“Derek,” she sobbed.
“I know,” he said.
Then they were silent. Not long. Just a second. Just long enough to be. Just long enough for the world to take note that it hadn’t won. Not completely. The family – part of it, at least – was still alive. Bruised, fragmented, but still holding on.
“Guys...,” said Christopher. Ken looked over. The kid had appeared as though by magic. He was probably the most sure-footed of the group, so no surprise that he would have made the leap across the gap with the least trouble.
Ken sighed internally. Ready for Christopher to point to the crane, to where the hordes would be screaming across.
But he didn’t. He was looking the other way.
There was something behind Ken.
Something already there with them.
32
FEAR SURFED ELECTRIC waves up and down Ken’s back. The hordes had come in behind them. It must be that. They were surrounded.
Then he heard Aaron curse. Not a fearful curse, more a resigned one. The sound of a soldier dealing with tragedy, not terror.
“Cover the girl’s eyes,” said Aaron. His voice a reverent whisper.
Ken did, putting his hand across Hope’s eyes even as he turned.
It was Buck. Sobbing, kneeling on the floor before a pile of wreckage whose once-purpose Ken could not even begin to guess at. No doubt once an integral part of this room, this building, now it was just a tangled collision of steel and trash and concrete; wood and plaster and melted bits of plastic.
And flesh.
The gray man knelt before his mother. The old lady’s mouth was working, opening and closing and opening and closing as though she had been caught in the grips of the world’s worst indecision.
She looked at the others. Only her eyes moved. Her head did not shift. It couldn’t. A thin shaft of metal – perhaps a piece of a cabinet, maybe the support bar of a desk organizer – jutted out of her cheekbone, disappearing into her skull and pinning her to the junk pile that had somehow melded itself to her.
Her mouth opened again. This time blood drooled out. The old woman’s body was broken. Bent in too many ways to count, probably shattered a hundred different ways inside.
“Help... me...,” she whispered.
Growling erupted behind them.
Ken looked back. The things that had been following them up the crane were now running down the jib. They coated it, swarming over the gangplank, climbing along the outside supports, even hanging like rabid monkeys from underneath it. He couldn’t even see the metal.
“Come on,” he said, and started to move. One hand holding Maggie’s hand, the other still shielding Hope’s face.
Buck spoke, the man’s voice much different now than it had been before. It had lost its haughtiness, its entitlement. Humility had been forced upon him. “Wait,” he said. “We can’t leave her.”
Ken was saved from having to respond by Aaron. The cowboy was gruff, direct. And honest. “She’s dead already. And we have to leave.”
“Don’t... don’t... leave... me....” The woman’s voice was a gurgling whisper, a brook burning away to lifelessness under a relentless sun.
Buck looked at the others. “Will they let her die?” he asked.
Ken didn’t know. And he could tell that the others didn’t know, either.
Buck dissolved into tears. He buried his face in his mother’s chest, and looked for all the world like a child after a hard day at school.
Aaron slung Dorcas’ arm around his shoulders, and they moved toward the other end of the area, where there was a hole that might once have been an exit. Ken couldn’t tell if the cowboy was supporting Dorcas, or if she was supporting him. He supposed they probably didn’t know, either.
“I can’t let them turn her!” shouted Buck.
Christopher followed after Dorcas and Aaron.
“I can’t!” Buck was shrieking now. His voice a piercing, whining whistle.
Ken took Maggie and Hope and limped after the others.
The growl of the horde close behind. The sobs of the grown man-child even closer.
33
KEN FOLLOWED THE OTHERS into the hole. There was nowhere else to go: all else was collapsed wreckage, destruction, and behind them an empty area that was sure to be swarming with zombies soon. So he walked into darkness, still hearing the sounds of Buck sobbing behind.
He almost ran into Aaron. The older man was moving back toward the area they had just left, Dorcas pulling on his arm.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Ain’t right to leave her like that,” he said.
“There’s no time,” she said, her voice caught halfway between a whisper and a cry.
“Don’t matter.”
Aaron moved past Ken and his family.
Ken looked at Dorcas. “Is he...?”
She nodded.
A moment later, there was a muffled snap. A sigh.
And then Aaron came back, this time with Buck under his arm. The balding man’s eyes were teary, but he seemed aware. As they came out of the light, he moved Aaron’s arm away.
“Thank you,” said Buck. “I couldn’t. I just... I couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t if it’d been my mother, either,” said Aaron.
Buck nodded.
Something cracked outside. The building shuddered.
“What was that?” said Maggie.
Aaron looked through the faux door into the area they had just left. He glanced through furtively, as though looking around a doorway where he suspected armed enemies might be hiding.
While he was looking, Maggie whispered in Ken’s ear, “Did he kill that old woman?”
Ken nodded. Maggie put a hand over her mouth. Ken looked at her, trying to tell her to stay quiet. Now was not a good time to have a conversation about the ethics of mercy-killing.
It worked. Sort of. She didn’t say anything, but she looked at Aaron with an expression of supreme distaste.
She doesn’t know him. She’s been asleep. She doesn’t understand what’s been happening.
But Ken wondered if that was true. He hoped it was. But he couldn’t deny that Maggie also seemed to be looking at him strangely. As though he was not only a part to the mercy-killing, but a party to murder.
She’s reeling. From all this.
She’s going to blame you.
He was saved from that line of thinking by Aaron as the cowboy drew back into the room. “Crane just tipped.”
“It fell over?” Christopher said. He was smiling hopefully.
Aaron shook his head and gave a strange half-shrug. “Not all the way. Looks like it tipped and hit the building a floor or two down.”
Silence.
“What does that mean?” said Maggie.
“It means they’re below us,” said Ken. “And we’ve got to figure out a way past them.”
There was a muted shudder. A soft sound that might have been a roar, separated by concrete and glass and steel.
“And we’ve got to do it fast,” said Dorcas.
34
EVERYONE LOOKED AROUND. Even Hope, clinging once again to Ken’s neck, seemed to be peering around the darkened area in which they had found themselves. Taking stock as quickly as possible, knowing it was only a matter of minutes – perhaps less – before the things were upon them again.
It looked like they were in what had once been a hallway. Hard to tell, because the explosion the jet had brought with it had wrought near-absolute destruction. But there were detached doors and what looked like wall panels in the jagged space.
There was a click, and a light bloomed in the darkness. Buck was holding a small LED penlight, the kind that attached to a key ring. He swung it in a circle, eyeing the dispersed group.
“Where do you want me?” he said.
“Here,” said Aaron. The cowboy gestured for Buck to join him at the opposite end of the destroyed passageway.
Buck seemed to stiffen. Whether he viewed what
Aaron had done as a mercy or not, Ken couldn’t see him wanting to be with the other man right now. But he moved to the cowboy without complaining. Aaron pointed, and Buck aimed the flashlight where Aaron indicated.
“Come on,” said Ken. He grabbed Maggie and they moved with Hope and Liz toward whatever Aaron was inspecting.
Christopher got there a moment before they did. “What is it?” said the young man.
Aaron was pulling back some trash, a few felled panels and bits of concrete. Grunting as he did it one-handed. Revealing a metal sheet beneath.
“Can’t get through that,” said Dorcas. Watching from eyes veiled by pain and exhaustion.
“Bet we can,” said Aaron. He pushed down another piece of trash. Revealing another metal piece. And now Ken realized it wasn’t just a random sheet of steel tossed out of place by the explosion. It was a door. Two doors.
“An elevator,” said Buck. He looked at the destruction around them. “I don’t think it’s going to be running.”
“Me either,” said Aaron. He put his good hand into the crack between the doors. “Help me with this.”
Christopher moved up, and the two of them levered the doors apart.
As the doors opened, the growling that had only been a suspicion strengthened into a reality. The things were here. Close, and getting closer.
As always, the sound carried with it an undercurrent of hopelessness, a call to just give up, to lay down and let fate run its course. Like the fight had already been lost, and Ken and his friends were just struggling against the inevitable.
Ken held Hope close to him. Listened to her heartbeat. Smelled the acrid scent of her little girl’s sweat, and tried to convince himself that this was what was real. That this was what was worth believing in, and fighting for. Family. Community.
Life.
“What’s the plan?” said Christopher, peering into the darkness beyond the elevator doors.
Aaron smiled oddly. And then, in an imitation of an old-fashioned elevator operator, he said, “Going down.”
35
KEN DID WHAT EVERYONE else did when Aaron said that: he let his mouth hang open for half a second, then he pushed forward to see what was beyond the elevator doors.
He wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised at the fact that Aaron was saying they were going to go down, or the idea that the cowboy had done it in a joking fashion. Aaron had never made a joke before. Maybe the ongoing apocalypse was convincing the older man to let his hair down. Maybe he was just determined to go down smiling. Maybe Christopher was a bad influence on him.
But no matter his reasons, the idea of “going down” had to be a joke.
Because there was nothing beyond the doors. At least, nothing that looked like it could be used to go down. Just empty space and some mangled machinery.
“Are you nuts?” said Dorcas.
Buck nodded, looking a bit irritated for a second, like Dorcas had stolen his line in the play.
Aaron shook his head. The joking now gone from his expression. “Safest way down. We already know they go up stairs faster than we do, and now they’re climbing up the walls, for goodness’ sake.” He gestured at the darkness beyond the elevator doors. “Nothing to climb in there.”
“Uh....” Christopher raised a finger as though he was in a classroom, waiting to be called on by the teacher. “Yeah, so how do we get down then?”
Aaron took Buck’s light. He pointed it at the machinery. It looked like a large spool, hung up on the side of the elevator shaft, partially embedded in the concrete wall. Several thick metal cords trailed off it, disappearing into the darkness like the limp limbs of a giant daddy longlegs that had been smashed by an even larger boot.
“That there,” said Aaron, pointing at the spool, “is called the greave. Those lines sticking out of it are the elevator cables.”
“And?” said Christopher.
“And by federal law, each one of those cables is required to be strong enough to hold up the entire elevator at full capacity.”
“So?” said Buck. A bit of the haughtiness back in his voice.
“So that’s more than enough to hold each of us,” said Aaron.
Silence.
“How do we hold on?” said Dorcas. She motioned at her broken arm. “We got broken arms, banged-up hands. Kids.”
Aaron grinned tightly. “I happen to know a few tricks.”
“Tricks?” said Dorcas. “For going down a dark elevator shaft using elevator cables with one arm, holding onto kids?”
“Something along those lines.”
More silence. Broken only by the groans filtering up from below. Finally Christopher said what Ken supposed they were all thinking.
“Who are you, man?”
36
AARON TIPPED AN IMAGINARY hat. “Aaron. Pleased to meetcha.”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” said Christopher. “What do you do?”
“Honest answer?”
“Yes.”
Aaron sighed. “Most recently... and this is God’s truth... I was a rodeo clown.”
No one spoke for the space of perhaps ten seconds. Finally Buck said, “You. Are. Shitting me.”
“Language!” Maggie snapped the word, holding her hands over Hope’s ears. Ken almost laughed. It was absurd. They were fighting over whether or not to climb into a vertical coffin, climbing down – in some cases one-handed – into darkness in order to avoid zombie hordes that to all appearances had taken over the world. And Maggie was worried about Hope’s exposure to profanity.
But then, wasn’t that the point? What was the reason for living, if not to show our children at the very least the possibility of a better world? If life became nothing more than survival, then humanity was already dead. Homo sapiens might go on as a biological classification, but it was only in the expression of our better selves that we could find something beyond existence. That we could find meaning.
He squeezed Maggie’s arm.
“No, sir,” said Aaron. “I was a rodeo clown. Last few years. Good job.”
“That’s not where you learned to do this,” said Dorcas. Her voice was quiet. Intense.
Aaron looked at her, and even in the shaky illumination of the small flashlight, Ken could see the cowboy’s face change. The older man wouldn’t lie to Dorcas. But nor would he tell her everything.
“No,” said Aaron. “But that’s a story for another day.” He looked back into the shaft. “For now, just trust me.” He swung back to stare at them as the growling grew louder. “Please. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Buck shook his head.
“You’re all insane.” He stepped back the way they had come. Toward the waiting corpse of his mother.
Ken thought he might be right. This... how could they do it?
Buck looked at them. “Well?” he said. “Anyone coming?”
And at that moment the world fell in on him.
37
LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, Ken had visions of 9/11 burnt into his mind from news images, repeat airings of first-person footage, countless ratings-grabbing “special reports” over the years. He remembered seeing people emerge from clouds of dust and ash, covered so completely in the stuff they looked like ghosts. And that was what Buck looked like when he stumbled out of the vast white cloud a moment later.
“What...?” he coughed. “What happened?” He almost collapsed. Christopher caught him, pounding the man’s back as he hacked and spit to clear his throat.
Aaron was swinging his flashlight at the huge cloud that had enveloped Buck. The powder and dust refracted the light weirdly, seeming almost to eat it. “Collapse,” said Aaron.
He turned the light back on Buck. “He all right?”
Christopher nodded. “I think so.” He looked at Aaron. “Any way out through there?”
“Not anymore.”
“You have a helluva way of convincing people to do things your way,” said Christopher. He was grinning as he said it, but the grin looked
a bit fractured to Ken.
Aaron nodded as though taking the words at face value. He returned to the elevator doors and disappeared into the narrow crack in the darkness.
Ken could just see him, shuffling around a narrow ledge that rimmed the edge of the shaft. He went to the greave and leaned down, inspecting the cables that trailed off it, pulling on each with his good left hand. Then he nodded to Christopher and the young man joined him out on the ledge.
“Rodeo clown my – uh, butt,” said Buck. Then dissolved into another round of gasping coughs.
Ken didn’t particularly like the bald older man, but he agreed. Whatever Aaron’s story was, there was more to it than dressing up in silly paint and hiding in barrels to keep angry bulls from killing thrown riders.
Christopher laughed inside the shaft. Not a happy laugh. The kind of laugh when you’ve just heard something deeply disturbing. Along the lines of “You’ve got terminal cancer,” or “You should think about getting your affairs in order.”
Then Aaron said, “Buck?”
Buck looked at the others. “I guess I’m the guinea pig.”
Ken expected the man to resist. But he stepped through the crack between the doors. Went over to Christopher and Aaron. The two talked to him for a moment, then Christopher lowered him into empty space. Buck disappeared from Ken’s sight.
Ken expected to hear a scream. Long, fading. Then nothing.
Instead, he only heard the continuing sound of the things coming closer. He couldn’t tell where they were: the open shaft bounced their growls and groans around and made it impossible to pinpoint a location.
Maggie grabbed his arm.
“Dorcas?”
The older woman shook her head. “Take the kids first,” she said.
“Dorcas....” Aaron’s voice carried a warning tone. Not of threat, but the sound Ken associated with a long-married man warning his wife he didn’t want to get into an old argument again.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 21