be napping.
The noises of a thousand hands slamming the windows ceased. It didn’t peter off, didn’t dissipate, just suddenly stopped as the zombies moved away as one. Off to the next target. To the next victim.
Ken started to peek over the counter. But a motion caught his eye. Aaron, gesturing for him to wait. He did. A moment later, Aaron nodded, and Ken looked over the countertop. Just in time to see a last zombie ambling away.
He glanced at Aaron.
How had the cowboy known?
51
NO ONE MOVED FOR A full five minutes after the things were gone. Then Dorcas stopped pressing her broken arm, and exhaled explosively. She wiped at tears that were streaming down her cheeks.
“We should go,” she said.
“You still want to?” asked Aaron. Ken got the feeling the cowboy wasn’t asking him – just Dorcas. Like the other man had decided that Ken was skirting the edges of Crazytown.
Aaron’s sticking around for Dorcas. Not for me.
He wondered what would happen if Dorcas said she didn’t want to go. If he’d have the strength to keep going toward his family.
Toward the center of town.
Wouldn’t it be better – smarter – to run? To get out of the urban center? To go somewhere with fewer people... fewer zombies?
Dorcas nodded, “Let’s go find his family.”
And that answered that. She was still a virtual stranger. Ken knew almost nothing about her. But she had rescued him, and was willing to risk herself to rescue his loved ones.
For a moment, standing on the brink of the end of the world, on the edge of a doom greater than any he had ever imagined possible, Ken felt like things would work out.
Then he stood. Got a good look at the windows. Red handprints smeared across them from top to bottom. Light filtering through them in splashes of scarlet that made it seem as though the interior of the bank was awash in blood.
“You guys ready?” he asked. His voice came out husky, the tone of a man struggling to hang on to hope.
Sounds beside him, the gentle whispers of a man and woman standing.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They stepped outside.
52
KEN LED THE WAY. THE entry to the bank, like the entry to most places of business in this part of the world, consisted of an interior set of doors and an exterior set. The typical setup for extreme cold weather, allowing for an “airlock” of sorts where people could shuffle off their winter snow, snap their wet umbrellas, and shift into the warmer interior.
Ken felt fine going thr
ough the interior doors. He pushed them open and stepped into the small anteroom. Aaron and Dorcas stepped in with him. The interior doors shut behind them.
He felt trapped.
Claustrophobia gripped him in a way that he had never before experienced. He was in a huge glass bowl, one that allowed a floor to ceiling view of him on two sides. Nowhere to hide. If one of the hordes came by, or even a few individual zombies....
He wanted to run back into the bank. Wanted to hide in the vault until this all ended. Even if the end that came was his death.
He remembered the feeling of despair that came when he called on the cell phone. The need to give up that he felt when the zombies screamed. Was this part of that? A residual effect that would eventually fade?
He hoped so.
He doubted it.
Ken realized he was standing still. Frozen by panic, an easy target.
Move, dammit.
He couldn’t.
He thought of Maggie’s face. Of Derek’s lopsided grin. Of the silly faces Hope made whenever she posed for a camera. Of Liz’s burbling baby laugh.
Will I find them alive?
He grabbed the outer door. Swung it open.
He didn’t step out. Just listened.
No screaming. No cries of pain. No growling.
No sound of thunder.
He nodded over his shoulder at Dorcas and Aaron. They joined him on the street. Aaron still had one hand on Dorcas’ shoulder, still had the other curled around his silver Magnum. The hammer was cocked.
The street was empty.
Smoke filled the space between the buildings. Car alarms could be heard pealing their shrill cries up and down the city. None on this street.
Ken spared a quick glance at the car next to the bank. The one the zombies had swarmed around. It was a blue Nissan sedan. The windows had been knocked out, and dents dipped sharply into the car’s frame every few inches.
Ken wondered what the hands that had done this looked like. He hoped they were mangled and useless; that they weren’t possessed of some strange healing faculties.
The interior of the car was empty. Shards of glass littered the seats, a parking permit for one of the local neighborhoods hung from the rearview mirror.
A single thumbprint of blood on the beige dashboard.
Ken moved away from it.
The bank they had hid in was on the corner of 12th and Idaho. The Wells Fargo Center was on 9th and Main. Only about four blocks away.
A lifetime.
He began to walk. Staying in the shadows as much as he could. Not easy to do. Much of this part of the city block was devoted to parking lots for the local business. The lots were choked with cars, many of them on fire, and Ken had to keep crossing and re-crossing the street, Aaron and Dorcas close behind, to find buildings to walk beside.
Plus, it was almost three o’clock and the sun was high overhead. What shadows were cast by buildings and the few trees that had not been plowed under by runaway vehicles were thin and held close to the objects that cast them. And all were rendered weak by the ever-present gloom of the smoke that hung a pall over everything.
Besides, he didn’t know if the zombies saw the same way he did. Maybe they saw better in shadows. Maybe they saw heat waves, or pheromones.
Still, it made him feel better to hug the buildings. Dorcas and Aaron did the same.
One of the problems with any city is the feeling of disconnection. It’s a fact of life: you can’t see more than a block in any direction when you’re standing among buildings that reach into the sky. Boise was smaller than most big cities – only about two hundred thousand people, about a dozen real high rise buildings – but it was big enough to provide that same feeling of disorientation. That strange sensation of being right next to something that could be anything.
That was why it was such a surprise when Ken came across the rubble. Huge pieces of concrete, some of it so white it seemed to gleam in the sunlight, other pieces gray and ashen. He couldn’t figure out where they had come from.
Dorcas figured it out first. She sobbed, a cry of anguish that exploded out of her. “It’s the One Capital Center,” she managed.
Ken gaped. That was impossible. The One Capital Center was still a block and a half away.
He began picking his way between the pieces of rubble. Some of it had sheared through other buildings on either side of the street.
He saw a shoe. Didn’t look closer. Didn’t want to see.
He walked around a huge piece of glass and steel and concrete, a chunk the size of an elevator.
And stopped dead in his tracks.
53
THE STREET WAS BLOCKED.
No, not blocked. Gone.
And Dorcas was right. The rubble they had been walking through was definitely the remains of the One Capital Center. Ken could tell, because he was looking at what appeared to be the top three floors of that building.
It was as though someone had sliced off the top of the One Capital Center, an almost perfect cross-section, and carefully positioned it a full block away from where it should be. The floors were laid across Idaho Street, sagging across the middle of the road, hanging on the buildings on either side. The bottom level – what Ken guessed had once been the twelfth floor – sagged low enough almost to touch the road. Every window had burst, and he could see right into the offices that had once been an everyday part of life a block over and some two hundred feet higher.
Almost as incredible, the buildings to either side of the displaced building had been crushed into rubble. Not a single door or window could be made out, not a single storefront could be discerned. Just two uniform mountains of debris, one on each side of Idaho Street, which glittered eerily as minute bits of glass caught what light penetrated the smoke and other particulates in the air.
“What could have –” Aaron’s voice almost echoed in the space created between the buildings on three sides. Even the ever-present bleating of car alarms was quieter here, as though reverencing the dark miracle of this event.
“Must’ve been one of the jets,” said Ken.
“An airliner wouldn’t do this,” said Aaron. “Maybe make a building fall down, but not blow its top like this.”
“Maybe one of the stealth fighters,” said Ken. He was whispering. They all were. Praying in a chapel of the damned and the dead.
“Stealth fighters?” Aaron sounded surprised. “There aren’t any stealth fighters stationed near here. Not even at the Mountain Home base.”
Ken shrugged. “Maybe not, but I saw two flying over the city when this...” he waved a hand, encapsulating the nightmare they had found themselves living, “... all started. One crashed into the other.”
Aaron pursed his lips, thinking, and Ken wondered again about this cowboy. “Maybe,” said Aaron. “Depends on the payload, but maybe.” Then he looked around. Shrugged as if deciding the question was academic. “We should get moving,” he said quietly. He stepped toward the sagging rubble before them.
Dorcas pulled back. “Shouldn’t we go around?” she said.
Aaron shook his head. “Can’t,” he said, as calmly as though discussing which route to take to the movies, which kind of cereal to buy at the store. “We’re trapped here. No exit. Gotta go forward.”
“Why can’t we go back?” said Ken.
And then he heard the thunder.
54
TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND people in Boise. Maybe twenty or thirty thousand more during the day, when people came in for work.
Half of them turned instantly.
Odds were that of the remaining half, most were killed in the first few minutes. And the great majority of those that remained were turned.
So how many zombies roaming the streets? A hundred fifty thousand? A hundred eighty?
Ken did all these calculations in the instant it took to turn toward the tired-looking, decapitated chunk of the One Capital Center.
In the time it took to take Dorcas’ hand and get to where
Aaron was waiting for them, the cowboy’s hand resting casually on one of the broken window frames of the building’s displaced twelfth floor, Ken did another calculation.
Maggie and the kids were dead. Out of two hundred thousand people – and change – there was no chance they had survived. The world had ended. Skyscrapers had literally been cut to pieces. A mother and her children alone had no chance.
“Come on,” said Aaron. His voice was brisk, and Ken realized he had stopped in mid-step, halfway into the building that lay in the middle of the street. As though pausing between one world and another, deciding which Hell he would prefer.
The thunder was joined by screams and growls. He didn’t have to look to know the first zombies had caught sight of them.
How many thousands? How long before they catch us?
The growls made him want to give up. He realized it was some kind of psychic effect, just one more way they attacked. But knowing it didn’t change its effectiveness.
Just give up.
He looked at Aaron. The cowboy nodded quietly, as though to say, “If you want to stay, I won’t stop you. Man’s gotta choose his own path.”
Ken stepped into the building.
Aaron clapped him on the back, half encouragement, half propulsion. Ken stumbled forward.
Into the darkness of a world destroyed.
55
PART OF THE REASON Ken chose history as a profession was the outright strangeness of it. He delighted in the twists and turns, the odd and unpredictable moments. As a kind of testament to the strange, each year he told his senior students the tale of Royal Air Force Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade.
Alkemade was a rear gunner in a bomber during World War II. When his plane was attacked by German fighters, he discovered his parachute had malfunctioned. Faced with the choice of staying in his plane and burning alive, or jumping and dying on impact, he chose the latter.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 11