Darkness had finally fallen.
It had been less than a day since the change had swept through the world. Less than twelve hours, and almost everyone was dead.
“Hurry up,” said Aaron. The cowboy was moving at a fair clip, followed closely by Maggie.
“Wait,” said Buck. The big man wasn’t panting as hard as he had in the plane, but he was moving so slowly that Ken guessed he was almost out of energy.
“We don’t have time to mess around,” said Aaron.
“We’re not,” said Buck. “I’m looking for something.”
He turned, drawing Ken with him. Ken heard him say, “I know it’s around here somewhere....”
They turned back to the plane.
And saw the undead had found their exit. A full dozen of them were loping toward them. Not as fast as the zombies that were recently-changed humans, not by far.
But fast. Too fast for a bunch of mangled survivors holding onto children and cripples to escape.
38
AARON PITCHED HOPE at Maggie. Ken thought his daughter was going to fall, but Maggie caught her at the last second, juggling her so that she was wrapped around the equally-unconscious shape of her other daughter.
“What are you doing?” she said. Her voice was harsh, grating. Ken had always loved her voice. From the first time he heard it, he thought it sounded like wind in the trees and a roaring fireplace and simmering stew and a million other things that all said home. Now, though, terror had razed the home from her voice and left it desolate. Ken would have cried if all his energy wasn’t devoted to the simple acts of keeping his eyes open and his head upright.
Aaron didn’t answer. But Ken knew what he was doing. Knew even before the cowboy wended between the remaining survivors and took up position between them and the zombies.
“Go,” he said. No panic, no screaming. Just a single word in a voice that was used to being obeyed.
Maggie turned away automatically, one child cinched to her stomach and the other clutched to her chest. Her chest heaved as though she was sobbing, but Ken saw no tears on her soot-stained face.
Buck did not turn. He kept casting his eyes around. Looking for something.
Aaron glared at the gray man. Buck ignored him. Then got a look on his face that Ken thought was terribly out of place. Excitement. Happiness, even.
“There,” said Buck.
Ken didn’t see what the man had seen. He didn’t care, either. He was watching Aaron. The cowboy/rodeo clown/whatever-he-really-was was tough. Tough and more dangerous than anyone Ken had ever met.
Tough... but he had to be tired.
Dangerous... but he only had full use of one hand.
And neither of those things mattered, because there was no way he could stand against a dozen undead things.
The first of them was five feet away from the cowboy.
Maggie was hobbling away with their children. She threw a look over her shoulder, shock rippling her features. “Come on,” she said.
Buck darted toward her. But not to follow. He grabbed her. Stopped her.
She screamed.
Using his free hand, Buck pulled her back. Back toward the danger. Toward the zombies.
The first of them reached Aaron.
39
“LET ME GO! LET ME go, let me go!” Maggie was screaming and kicking, but she couldn’t do much more than that without either dropping Hope or losing her balance. So Buck just yanked her backwards, her feet dragging intermittently as she raised one foot to kick, then dropped it quickly before she keeled over.
“Shut up,” he snapped.
“Don’t tell me to –“
Buck shook her. Hard. Ken could feel the jerk through the big man’s trunk, and it jerked his mouth hard enough he bit his tongue. Blood flowed into his mouth. Not a thing he could do about it, though. He could barely keep his eyes open.
And it was getting harder to keep his head upright.
Sounds behind them indicated that Aaron was fighting. Trying to buy them time to run. Time Buck was determined not to let them use.
Was the big man trying to make them commit some strange sort of suicide?
He’s lost it. Lost his world, lost his mom. Decided to take us with him.
Aaron grunted. Not in pain. Not yet. Something crashed into what sounded like a board, accompanied by the noise of rending wood. Ken figured the undead couldn’t vomit acid like their “living” cousins – at least, they hadn’t yet done so – but they were still fast and strong.
And they wanted to kill the survivors.
Buck kept dragging Maggie back. She tried to speak again, and he shook her again. “Shut up,” he grunted. Then yanked her close to him and said, “Look up.”
She did. Gasped.
Ken looked up as well, though it took him longer.
They’d been in the plane for no more than thirty minutes. But like everything that had happened since the universe flung itself off its axis, time had taken on an insane quality. Ken had almost forgotten that they had entered the plane for a reason.
Running.
Fleeing from two hundred thousand zombies – the kind that had converted from living humans – that had followed them into the Wells Fargo Center. Had coated its walls like a living oil slick. An infestation.
And those zombies, the living zombies, were still looking for the survivors.
No, that’s wrong. They’re not looking. They’ve found us.
40
AS SOON AS KEN SAW this, he also realized why Buck had pulled Maggie back. The plane had fallen into the street, had jammed into the pavement and asphalt. There were pieces of metal and plastic everywhere, butting right up to the building across the street. The body of the plane itself effectively created a blind alley from which Maggie had been trying to escape.
But escape to what?
Nothing good: the side of the One Capital Center building they had entered the plane from was completely coated with zombies from the third floor up. So was the building across the street. Ken couldn’t see any glass or masonry. Just bodies interlocked, clinging impossibly to sheer sides of buildings. Some were broken and bleeding black ichor, others appeared nearly whole.
But they were everywhere. And they continued on to the edges of both buildings, curling around the building faces. Maggie had been running right to more of the things, and the only reason she hadn’t seen them was the combination of smoke in the artificial alley and the fact that they were still about fifty feet overhead.
But Ken knew height wouldn’t matter much. They would toss themselves down at the survivors. He had seen it happen before. And there was no way they could resist and onslaught of thousands of the things in this tight space.
Aaron was still fighting. At least, Ken assumed he was. Not screaming, at any rate. Grunting, though the sounds he was making were getting more and more ragged. Desperate-sounding even in their near-silence.
There was nowhere to go.
Why aren’t they jumping?
His mind tossed the question at him before he realized it, like a surprise throw to first base, coming so fast it catches not only the runner but the baseman by surprise. It took a half-second to process, and in that half-second Maggie noticed the same thing.
“They’re not moving,” she said.
Buck looked up. He grunted, a sound that was half confusion and half relief.
The things were everywhere. Ken and the others were theirs for the killing.
But Maggie was right: they weren’t moving. Just hanging there. Not even watching. It was like the zombies – all but the undead ones that had followed from the plane – had shut down for the time being, like machines that had lost their power source.
“What the hell is happening?” Buck said.
Aaron screamed. Everyone turned.
Aaron had positioned himself between a broken chunk of concrete the size of a car and a section of wing, trying to create a bottleneck. Two zombies lay on the ground in front of him, t
witching, slowly getting to their feet.
A third tackled Aaron. The cowboy went down. Trying to keep the undead thing’s teeth away as it silently bore down on him.
Aaron had only one good hand.
The undead thing had two.
And another of the undead grabbed Aaron’s cowboy boots and began chewing at them. Worrying them like a pit bull attacking a meal.
A fourth dove onto Aaron’s stomach. Ken saw that the cowboy’s shirt had ridden up, exposing a thin slice of flesh.
The thing opened its mouth. It seemed to smile.
Aaron looked back at the other survivors. “Run, you idiots,” he said.
Ken knew that was the man’s goodbye.
41
A FLURRY OF THOUGHTS went through Ken’s mind.
Where would they go, with the hundreds of thousands of zombies everywhere around them?
Buck should drop Ken and run – there was no chance for Maggie and the others if they were dragging him behind them.
Ken couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t even tell Buck to let go of him. He was just fighting to stay awake. Fighting to watch. As though knowing what happened to his family and to himself would be some kind of mercy.
What a joke.
All those thoughts flashed through Ken’s brain with the speed and violence of an electric shock.
Then he heard the roar. Loud, terrifying.
But it was not the roar that had come to define his world in the last few hours. Not the sound of the zombie horde, growling their siren song of despair. No, this was a sound that belonged even less to this part of the world.
Still, it was a sound that Ken had heard. One that he knew.
A white and black blur bulleted into the alley. It passed Maggie and Buck, seeming not to notice them, rocketing at the things that were now coating the still-screaming Aaron.
The roar intensified. It split. Ken realized that he was hearing – and now seeing – not one creature, but two. Creatures as out of place in downtown Boise as the zombies were. Animals who walked the frozen steppes of Russia, the Himalayan mountains of Tibet. But Ken knew them.
He had seen the creatures dozens of times.
They were snow leopards.
42
“WHAT IN GOD’S NAME is happening?”
No one answered Buck’s question, which sounded outraged more than surprised. Like he had reached his limit on things he was prepared to deal with and was now going to start complaining to whoever was in charge.
Ken stared, of course. It was all he could do. Maggie was silent as well.
The cats tore into the mass of bodies that had obscured Aaron from view. They growled and screeched, occasionally hissing as they moved. They weren’t as big as lions or tigers – Ken knew that the male was about one hundred and twenty pounds, the female perhaps ninety – but what there was of them was bone, muscle, claw, and tooth.
“Are those from the zoo?” Maggie said in a breathless whisper.
Ken couldn’t answer to anyone but himself. But he was sure she was right. The snow leopards had been given to the Boise Zoo as cubs, and Ken had taken the family to see them time and again. They must have escaped their enclosures somehow.
Their cats’ paws, so soft-looking when Ken had seen them with the kids, now showed the claws sheathed in their pads. They batted the zombies away from Aaron, the male sending half-dried blood dribbling in dirty clots as it eviscerated one zombie with a powerful swipe of its forepaw, the female grabbing another’s head in her jaws and crushing it with a powerful snap.
The zombie the female had mangled went mad, of course. Black-red gore squashed out of the snow leopard’s mouth, staining her muzzle and at the same time the zombie freed itself.
Aaron was pulling himself away from the melee. Shock deepened the wrinkles of his face, his eyes open so wide the whites were visible all the way around the irises. His jaw hung nearly to his chest as he crabwalked away from where the snow leopards fought off the eight zombies that were still unbroken enough to stand.
“What... what... what...?” he kept saying. All the way back to the other survivors.
“Are you bitten?” said Buck. He said it almost as an afterthought. His eyes were still glued to the snow leopards.
“No.” Aaron remained on his butt. Staring. One of the undead lurched past the cats, tried to get to the survivors. The male snow leopard took it down, slamming into it from behind, then severing its spine with a powerful bite to the base of the skull. The zombie twitched. The cat kept biting, burrowing into and through its trunk.
“We should... go....” Maggie’s voice had a dreamlike quality, as though she wasn’t sure if she was awake or not.
Ken wasn’t sure either. He didn’t think he was dreaming, but maybe he was insane. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? All this was just stress, just the lunatic dreams of a madman.
He wished it. But knew it wasn’t so.
Buck nodded. He leaned down and lifted Aaron up. “Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded like Maggie’s: distant and lost. Hoping someone would pinch him and say it was all right, none of it was real and it was time to wake up.
Ken remembered Derek coming to his and Maggie’s room in the night, shivering in his underwear, terrified of a bad dream. Curled up between them in the bed and Ken whispering that it was all right, that the bad dreams were just dreams and the monsters weren’t real.
But he had been wrong. So wrong. The monsters were real. They killed his son, not in his bed, but in broad daylight.
Ken watched the female snow leopard savage another undead zombie that was trying to get past it.
“Does it seem like...?” said Buck.
Aaron nodded. “Like they’re fighting on our side or something. Yeah.”
Then, as one, the undead fell. The ones who had already fallen – the ones on the street who were twitching and injured, but still trying to move toward Ken and the survivors – ceased their motion.
“What just happened?” said Buck.
The snow leopards continued tearing into the suddenly-still corpses for a moment. No longer the serene white and black cats Ken remembered seeing so often at the zoo, but rather black and crimson, like warriors that had painted themselves in preparation for coming conflict.
Ken felt himself tense, if only mentally, as the cats looked at the survivors. But neither of the snow leopards made a move toward them.
The male looked up.
So did Aaron. “Oh, dammit.”
The female didn’t look up. She seemed to be looking straight at Maggie.
Ken couldn’t look up to see what the male snow leopard was staring at; what Aaron had cursed. He was out of gas. He felt hot, flushed all over. Probably infection, maybe total systemic shutdown. Either way, he didn’t have the energy to raise his head beyond a level plane.
But he could look at Maggie. And realized the female cat wasn’t watching his wife. The cat was staring at Hope and Liz. At his daughters.
Both of them were awake. Eyes rolled back. Panting.
Smiling.
And Ken knew what Aaron had cursed about. Knew it even before he heard the movement above, before he heard the first wet clonk of a body shattering against broken concrete.
The zombies – the dangerous, fast, living ones – were moving again.
43
KEN HAD BEEN IN SEVERAL hailstorms, only one of which was dangerous. He and Maggie had been out sledding during Christmas break before they got married. Fully in love, ready to start a life together, and neither noticed how far they had gotten from their car, or how dark it was getting.
The first hail fell and they ran for the car. But the snow was thick. The car seemed to have moved away from them.
The hail came down in golf ball-sized stones that were hard enough to crack limbs from the nearby trees. One hit Ken in the shoulder and he thought for certain he’d broken his collarbone.
They got to the car and found the front windshield with three long splits running its
length. They didn’t dare to drive until the storm passed. Just huddled and hoped that the hail wouldn’t shatter the safety glass completely.
It was terrifying. The only good part had been the fact that Maggie didn’t get touched. That... and the fact that she insisted on kissing the spot he had been hit, “to make it better.” So on the whole it turned out all right in retrospect.
But the sound of hail falling, of things tumbling from the sky with enough velocity and force to shatter bone, had remained in his dreams for a long time.
And it was nothing compared to the sound of bodies letting go of the walls of the buildings above. The noise of a fleshy tidal wave as they sloughed away from the concrete and plummeted to earth.
Buck was already pulling them toward the building across the street. And that was madness, because the zombies that had let go were already standing. Lurching up on legs that were broken, the bones sticking straight out of their sheared flesh. Pushing up on arms that had so many breaks they looked almost like the segmented tails of scorpions.
Many of the things – more than before – had the scaly growths on their bodies. A lot of them covered the things’ eyes, though Ken knew that they would be able to zero in on the survivors just the same.
The things that had fallen were moving slowly. Picking themselves up and shifting as though trying to figure out how to adjust for the broken parts of their bodies.
Ken noted one of the zombies. It had broken legs, two limbs that jutted out in forty-five degree angles from its hips, then jerked back inward at mid-femur. Shattered bones, there was no doubt.
But as Ken watched, the thing’s legs straightened. He thought he could hear crackles. The thing leaned over and vomited the same yellow goo that they had been using to build walls and seal in Ken’s family in the Wells Fargo Center all over its legs.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 35