The survivors had crowded into the top of the fuselage, standing at the top of a buckling center aisle that led downward at a steep angle into smoke, fire, and death.
“Where are the rest of the creeps?” said Christopher. Ken saw Dorcas look askance at him. “There must have been some zombies in here,” said the young man. “Where’d they go?”
“Must’ve left after the plane hit,” said Aaron.
“You think?” said Dorcas.
No one answered her. Either because Aaron had given the best answer or – more likely – because no one knew the answer.
“What now?” said Dorcas.
A roar behind them made the answer easy.
“We go down,” said Buck. The big man shifted Hope’s loose form in his grip, then took a careful step forward. Ken heard a double pop-pop and thought at first he was hearing the crackle of the fire, coming from some unseen spot below them.
Buck grinned sheepishly. “Weak ankles,” he said. Ken almost laughed. Then the laugh dissipated utterly from his thoughts as Buck stepped forward again. Forward, and downward.
Down into smoke. Into fire.
Into the province of the dead.
9
MAGGIE FOLLOWED BUCK. Liz continued to struggle in the carrier, and Ken’s wife still had her hand clamped over their daughter’s mouth. The sight of Maggie gagging the toddler chilled Ken: not something he had ever thought he would see his wife doing. He had been on the fence as far as spanking went when he entered the marriage, but Maggie very quickly let him know it wouldn’t be an option for their children. She believed in time outs and reasoning and positive discipline.
Not shoving her hand over their child’s face.
But then, are you even sure that is your child anymore, Ken?
A valid question. And not one he was sure he could answer.
Ken moved to follow Maggie, but before he could Christopher slipped into the aisle. He looked over his shoulder and shrugged as though to say, “Better not get to close to her right now, man.” Or maybe that was just Ken’s imagination, imputing meaning where there was none.
It was easy to do. People had been doing it since the beginning of time. Interpreting the universe in a way that had it making sense, in a way that drew order out of chaos.
But what order could there be now? When humanity was changing before Ken’s eyes, and even the release of death was denied to so many.
He shuffled down the aisle behind Christopher. The adrenaline that Aaron had pumped into him was still blasting through his veins and arteries, making him feel on edge. The world seemed to have a blue tint to it, as though everything had been subtly electrified. His aches and pains were still there, but muffled under a blanket that pulsed with the erratic beat of his overstressed heart.
He could barely feel his back, and though the nerves in his left leg still hurt considerably the pain seemed faraway and more abstract than concrete. As though it was something being described to him rather than something he was actually experiencing.
He looked around. The cabin was lit by fire somewhere at the bottom of the incline. Small flames licked along lines of upholstery and carpeting along the length of the fuselage, as well. Some of the bodies still smoldered.
The seats were arranged three on the left, three on the right. Extending into the distance below. Some of the seats had been knocked off their moorings and either hung dreadfully askew or had seemingly disappeared completely. Perhaps they had flown through the front or side of the jet when it impacted the ground or the building – Ken couldn’t tell which it had hit first. Perhaps something else had happened. The FAA would have had a field day investigating a wreck like this.
Only there’s no more FAA. No more FAA, FDA, NSA, CIA. None of those good ol’ acronyms that mean everything is A-OK.
Ken looked to his right. About three-quarters of the seats were empty, but it wasn’t a regular dispersal. Some rows were completely vacant, others had a single body, others held a full contingent of cadavers.
Beside him now, he saw what looked like the remains of a family. A man and a woman with a smaller body between them. Impossible to say whether the smaller body had been a boy or a girl – the face was hidden below the parents’ forms, what was visible of the child’s flesh was torn and twisted, and the clothing was so bloodstained there was no way to discern color or cut.
The tray table on the seat back in front of the man had popped free of its little lock and punched halfway through his body, nearly cutting him in half.
“Please return your trays to their locked positions,” Ken heard a voice say in his mind, words that had been spoken a thousand times and would likely never be spoken again. They belonged to a world that was already a memory.
The woman looked almost unblemished. Whole. Only the thin sliver of metal puncturing her breast giving a hint as to the cause of her death.
Man and woman – mother and father? – were twisted, almost huddled, over the smaller body. As if they had thrown themselves across the child in the last moments before impact.
Ken didn’t know how to feel about that. He wanted to find hope in it. Because it showed that there was more to life than just selfishness. There was more to existence than a clawing grasp for one’s own survival.
On the other hand, what had it benefited them? Mother and father were both dead, and the child was a shrouded scrap of tissue between them. At best they had the blessing of feeling the child die before they themselves expired. Of knowing what had happened to their baby.
Was that what they were all doomed to feel? To hope for? Was humanity’s aspiration now merely that death would take them – and not something darker, and harsher, and far more eternal?
Ken felt Derek in his arms. Felt him as real as he had ever been. Felt him falling away. Changing. He wondered if he was going mad.
Thought it might be better. Everyone talked about insanity as a curse. But the reality, the dark secret that he suspected now more than ever, was that recent years had seen spikes in mental health problems because more and more people had discovered the relief of lunacy. The comfort that came with not knowing... and never having to know anything again.
Never having to see your son fall. Never having to see your daughters change.
Ken’s musings took him so far into himself that he almost didn’t notice the sounds for a moment.
Tic. Tic-tic. Tic-tic-tic-tic.
“What’s that?” said Aaron. The cowboy was a pace behind Ken, following with Dorcas.
“I don’t –“ began Christopher.
Tic-tic-tic-tictictictictic....
And then Ken knew what the sound was. He had heard it before.
He looked at the windows. They were double-paned, and they seemed to have survived the crash, for which he was grateful.
Because they were the only thing standing between the survivors and the source of the sound.
10
THE BUGS HAD BEEN THE first signal of the change.
They had clustered on a window – just a single window – of Ken’s classroom. So thick, so closely grouped that they appeared to be some kind of moving plate mail. They didn’t fly away when Ken tried to spook them, not even when the first explosion shook Boise and rattled the very pane to which they clung.
Later, the bugs continued acting strangely. Swarms of bees seemed to target human beings, stinging any they came into contact with.
And then... they all died. Insects by the tens and hundreds of thousands – by the millions – carpeted vast stretches of sidewalk and street.
Ken had, in the back of his mind, assumed that the last ones he saw – a black expanse of dead bugs outside the Wells Fargo Center – were it. The last ones in Boise, perhaps in the world. And part of him wondered what would happen, how life would change, if the insects were suddenly just gone.
He needn’t have worried.
At least, not about that.
The air in the cabin grew suddenly dark as what little light had filtered
through the soot-fogged windows dimmed and disappeared.
Bugs.
Everywhere.
Tictictictictic....
The sounds of thousands of tiny feet, so inconsequential on their own, was almost maddening. It joined with the crackling of the fires in the cabin to create a unique drumbeat, one that captured Ken’s already heightened pulse and sent it spinning into overdrive. He felt like his head was going to explode.
“What’s going on?” said Maggie.
“Shhh,” hissed Aaron. Ken didn’t know if the cowboy understood something about what was happening, or if it was just good advice in general. Either way, Maggie fell silent.
And Ken noticed that she wasn’t the only one.
“Maggie,” he whispered.
She looked at him. Fear in her eyes, though her mouth had drawn a thin line of anger across her face. He knew in his deepest heart that she wasn’t really angry at him, any more than he was angry at Aaron or Christopher or God or anyone else for what was happening.
Sometimes, we just needed a face to hate.
Sometimes, the face we hated just happened to be the closest one to our hearts.
“What?” she said.
“Liz,” he said. It was all he needed to say.
Maggie looked down. She gasped. A tiny inhale that threaded its way between the omnipresent tictictic of insects crashing their way to the windows, clinging to one another’s backs and legs and heads. A hand went to her mouth.
“What...?” Ken heard Dorcas behind him, could almost hear her craning to see what was happening.
“I don’t know.” He looked at the windows. Black holes in the red/gray shimmer of the fire and smoke that had enveloped their existence. The smoke wrapped around the still forms of the dead, making them seem less like corpses and more like an audience in the world’s most macabre theater. The shifting clouds of dark fog created the illusion of motion, and the change of light as the fire moved from place to place caused subtle shifts in shadow that heightened the hallucinatory effect.
Maggie shook Liz. Only a moment before they had all been praying that the toddler would stop shouting, stop moving, stop doing whatever it was that called the creatures to them.
Now, suddenly, Ken could feel the company lean toward Maggie, and could feel them trying to rescind that prayer.
Liz wasn’t moving. Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, only whites showing. Her head tilted back, her mouth open.
The rest of her hung limp.
“What is it?” Buck looked at Hope. The little girl was still unconscious. Then he looked left and right at the dark holes, like black eyes that had once been windows. “What’s happening?”
Tic. Tictictictic....
Ken had been concussed. Bruised, beaten, maimed. He had also had most of his back burnt in an explosion. So he had no small hairs on the back of his neck. Still, he felt the muscles there tighten. A twitching, trembling, more civilized and less developed version of the early-warning system that sent feral animals howling out of the forest mere moments before the earthquake, the hurricane.
He looked at the buzzing darkness at the windows. The dead bodies like visions of the future come to claim them all.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
11
EVERYONE KEPT MOVING forward.
There was nothing else to do. They couldn’t go back – there were Heaven-only-knew how many zombies behind them. Couldn’t go sideways. No way out of the airplane. And even if they found an emergency exit, Ken didn’t want to be the first one to venture out into the swarms of insects. He remembered the people he and Dorcas had found, people who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the swarms. Swollen, bloated beyond recognition. Only their clothing had identified the remains as being of human origin.
Tic-tictictic....
Ken realized some of the sound was coming from inside his head. Panic sent a bolt of purest ice through his chest, down his stomach and testicles.
It’s happening to me. I’m changing.
Then he realized the sound was his teeth. Clicking. Chattering in terror and the natural reaction to all the adrenaline that had saved him... and now threatened to overcome him.
Easy.
Easy.
Tictictictictic....
The floor of the aisle buckled suddenly after about fifteen feet, humping up and then dropping off to an even steeper incline. The group clotted up getting over it. Ken felt his skin continue to crawl, drawing tight against his bones and then letting go explosively, then drawing tight once more, letting go, repeating the process in an infinite loop that made him feel nauseous.
Something’s coming.
Still, he didn’t say anything. Didn’t whisper at Buck or Maggie to hurry, because the last thing any of them needed was for someone to fall at this point. Not now.
Tictictic....
Teeth or bugs? He couldn’t tell anymore. The sounds had mingled in his mind, bouncing around and creating a noise that was half alien, half familiar. The familiarity made it worse. Anything fully alien is merely incomprehensible; it is only when mixed with a modicum of ourselves that we understand it enough to fear it.
Tictictic....
Buck had stepped over the hump. Not much, just a six-inch jutting in the floor. Normally not even a nuisance, but the big man was treating it with utmost care.
Tictictic....
Buck turned and held out a hand to assist Maggie. She looked at Liz. The toddler’s head still pointed up, her eyes still rolled back so far only pure white showed. It was so bright it almost glowed in the brimstone cylinder of the plane cabin.
Tictictic....
Maggie took Buck’s hand. She stepped forward.
Ticticti –
Silence.
Everyone stopped moving.
Everyone.
But not everything.
12
THE SOUNDS STOPPED, and the silence was almost painful.
Until that moment, Ken hadn’t realized how much his world had come to be defined in terms of noise.
The sounds of Liz crying, of Hope and Derek playing.
Maggie laughing.
The pervasive tones of electronic media – beeps and boops and laugh tracks and commercials that were all just a bit too loud for comfort. But you didn’t notice after a while, because even the obnoxious, even the almost-painful became mere background. First we notice, then we tolerate, then we embrace, then we forget. The human condition as expressed by mass communications.
Then, after the change....
Explosions.
Screams.
Shattering bones.
Breaking glass.
The growl.
Give up.
Give in.
And just like that, it was gone. All of it. Only the corpse-breath crackle of the flames in the cabin.
“You hear that?” said Buck.
“Where’d the creeps go?” said Christopher.
The growl was gone. As though the zombies had, all in an instant, disappeared.
Ken dared to hope. Dared to dream that something might be going, if not right, then at least less wrong.
He looked at Maggie. Her arms around Liz.
The toddler’s eyelids fluttered. The whites of her eyes, so blaring and bright they almost glowed, suddenly disappeared as her head slumped forward.
Brightness streamed back into the cabin.
“Wha –“ said Dorcas.
Ken looked at the windows.
The insects were falling away. Letting go.
Dead?
No way to tell. No way to know without going outside.
All was silent.
Just the breath of the survivors, the crackle of flame.
Then something shifted.
Maggie clapped her hands to her cheeks. It was a strangely juvenile gesture, the kind of thing Ken had seen his students do occasionally.
When Ken saw a high schooler do it, he tried not to laugh.
When Maggie
did it, he had to force himself not to scream. Instead, he turned and looked at what she was staring at. He didn’t want to see it, but he knew that avoidance was the fastest way to die. The only way to survive this world was to keep your eyes wide open, watch for danger... and run when you could.
He saw what she saw.
And like Maggie, Ken did something he would have thought of as cartoonish if he had observed someone else doing it.
He rubbed his eyes.
He did it almost carefully, scrunching up his one good hand and pressing it against his right eye, then his left. Each time adding a quick circular motion as if to remove whatever grit was causing this vision.
He opened his eyes.
And it was still there.
The world made less sense than it had.
The mere insanity that had gripped the world was gone, replaced by full-fledged homicidal psychosis.
Someone cursed.
Someone else screamed.
Sound snapped back to existence, found its way to a place where there was no hope for survival, no hope for escape.
Not even in death.
Because the dead themselves were moving.
13
THE FAMILY KEN HAD spotted earlier had led to mixed feelings. Hope and dread, poignant loss and melancholy surrender.
Now he saw them simply. They were evil. Evil in its purest form.
It was one thing for people to suddenly change, to turn on one another and become snarling, biting beasts. But really, wasn’t that just a small nudge down a slope so many people already rested on the crest of? Just a push into a shadowy precipice over which so much of humanity eagerly lunged of their own accord?
There was nothing beautiful about what had happened to this point. Nothing poetic, nothing bright –
(nothing bright about Derek being bitten, about blood streaming from his pores, about his eyes flooding with madness, about his fall to flame)
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 30