Genesis
Author: Michaelbrent Collings
Date: 2013-08-16 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Zombies; Apocalyptic; Post Apocalyptic; Science Fiction; Fiction; Thriller; Dystopia; Suspense; Action
Description: Forget everything you think you know about zombies. In under 10 minutes, 99.9% of the world's population will be dead… or changed. Conversion is instant. Headshots just make them angry. And they’re getting smarter. Ken Strickland has made it through the first moments. But his family is still out there. Can he survive? Can he find them? Or will he become one more of the creatures that now rule our world? *Forget everything you think you know about zombies. * In under 10 minutes, 99.9% of the world's population will be dead… or changed. Conversion is instant. Headshots just make them angry. And
Publisher: Createspace

Book One of the Colony Saga

Copyright © 2013 by Michaelbrent Collings

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author. For information send request to info@michaelbrentcollings.com.

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email: info@michaelbrentcollings.com

cover and interior art elements © 2013 Stokkete
used under license from Shutterstock.com
cover design by Michaelbrent Collings

NOTE: This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

STRANGERS

“Highly recommended.” –
Hellnotes

“Collings is so proficient at what he does, he crooks his finger to get you inside his world and before you know it, you are along for the ride. You don't even see it coming; he is that good.” – Only Five Star Book Reviews

“Move over Stephen King... Clive Barker.... Michaelbrent Collings is taking over as the new king of the horror book genre.” – Media Mikes

“STRANGERS is another white-knuckled journey that demands to be read in one sitting.” – The Horror Fiction Review

“Michaelbrent spins a tale that keeps you enthralled from page to page….  Overall I give this novel an A.” – The Horror Drive-In

DARKBOUND

“Really good, highly recommended, make sure you have time to read a lot at one sitting since you may have a hard time putting it down.” – The Horror Fiction Review

“In Darkbound you will find the intensity of Misery and a journey reminiscent of the train ride in The Talisman….  A proficient and pedagogical author, Collings’ works should be studied to see what makes his writing resonate with such vividness of detail….  You will not be disappointed in this dark tale.” – Hellnotes

“Darkbound travels along at a screaming pace with action the whole way through, and twists to keep you guessing throughout....  With an ending that I didn't see coming from a mile away, and easily one of the best I've had the enjoyment of reading in a long time....” – Horror Drive-In

THE HAUNTED

“The Haunted is a terrific read with some great scares and a shock of an ending!” – Rick Hautala, international bestselling author; Bram Stoker Award® for Lifetime Achievement winner

“[G]ritty, compelling and will leave you on the edge of your seat....  The Haunted is a tremendous read for fans of ghoulishly good terror.” – horrornews.net

“The Haunted is just about perfect....  This is a haunted house story that will scare even the most jaded horror hounds.  I loved it!” – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and Inheritance

APPARITION

“Apparition is not just a 'recommended' novel, it is easily one of the most entertaining and satisfying horror novels this reviewer has read within the past few years. I cannot imagine that any prospective reader looking for a new read in the horror genre won't be similarly blown away by the novel.” – Hellnotes

“[Apparition is] a gripping, pulse hammering journey that refuses to relent until the very final act. The conclusion that unfolds may cause you to sleep with the lights on for a spell....  Yet be forewarned perhaps it is best reserved for day time reading.” – horrornews.net

“Apparition is a hard core supernatural horror novel that is going to scare the hell out of you....  This book has everything that you would want in a horror novel.... it is a roller coaster ride right up to a shocking ending.” – horroraddicts.net

“[Apparition is] Riveting.  Captivating.  Mesmerizing....  [A]n effective, emotional, nerve-twisting read, another amazingly well-written one from a top-notch writer.” – The Horror Fiction Review

THE
LOON

“It's always so nice to find one where hardcore asylum-crazy is done RIGHT....  THE LOON is, hands down, an excellent book.” – The Horror Fiction Review

“Highly recommended for horror and thriller lovers. It's fast-moving, as it has to be, and bloody and violent, but not disgustingly gory....  Collings knows how to write thrillers, and I'm looking forward to reading more from him.” – Hellnotes

MR. GRAY (aka THE MERIDIANS)

“... an outstanding read.... This story is layered with mystery, questions from every corner and no answers fully coming forth until the final conclusion.... What a ride.... This is one you will not be able to put down and one you will remember for a long time to come. Very highly recommended.” – Midwest Book Review

HOOKED: A TRUE FAERIE TALE

“Hooked is a story with depth....  Emotional, sad, horrific, and thought provoking, this one was difficult to put down and now, one of my favourite tales.” – Only Five Star Book Reviews

“[A]n interesting and compelling read.... Collings has a way with words that pulls you into every moment of the story, absorbing every scene with all of your senses.” – Clean Romance Reviews

“Collings has found a way to craft an entirely new modern vampire mythology – and one strikingly different from everything I've seen before....  Recommended for adult and teen fans of horror and paranormal romance....” – Hellnotes

RISING FEARS

“The writing is superb. The characters are believable and sympathetic... the theme of a parent who's lost a child figures strongly; it's powerful stuff, and written from the perspective of experience that no one should ever have to suffer.” – The Horror Fiction Review

Dedication

To...

Mom and Pop Barbey,
who provided me with a rare gift,

and to Laura, FTAAE.

The Colony: Genesis
Book One of The Colony Saga

Contents

Chapter

1. 1

2. 4

3. 7

4. 10

5. 13

6. 18

7. 21

8. 25

9. 28

10. 30

11. 34

12. 38

13. 41

14. 44

15. 48

16. 50

17. 52

18. 55

19. 58

20. 60

21. 62

22. 66

23. 70

24. 74

25. 77

26. 82

27. 87

28. 89

29. 91

30. 93

31. 95

32. 97

33. 99

34. 103

35. 107

36. 110

37. 114

38. 117

39. 118

40. 121

41. 124

42. 129

43. 131

44. 134

45. 137

46. 139

47. 141

48. 144

49. 146

50. 149

51. 151

52. 153

53. 157

54. 159

55. 161

56. 163

57. 165

58. 167

59. 170

60. 173

61. 176

62. 178

63. 182

64. 185

65. 188

66. 190

67. 194

68. 197

69. 199

70. 202

71. 206

72. 209

73. 214

74. 218

75. 220

76. 222

77. 225

78. 227

Author’s Note.. 229

1

“Mr. Strickland?”

“Shhh.”

A pause.  Then:

“Mr. Strickland?”

“Shhhh!”

A shorter pause.

“Mr. –“

Ken Strickland tried very hard not to roll his eyes.  He almost succeeded.

“What is it, Becca?”

Becca Lee was famous for this.  Bright enough to be in the college prep courses, but she somehow always found herself on the upper end of the grading curve in the lower level classes.  Like she didn’t want to run the risk of finding herself in the middle of the pack.  Better to win at an easier game than actually push herself to excel.  Still, that didn’t stop her from raising her hand and asking some question every time she finished a test. An obvious-to-everyone-but-her attempt for recognition, if not outright validation.  She might as well have just said, “I’m done, I’m smart, and I just wanted you all to know.”

Ken liked Becca.  He liked all his students, even the ones who seemed determined to squeak through their high school career on the way to promising futures as fry cooks, senators, and other high school teachers.  But some of them really tried his patience.

“Becca,” he said.  His voice was a stage whisper, one he knew from experience would carry through the room.  She was in the first row – a seat she had picked for herself, of course – so he could have been quieter.  But sometimes a little public embarrassment was the best medicine.  “Please be quiet unless you need to go pee-pee so bad you’re going to explode.”

Titters from the class.  Most of them seemed to understand what he was doing, too, glancing surreptitiously at Becca and rolling their eyes before returning their gazes to the tests he had handed out only….  Ken’s eyes flicked to the digital wall-clock.

Crap, it’s only been ten minutes?  No way she finished already.

As if mirroring his thoughts, Becca shook her head at that moment.  Her face scrunched up and there were wrinkles on her forehead that he’d never seen on her before.  She looked worried.  Freaked out.

Scared.

“It’s not that.  It’s just….”  She looked like she was searching for the right words, then just shrugged and pointed.

Ken followed the line of her gesture.  He wondered absently if this was some new way to get attention.  Wondered if there was any chance he would be able to steal away during his lunch break and meet up with Maggie and the kids.

Wondered if he was going to live and die in that lowest of all stations: a high school teacher.

Then all that fell out of his head, fell from his mind like water through a sieve as he saw what Becca was pointing at.  What she had been the first to see.

Others in the class saw it, too.  The titters of a moment before disappeared, replaced by several gasps and one small screech that probably came from Janeane Carpenter in the last row.

Or maybe it came from Ken himself.  He couldn’t be sure.  But a moment later he realized he’d stopped breathing.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

2

Bugs.

Lots of them.

The high school was all indoors.  It had to be; Boise, Idaho, didn’t get cold on the same level of, say, Missoula, Montana, but the idea of walking between different buildings during a winter snowstorm would have been supremely unpleasant.

Ken’s class was on the third floor of the high school, the east side.  One side of the classroom was mostly glass, just a wall of windows that allowed a view of the city.  It was a nice view, but Ken hated it.  It was just one more thing to distract the kids, especially with all the construction going on downtown: huge cranes moving steel girders into place were far too interesting for a mere teacher to compete with.

Now, however, the cranes were the furthest thing from his mind.  Instead, he was staring at the windows themselves.  Or at least, at one of them.  The second pane from his desk.

At first glance, the window appeared to be covered by some sort of corrugated cardboard, dark and rough.  But then Ken saw that the ripples in the “material” were moving.

Feet.

Legs.

Carapaces.

The bodies and body parts of thousands – tens of thousands – of insects that for some reason now clung to the single pane of glass.

One of the students cursed.  Normally the word would have gotten the kid a trip to Principal Connors’ office, but Ken barely registered the sound.

He stood up and walked to the window.

“Mr. Strickland….”

He glanced at Becca.  She had half-risen from her seat, one hand reaching toward him.  She looked like a damsel in a Saturday morning serial, reaching for her beau as he embarked on a dangerous mission.

A chill ran up Ken’s spine.  He turned back to the bugs.  He didn’t want to go.  But he had to know.

He moved to the window.

The insects crawled over, under, across one another.  A teeming mass of life.  But they did not leave the confines of the single pane of glass.

Something buzzed and hit the pulpy mound of insect bodies.  It hit hard enough that the window beneath clicked.  Ken’s face was within inches of the glass when it happened, and he jerked back.  Someone behind him screamed.

“Just another bug,” he said, realizing what had happened as he said it.  Just another bug.  Another bug.

But why?

Another buzz as something flew to join the coagulating pile of insects.  He could actually hear them through the glass, their feet clambering over the window and each other, tic-ti-ti-tic-tic-tic-tic.

His guts roiled.

He grabbed his stomach with one hand.  With the other, he reached up –

(Don’t do this, Ken, it’s a bad idea….)

– and tapped on the glass.

Nothing happened.  The bugs didn’t seem to notice.  He tapped again, harder this time.  They continued buzzing over and around each other, but none took flight, none were startled away by the intrusive vibrations he must surely be sending among them.

Ken slammed the flat of his fist against the window.  A sharp crack punched through the otherwise still air.  The window split.

The bugs kept crawling.  None flew away.  They remained on the single square of glass.

And then one of the students screamed.

3

Ken didn’t turn around, because he saw the reason for the scream in almost the same second.  So did most of the kids.  They emptied out of their chairs and stampeded to the windows.  Normally the kind of thing Ken frowned on.

Not this time.

This time he was too busy looking at the plane.

He wasn’t an aviation expert.  He could discuss airplanes from a historical perspective, but he didn’t know much beyond that.  He could tell, however, that the plane he was looking at was a big one.  Maybe a 747 – he didn’t think the Boise Airport handled anything bigger than that.

Whatever it was, though, it was falling.  Not coming in for a landing at the airport, not doing a dangerously low flyover.  It didn’t even look like it was crashing in the sense that Ken thought of it: a dive that was just a bit too low, or listing to one side as though it might have an engine out.

It was simply plummeting, spinning on three axes, flipping tail over wing, nose over belly.  Smoke was coming from its sides, as though someone had smashed out the windows before setting off a smoke bomb.

One of the wings exploded.  It happened fast, and more violently than Ken could have imagined.  No apparent smoke, no flames.  Just one moment there was a wing and the next the plane was raining fiery shrapnel from a jagged stump where the wing used to be.  The explosion sounded like a muffled pop at this distance.

A few of the students screamed.  Ken did, too.  He thought about telling them to get back, not to look.  But there was a disconnect between his thoughts and his mouth.  He kept looking.  Kept staring as the plane fell.

A second later, two more jets entered his field of vision.  These were military, he could tell.  Probably from the Air Force Base in Mountain Home.  They looked like some kind of stealth fighters, flying in a tight formation like black insects carrying the world’s deadliest stings.

Then, an instant before the 747 completed its topsy-turvy fall to earth, one of the stealth fighters abruptly jerked into the flight path of the other.  The move was so sudden that Ken jumped in place.  The two fighters impacted.

These two jets were close enough that when they hit it wasn’t a muffled pop, but a thundering boom that rattled the windows in the classroom.

It was enough to shake some of the fuzz from Ken’s mind.  He turned and said, “Move away, guys.  Move away from the glass!”

He was trying not to scream.

The two stealth fighters fell in a tangled mass of light and dark, black metal burning bright.

Before they fell to earth, before any of the students turned away, the falling 747 finished its collision course with the world.  Another huge, window-shaking thud.  A bright ball of fire exploded somewhere downtown.  Smoke surged like a living thing, reaching up to swat at the sky.

“Get away from the glass!”

Now he was screaming.  He needed them away from the windows.

Mostly because he didn’t want the kids to notice that the bugs – the things that had called him to the glass in the first place – hadn’t taken flight, even when the explosion from the two doomed fighters rattled the glass.

He also hoped none of them had noticed the other things.

4

Six.

Six.

SIX, GOOD GOD, SIX!

That was how many other aircraft he had seen in the sky.  All falling.

Boise Airport was not Los Angeles International.  Six had to be pretty much every single commuter jet on approach in the area.

All falling.  All looking like they’d been knocked from the sky by the hand of God.

“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”

The voice burrowed into his consciousness, someone speaking his name over and over again like a weird chant.  He wondered how long the sound had been going on.

How long did it take for someone to lose their mind?

The students were all crying, whimpering.  Some of the kids were holding one another, faces resting in boyfriends’ chests or on girlfriends’ shoulders.  Their expressions seemed decades older than they had only moments before.

“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”

He finally managed to penetrate the fog of shock long enough to recognize the voice.  It was Becca again.  She was pointing at something else.  Not falling planes or bugs gone mad.  Something new.  Something on the floor.  Something….

This time it was Ken who cursed.  No one called him on it.  Everyone was too focused on the windows, on grief.

A few of them, like Becca, even noticed Matt Anders.

Matt was a small kid.  Quiet.  The kind of boy who went with the flow, who did what was asked.  A teacher’s wet dream from the perspective of being no trouble at all about anything.  But Ken always worried about Matt.  Wondered what kind of life the kid was going to have if he could never find his own opinions, his own point of view.

Now, though, all of that might be moot.  Matt was laying on the floor of the classroom, splayed out full-length in front of his desk, his feet twitching spastically against the cheap tile, his head rolling back and forth as white froth oozed from his mouth.

“He having a seizure?”  That was Ricky Briscoe, looking over the tops of his huge glasses, staring at Matt like he was a cool new trading card at the comic book store.

“I don’t know!” snapped Ken.  He knelt down next to Matt and tried to remember what to do in case of seizures.  The school made the teachers take CPR and first aid classes, but most of that was geared toward broken bones and the like, not grand mal episodes that occurred in the middle of some major terrorist event.

“Get up, move!” he shouted, waving for a few students nearby to give him space.  The students stepped back and Ken swept all the closest chairs away as well, giving Matt a clear area where he wouldn’t collide with anything.

“Shouldn’t you get him, like, a spoon or something?”

Ken didn’t look at the speaker.  Didn’t have to.  Becca.

“I don’t – I don’t think so, I –“

Then the screaming began.  The real screaming.

5

Matt Anders was on the floor.  Rolling around, having a seizure.  Ken had his hands on the boy’s shoulders, trying to keep him from rolling into the chairs, trying to keep the scrawny kid from braining himself on the metal legs only inches from his face.  He wouldn’t have thought he had enough mental space left to look at something else.

But he did.  The screams forced him to look.

He glanced over his left shoulder.  Just a quick peek.  Just a glimpse.  Just a tiny look that was more than enough to afford him a full view of the hell that had opened up around him.

The first thing he saw was Becca.  Of course, it was always Becca.  Becca, who was so careful to be the center of attention.  Becca, who wanted to succeed at everything, even if the thing she succeeded at carried no value at all.

Becca, who was now shrieking as she tried to hold Ricky Briscoe away from her.

And as Ken watched, Ricky leaned in close, snarling, and clamped his teeth on Becca’s throat.  Becca had time for one more agonized scream before Ricky’s jaws ground down.  The girl’s scream turned to a loud gurgle, then to a horrible wet murmur as Ricky yanked his head back, and pulled her throat out with his teeth.

Blood geysered, arterial spray painting surrealistic designs on the mint-green walls of the history classroom.

Becca’s fingers clawed at the raw gap where her throat had been.  Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.  Blood continued to jet out of her throat, coating Ricky’s face.

He grinned and turned his face skyward, like he was standing under a summer rain.  Ken noticed that the boy’s glasses had come off, and his eyes were empty of anything but joy at the blood coursing over his skin.

Becca fell.

But the screams continued.  Impossible.  Becca was dead.  She had to be dead.  Her blood was no longer jetting across the room in a high-pressure stream, just trickling out of her with the weak force of gravity as she lay face down on the floor.  No, she was dead.

So where were the screams coming from?

It took a moment for Ken to realize what was happening.  Like his brain was operating on a slightly different time stream, something a few seconds delayed from the rest of the world.  He knew he should be reeling from what had just happened, knew he must be in shock.  But all he could think to do was look around for the source of the sound he heard.  The source of the shrieks.  The screams.

They were coming from the other students.

He looked at his class.  Realized that he had been wrong before.  What he had seen previously had not been Hell; it hadn’t even been Hell’s doorway.

But this….

The students were killing each other.

Ken gazed at what was happening in dumb horror for perhaps as long as two seconds.  Two seconds in which he saw half the class – students he knew and loved – grappling with and trying to kill the other half of the class.

The aggressors all looked like Ricky Briscoe had looked: eyes empty of anything but unadulterated rage.  Nothing left of what they had been.  Like they had been… erased.

Shirley DeMarco, a girl who never caused any trouble, who sat at the back of the class and who Ken had to coax into participation, was straddling another student.  Ken couldn’t tell who the other student was because Shirley was gnawing the other student’s face with her teeth, chewing and smacking like she was tearing into a filet done extremely rare.  The student below her was writhing and screaming, but even as Ken watched the unfortunate student’s form went still.  Ken didn’t know if the kid was dead or just unconscious, but a moment later he knew as Shirley – nice, mousy Shirley – buried her face in the student’s neck and started chewing away.  Blood spouted, obscuring Shirley’s visage, her dead eyes.

Ken moved his gaze to another pair of students.  A girl –

(Who is that?  What’s her name, oh, God, why can’t I remember her name?)

– who was attacking a much larger boy with a letterman jacket.  She clamped her teeth on his shoulder and bit down and the boy – Stu Clancy – howled and shoved her with an explosion of his thick muscles.  The girl flew back through the confused melee that the classroom had become.  She tripped over a pair of bodies that were locked in a deathroll on the now blood-slicked tile floor, slipped on a patch of what might have been brains forcibly expelled from a student’s skull, and fell.

Her head smashed into the sharp corner of a desk.

Ken saw the girl’s –

(Laura Briscoe!  It’s Laura Briscoe!  What the hell is happening, Laura?)

– head seem to implode.  Pink and gray ooze exploded out of the wound.  Her head went convex.

She didn’t die.  Didn’t even pass out.

No, Laura stood up.  She tilted her head skyward and screamed, a sound so awful and wrenching that Ken wanted to cover his ears.  It seemed like every bad thing that had ever happened in a universe not famous for mercy was packed into that scream.

Then Laura’s head tilted back to its usual plane.  Not staring straight ahead – impossible since one of her eyes was gone, exploded right out of her face with the force of impact into the desk – but rather seeming to peer into an abyss of madness that only she could see.

She howled again, and dove back into the free-for-all.  But whereas the other students seemed to be involved in one-on-one struggles, she tore indiscriminately into anyone who came within her reach.  Punching, tearing, clawing, biting.

And all the while, a hideous pink/gray, bilious goo leaked from the massive rifts in her skull and her skin.

Ken felt like he should call someone.  The principal?  911?

Who do you call when something like this happens?  When your tiny corner of the universe casts off all vestiges of reason and runs rampant on a field of madness?

Who do you call?

For a moment he thought, Ghostbusters!
and he knew his own brain was misfiring; madness creeping in at the edges of a mind seeking desperately to find reason and coming up empty.

He heard two booms and figured it must be a pair of the falling planes coming down.  But he couldn’t be sure.

He didn’t know.

Didn’t know who to call.

Didn’t know what to do.

And then he didn’t have time to think about it.  Because in the next moment things got much worse.

6

If you had asked Ken Strickland even ten minutes ago a question like, “Could you forget about a student having a seizure in your class?” he would have answered in the negative.  He would also have laughed and possibly asked if you needed a medication increase.

But that was before insanity pushed into his class.  Before the bugs, before planes bombing downtown, and before students started killing each other.

Now, he had forgotten about the boy suffering a grand mal seizure under his hands.  Had forgotten about Matt Anders.

But the growling reminded him.

That and the fact that Matt went suddenly and completely still.

Ken’s eyes were dragged to the silent form under his hands, like he was looking for a single bright spot of sanity in the black pit of madness that had swallowed his once-orderly classroom.  Like he was looking for some reason he could give himself that life still made sense – even if that reason was that at least normal things like seizures were still a possibility.

But even that was denied him.

He looked down and saw Matt, still drooling but no longer thrashing around.  The boy’s eyes were rolled back in his skull, his head oriented upward, like he was trying desperately to see something beyond the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles.

He was growling.  A low, abrasive noise that sounded like he was probably damaging his vocal cords.  It sent another round of shivers up and down Ken’s spine.

Then Matt’s eyes snapped back into place.  They didn’t roll, they actually snapped, like they had been jerked back into their moorings by some electromagnetic force.  The pupils were hugely dilated.

Matt’s gaze focused on Ken.  The growl turned even darker.

The boy launched himself upward.  His teeth gnashing.  His hands clenching.

Only the fact that Ken’s hands had already been on Matt’s shoulders saved him.  Only the fact that he had half-pinned the boy’s shoulders to the floor kept him from finding out what it felt like to have his jugular ripped out; to see his lifeblood spew across the slick killing floor that had once been a place of learning.

Even so, it was close.  Matt’s teeth came together with an audible clack inches from Ken’s neck, and Ken could hear the boy’s jaws grinding together with a terrible rasping noise as the kid strained to reach his neck, his face, his flesh.

“No!”

Ken didn’t know if he was screaming at Matt, or at the other kids in the class who had suddenly and unaccountably gone insane.  Most likely he was screaming at everything and everyone – at a world that would permit such madness.  Regardless, the word seemed to come with a burst of strength.  He pushed Matt away, and pushed himself back at the same time.

Matt felt like long cords of firewood under his fingers, muscles bunched so tightly they no longer felt human.  The boy was impossibly strong, impossibly fast.  Ken fell back, thinking he would have a moment to get some clearance between himself and the still mostly prone kid, but he hadn’t taken two steps before Matt was on his feet and rocketing straight at him.

The boy’s fingers were curled into hooks, and Matt knew without a doubt that if the kid got those hooks into him, it would be hard – impossible – for him to escape.

Time slowed down.  Ken had been operating in a different time zone than the rest of the class.  Now he seemed to be rejoining them, but in a way that slowed down the flow of their movements.

He heard a scream.  Had an impossible chance to look over.

It was Stu Clancy.  The big jock was gripping his shoulder where Laura Briscoe had bitten him.  His face was white and sweat was bursting from his pores.  But not normal sweat.  It looked like he was sweating blood, like his capillaries had burst under the pressure of some unimaginable distress.

Stu screamed again.  Then his eyes rolled back in his head.  His face tilted to the ceiling.

And then Ken had to look away from the terrible vision of the star football player.  Because Matt Anders was about to kill him.

7

A moment ago – less than a moment, a mere instant ago – Ken had been worried about Matt’s hands.  Now all he saw was the boy’s teeth.  Because what if he got bit?  What if being bit was some kind of death sentence?  What if being bit meant he would end up like the rest of them?  Like Stu?

All this went through Ken’s head in a flash.  Too quickly to come up with a plan.  He just reacted.

When Ken was fourteen he went to a week-long church camp.  He got there early, and was able to score a prime bunk by the door.  He put his stuff – mostly books he’d brought to pass the time – on the bed and went to check out the camp snack shack.

When he came back a half hour later, a kid named Adam was sitting on his bed.  Ken’s books and clothes were in a messy heap on the floor.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.  Ken, then a full head shorter than most of the kids his age, had started trembling with rage.

“That’s my stuff,” he finally managed.  “That’s my bed.”

Adam barely deigned to glance at him.  Just laced his fingers behind his head and studiously looked heavenward.  “What’re you going to do about it?”

Adam was a full six inches taller than Ken.  Probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.

The answer was obvious.  Ken gathered his stuff and went to another cabin.  He didn’t know anyone there.  He had a terrible time.

And as soon as he got home he withdrew every penny from his bank account – he’d been saving for a car when he turned sixteen – and paid in advance for a year’s worth of lessons at the first martial arts studio he found.  He didn’t kid himself.  It wasn’t about self-defense.  It wasn’t about “never letting it happen again.”

It was about a goal.

He wanted to go back to camp in one year’s time, and kick Adam’s ass.

In the next year he absorbed hapkido.  And while he only grew four inches – still short for his age – he did add fifty pounds of muscle to his frame.

Oddly, at the end of the year Adam’s attitude had done a complete one-eighty.  Maybe it was the fact that he’d heard Ken wanted to teach him new and exciting ways to die.  Maybe it was just that Ken had a lot more confidence and so wasn’t as easy a target.  Maybe it was just that both of them grew up enough to get over their insecurities.

Whatever it was, there was no end-of-the-year ass-kicking.  He and Adam ended up being best friends.

But Ken never quit martial arts.  It slowed down a bit when he got married.  A lot when the kids started coming.  But he still made time at least once a week to get out and do some forms, or some weapons practice or sparring.

So when Matt came at him and all he saw was teeth and all he thought about was turning into something less than himself, he just reacted.

He grabbed Matt’s hands, crushing them in his own fingers.  Matt kept barreling at him.  Teeth gnashing.  Spittle flying from his mouth.  That growl, that low, terrible growl.

Ken knew he couldn’t stop the kid.  Whatever had happened to his students had somehow made them stronger than they should be.  Had turned them from normal-level kids to high-level ‘roid freaks.

So he didn’t try to stop Matt.  Just let him come.  Let him come.  Actually pulled him.

Matt stumbled forward a bit.  And in the second that he was off-balance, in the instant that the kid’s feet left the floor and he was completely weightless, Ken fell back himself.  He rolled to his back, still holding onto Matt’s fingers, and used their joint momentum to yank the boy onto him.

This was the dangerous moment.  The time where if he screwed up, Ken knew he was dead.

He didn’t screw up.  His foot popped up perfectly, jamming into Matt’s gut hard enough that the boy’s breath exploded out of him.  Inertia transferred from downward motion to upward and backward motion as Ken’s foot kicked up like a piston, shooting Matt up and over him.

Ken let go of Matt’s hands.  The boy didn’t stop growling, and his claw-fingers grabbed for Ken’s face, nails dragging bleeding lines across Ken’s cheeks and temples.  He just missed gouging out Ken’s eyes.

There was a crash.

The growling stopped.

Ken followed through with the roll, so he ended up on his hands and knees, facing the direction he had started.  He spun around, positive that Matt would be rushing him from behind.

But Matt was gone.

Ken’s stomach felt at once tight and loose, a strange dichotomy that he didn’t understand.

He rushed to the broken window.  Looked down.

Matt’s body was there, three stories below.

Motionless.

Ken had just killed one of his students.

But he didn’t have time to think about it, to care about it.  Because the window let him see the city.

“Maggie,” he whispered.

8

Boise was a lovely city.  Ken had always thought it was the perfect mix of big-city life – movie theaters, malls, a few nightclubs – and small-town community.

But now he could not remember why he had ever thought anything positive about the place.  He could only see the black smoke rising in dozens of locations.  Could only see fire skittering over the surfaces of several of the buildings.

The Banner Bank building… was just gone.  Disappeared from Boise’s skyline.  Smoke and fire reached greedy fingers into the sky at the spot where it had once stood, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out where at least one of the crashing planes had gone down.

Then, as he watched, one of the huge industrial cranes that stood in the city center tilted drunkenly.

It was the one by the Wells Fargo Center.

“Maggie,” Ken said again.

The world had gone mad a moment ago.  Now it felt like it was ending.  The great crane, tall enough to loom over the eleven-story building, seemed to hang at an impossible angle for far too long.  A fireball bloomed from somewhere near its base, a great ball of orange and red that ballooned upward before disappearing into an ashy black and gray outline.

The crane fell.  It hit the Wells Fargo Center hard enough that Ken could hear it even miles away.  A sickening, lurching crunch of metal and glass and concrete shearing off.

Things fell from the side of the building.  He couldn’t tell if they were huge pieces of concrete or human beings.

The crane slid along the side of the skyscraper, gouging great furrows in the side of one of the largest landmarks in the city.  Then it slowed, stopped.  Still hung up on the side of the bank building.

The building where Maggie was.

Where the kids were.

He pulled away from the window.  Intending to turn and run.  To get to his car, to race to the bank where Maggie had been dealing with a re-fi of their house, and find her and the kids.

It saved his life.

One of the students – could they even be called students anymore? – had apparently taken advantage of his distraction.  Had run at him from behind.  When Ken pulled away from the window, the kid –

(Kari Harper.)

– missed jumping on his back by stupid, dumb luck.  Instead she impaled her throat on one of the jagged shards of glass left behind when Matt went through the window.  Blood ran over the piece of glass, staining it crimson in a way that was almost beautiful.  Kari twitched like a trout caught on a lure, yanking back and forth and only succeeding in shredding her throat further.

She grabbed the shard of glass and tried to pull herself off, but only succeeded in slashing her palms open.  She must have severed the tendons or nerves, because her fingers stopped working and she just batted at the glass ineffectually until she finally sagged, still pinned to the windowpane like the world’s largest and most grotesque insect on a science board.

Ken looked around.  The class was still a battleground.  But it seemed like the tide was turning.  Most of the kids still alive had that dead look in their eyes.

Only a matter of time before one of them took him down.  And it didn’t matter how much sparring he’d done, how many thousands of times he’d punched a heavy bag.  One bite and… what?

Didn’t matter.  He couldn’t let that happen.  He had to survive.  Had to get to Maggie and the kids.

As if to contradict him, a now-familiar growl drew his attention.

Stu.

Blood drizzled through the mangled bite on the jock’s shoulder, and his blood-crusted skin looked like it was scabbing over.

His eyes were dead.  Dead, but still focused on Ken.

The big kid rushed at him.

9

Ken was dead.  There was nothing he could do.

Where before several decades of martial arts training had come to his rescue, now they seemed to have abandoned him.  He didn’t know what to do.  He didn’t know where to go.

He just watched as Stu – a tackle on the high school varsity football team – barreled at him.  Growling.  Teeth clicking together in obvious anticipation of ripping the flesh from Ken’s body.

And Ken stood there.  Just stood.

Goodbye, Mags.

A high-pitched shriek ripped Ken’s attention to the right.  He turned just in time to see a blur of motion pounce on Stu.  Stu roared, screeching in pain as something tore into him, ripping his ear off.

It was Laura.  The girl that had bitten Stu, the girl he had tossed into a desk.  She was still oozing that pink pulp from the side of a horribly misshapen head, and now Ken could actually see bone fragments dropping out of her skull.  She couldn’t be moving, couldn’t be alive.

But she was.  She was, and she had just saved Ken’s life, buying him time with her frenzied attack against the thing that had once been Stu.

Laura – the once-Laura – pushed her thumbs into Stu’s eyes.  He shrieked again as her thumbs went deep into his eye sockets.  The eyes seemed to both pop and wilt, almost disappearing under the pressure of her attack.  Gray matter dripped down his face.  He roared and threw Laura away from him.

Ken watched her body fly into a pile of other students who were rolling around in a mass of gore.  He thought she would return to finish Stu off, but she didn’t.  Just started fighting with whatever was in reach.

Ken turned back to Stu.  The teen’s face was a mass of blood and he was spinning back and forth, trying to orient on some unknown location.

Me.  He’s trying to find me.

Ken didn’t wait to see if he was right.  He ran for the door.

Threw it open.

And was nearly engulfed.

10

Ken knew it must have happened everywhere in the city –the fireballs, the tilting crane, the explosions had made that painfully obvious.  But knowing that hadn’t prepared him for the scene in the school hallway.

What had happened in his class must have happened in all of them.  And hundreds of kids must have run, fleeing for their lives and making it as far as the hallway before being taken down by the things that used to be their friends and classmates.

The walls were green and white.  Or they had been.  Now they were green and white and spattered with impressionistic splotches of red and black.  Ken’s first step into the hall almost ended in disaster as his foot came down in an inch-deep puddle of blood and he nearly skidded into three students locked into a life and death struggle near a bank of lockers.

The sound.  The screams rolled over him like a sonic tidal wave, nearly knocking him off his feet.  The growls and high-pitched whines of the students that had succumbed to whatever maddening impulses were even worse, a pulsing, pounding current that seemed to whisper madness into the deepest shadows of Ken’s own mind.

Just give up.  Just give in.

No.  Mags.  The kids.

They won’t notice.  They’re gone.

I don’t know that.

You do.  They’re gone.

No.

They’re dead.

NO!

And worst of all was the smell.  The smell of any indoor high school was a peculiar beast, a confluence of b.o. and aftershave applied by incompetent hands; of perfume put on in amounts that would embarrass a medieval French prostitute, mixed with the overriding smell of hormones on the brink of breaking free.  But this….

The desperate scent of terror, the tangy copper-smell of freshly spilled blood.  The pungent odor of bowels that had been purged in fear and death.

The smell brought Ken back from the edge of an abyss, reminded him that he was still alive.  Alive, and separated from the only things that made his life worth living.

He looked down the hall to his right, to his left.  Saw the same thing in either direction: teeming masses of students intent on killing or being killed.

And not just students.  Ken saw Joe Picarelli, the gym coach, kneeling over a young girl, yanking loops of entrails out of her stomach while making that same horrific growl.

Ken backed into a corner between the nearby bank of lockers and the doorway to his classroom.  He snaked out a hand and yanked the door closed, not sure if that would stop anyone from coming out but equally unsure what else to do.

He felt like curling up in a ball at the base of the lockers.  Felt like giving up.  That damn screaming pounded at him.

Give up.  Give in.  Give up.  Give in.

He turned and climbed.

He hoisted himself onto the top of the lockers.  There was no way to get out of the school via the hallway, not unless he was suddenly going to channel the ability of an Australian sheepdog to walk across the backs of the students roiling and rolling about on the floor like hyper-violent rioters.

So he went up on the lockers.

Ken didn’t have a plan.  Just knew that to stay still would be to die.  To remain would be to succumb to the pounding voice within him that counseled defeat.

He pulled himself onto the lockers.  There was about two feet of space between the tops of the lockers and the ceiling.  Not much room, just enough for him to crouch and observe the screaming chaos, the death everywhere.

One of the doors opened nearby and Emily Sumter, the English teacher, made a break for it.  Joe Picarelli jumped away from the now-still form of the girl whose innards he’d been yanking out and leapt on the older woman’s back.  Emily went down, screamed once, and then was silent as Joe grabbed her head in both hands and slammed her face repeatedly into the floor.

She was going to retire this year, Ken thought.  He had an insane moment where he realized he wouldn’t have to chip in the usual ten bucks for cake and a retirement gift.  Another insane moment where he was actually grateful, because Emily had always treated him like something you’d find underneath an abandoned refrigerator.

Then Joe Picarelli stopped slamming Emily’s face into the floor.  He looked up.

He saw Ken.

He howled.

And ran for the lockers.

11

Ken just reacted.  An all-but-buried part of him wondered how long that would keep him alive, how long instinct and dumb luck would suffice for survival.  But sitting back and drawing up plans was out of the question when you had a two-hundred-pound man with gobbets of flesh hanging from his outstretched hands rushing at you.

He had been crouched atop the bank of lockers, perched like the world’s strangest squirrel in the space between lockers and the ceiling.  Now he scrabbled to his feet and rammed his forearm through the ceiling tiles above him.  He stood, following his arm through the drop ceiling acoustical tiles, ramming his way into the plenum between the tiles and the structure of the building itself.

He felt a hand grab his ankle.  Felt fear shoot lightning bolts up and down his body.

He’s going to bite me.  I’m gonna get bitten.

Ken froze, unable to move for a critical second, as though hoping on some level for the bite to come.  For this to end.

It didn’t happen.

A moment later he realized why.

“Too high,” he muttered, and with the words he kept punching his way into the space above the drop ceiling.

The lockers were almost six feet tall.  No way Joe Picarelli could bite him at that height.  He was safe.  For now.

The hand on his ankle clenched.  Ken had an instant to remember the superhuman strength of the kids he had battled in the past few minutes before Joe yanked his leg out from under him.  He almost tumbled down into the maelstrom of teeth and nails and flailing limbs and death and madness below.  Barely managed to grab onto some kind of ductwork in the ceiling plenum.

Ken felt himself pulled taut, like one of those Gumby dolls he had played with as a kid.

He remembered that he inevitably ended up pulling the legs off those toys.  The thought was not a comforting one.

He looked down, but couldn’t see anything.  His belly was pressed into the edges of one of the metal grids that held the acoustical ceiling tiles.  He couldn’t tell how close he was to having his feet or legs bitten by Joe or some other person.

He pulled, trying to muscle himself up and out of harm’s way.  Joe wouldn’t let go, though, and Ken felt himself tiring.  He was in good shape, for a teacher, but he was no match for whatever unnatural power was flooding the muscles of the gym coach.

Pain lanced through his calves.  He thought he’d been bitten; waited to change into whatever those things were.

The change didn’t happen.  Nothing came but more pain.  He felt his pants leg soak with blood.  Joe must be pulling his skin and muscle away from his leg with his fingers, yanking at him like Ken might work at a difficult chicken leg during a family barbecue.

Then he felt something else, a strange, mushy sensation that pushed its way through the pain.  Something moving around the soles of his shoes.  Pulling and pushing at once.

Ken realized that Joe had pulled him close enough that the gym coach was biting his feet.  Only the fact that Ken favored thick-soled Doc Martens shoes had kept him from being wounded.

Ken cried out, an inarticulate scream of pure terror as he realized that the span of his life and sanity could now be measured in centimeters.  He kicked out, felt the heavy soles of his shoes smash into Joe’s face.  He kicked again.  Again.  Crunches, strangely delicate, like wishbones popping.

Joe’s hands kept raking at Ken’s legs.  Ken kept kicking.  The crunches started to sound muffled, wrapped deeper and deeper in soft tissue.

The hands fell away abruptly.  Ken’s body went from taut to slack, and his lower half slammed painfully against the lockers as a shriek scraped against his eardrums.  He knew it was Joe.  Just like what had happened to Laura when she had tripped into the desk.

Ken yanked himself up until he was standing on the lockers again.  Then pulled himself into the formless black above the ceiling tiles.

It was dark.  The only sense of reality was provided by the hole he had come through and the rolling waves of sound from below, a pounding tsunami of rage and terror that threatened to drown him.

He moved forward.  Didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to keep moving.

Had to get to Maggie.  Had to get to the kids.

If they’re even alive.

What were the chances of a woman, with a nine-year old, a seven-year old, and a two-year old in tow, making it through what was happening?

He didn’t know.  And didn’t care.  He had to find them.  No matter what.

Light punched into the darkness.  A hand burst through the tiles in front of him.  A black outline pushed its way into the slightly greater darkness around them both.

Ken didn’t move.  He held his breath.  He couldn’t tell if the thing nearby was male or female, student or teacher.  And he certainly couldn’t tell if it was a normal person… or one of the crazy things that had somehow supplanted normality.

The dark form remained as still as Ken.  He could see its outline, lit by the flickering fluorescents in the hall below.  But no features.  Just a hunched, silent form.

Then it growled.

12

The thing lurched at him, jumping over the hole it had just opened in the ceiling.  Ken turned away, still hunched in the tiny space in which he had taken momentary refuge, but not before he saw the face of the thing following him.

Not a person.  Not a girl or boy.  Just a thing.  Just an it.

Its forehead and eyes were unscathed.  High cheekbones that could once have belonged to a beautiful girl or to a fine-featured boy.

Ken couldn’t tell.  Because everything below that was a travesty.  The nose was gone, chewed to oblivion, just bits of flesh with sharp white shards of bone poking through.  No upper lip.

The lower jaw was completely gone.  Ripped away by some impossible force.  The lower face sagged as though saddened by the loss of itself.  Ken thought for a fraction of an instant that the student’s throat was cut, but then he realized that what he had taken for a congealing trail of blood was in fact a limp, loose tongue hanging against the neck of the once-teen’s shirt.

Then he couldn’t see it any more.  His back was to the abomination, he was crawling along the metal framework of the drop ceiling.  Trying to move as fast as he could while at the same time knowing if he put his hand down on a tile instead of on the ceiling grid he would plummet through into the hall below and death – or worse – would be swift and inevitable.

He tried to think as he spider-crawled from support to support, bunching his body up and over bundled A/C vents that squirmed over the drop ceiling like silvery caterpillars.  Tried to think what to do, where to go.

And kept coming up empty.

The thing behind him snarled, the sound coming out strange and wet, saturated by blood and unmuffled by the enclosure of a lower palate.

Ken realized he was screaming, too, and wondered how long that had been going on.  Wondered if it would ever stop.

He tried to think of Maggie.  Of Derek and Hope and little Liz.  He tried, but all he could hear was the pound of hands and feet behind him; all he could feel was blood dripping off his calves and his cheeks; all he could see was darkness.

He felt a hand at his foot.  Just a brush.  It didn’t grab him, it wasn’t close enough to get a grip.

But it was close enough to make him forget what he was doing.  To make him panic.

Ken’s ongoing scream notched up an octave and he threw himself forward.  His hand came down, not on the sharp edge of the ceiling grid but on the hard-sponge feel of the ceiling tile.  He came to his senses in that moment, tried to stop himself from moving forward, but it was too late.  Even in this screwed up version of reality, even in the madness that had replaced his universe, apparently physics still mattered.

He couldn’t arrest his forward momentum.

Couldn’t stop himself from pitching over the edge of the grid…

… hitting the ceiling….

Falling through.

13

Ken swung down into the hall, his hand reaching out as though to break his fall.  One of the things below saw it and grabbed for him, blood-stained teeth gritted around chunks of something.  He snatched his arm back and the thing missed him by a hair’s breadth.

Then he felt something at his feet, which were still laid out full-length in the ceiling space.  He knew it was the thing that had followed him up there.  And knew there was no way he could fight it off.

He swung his body up, arching his back and reaching blindly behind him, trying to find a grip on the ceiling grid that he had just fallen through.

It didn’t matter.  He didn’t know why he bothered.  He was going to be bitten.  He could feel the thing on his legs.  He didn’t have time.

Still, his body kept moving.  Kept clawing for purchase.  Giving up wasn’t an option, it seemed; survival as much a matter of motor memory as it was of will.  He felt like he had no say in his own soul in that moment; like a creature greater than himself had briefly taken control and forced him to endure, to strive, to continue.

He grabbed the grid and started to haul himself backwards into the ceiling space.  Like being born in reverse, going from blood and light into the darkness again.

He felt teeth on his leg.

And the thing didn’t bite.

Why?

He flipped himself into the plenum, and realized what had happened: the thing wasn’t biting him because it couldn’t.  It only had an upper jaw.  No lower jaw to grind against, no lever it could use to exert enough pressure to puncture his flesh.

Still, he was bleeding from where Picarelli had clawed at his legs.  What if the thing bled into him?  What if its saliva got into his wounds?

The thought sent Ken into a paroxysm of motion.  His legs kicked out, catching the mewling thing in the loose sacks of flesh and fluid that were all that remained of its lower face.  The thing screamed its wet cry, its hands raking toward Ken’s eyes.

He rolled away.  The thing hit the ceiling tiles where Ken had been a moment before and went right through.  A crescendo of screams sounded, the noise of feeding beasts interrupted in the midst of their frenzy.

Ken rolled back and looked through the hole in the tiles.  He couldn’t see the thing that had attacked him.  Just a carpet of moving monsters standing atop another carpet of blood and body parts and gore.

He felt his stomach lurch.  Forced himself not to vomit.

Maggie.  Derek.  Hope.  Liz.

He focused on them.  On their faces.  He pushed back to hands and knees and kept crawling across the grid.  Vowing not to fall.  Hoping he could keep his promise.

Outside, something exploded.  He couldn’t tell exactly what.  Whatever it was, it sounded huge.  It shook the foundations of the school.  He almost fell through the ceiling, almost pitched over with the violence of the invisible blast that felt both impossibly far and right next to him.

Something big.  Something big just went up.

And Ken knew that whatever it was, it signaled the end of everything he knew.

His world disappearing.

14

Darkness rapidly became both armor and enemy.

In the empty space between the ceiling grid and the building superstructure, Ken felt safer than he had since first seeing Becca’s throat torn apart.  But he also had a moment to think, a moment to wonder what was happening.  The blackness all around him writhed like serpents, and all he could see was students pulling each other apart.

He vomited.

He tried to stop it, but it came anyway.  Like he was trying to physically purge himself of the memory of what had just happened to his world.

He heard the wet splat of his lunch hitting the ceiling tiles.  Waited for the sounds below to change; for one of the monsters to figure out he was up here.

Nothing happened.

He felt weak.  He wanted to lay down.  Just sleep, right there in the ceiling like a rat.

The thought of Maggie and the kids kept him going.

Slivers of illumination occasionally forced their way between warped ceiling tiles, shadow-traces of the brightness that had once been a way of life but was now merely something to be remembered.  His reality now was darkness and pain.  Pain in his legs, where Joe Picarelli had yanked gobbets of flesh away from his calves; pain in his face, where the newly-transformed Matt Anders had raked bleeding furrows in his cheeks and temples on his way to a three-story drop out the window.

He kept crawling.  His hands and knees were on fire as well, the entirety of his body weight resting on the thin metal ridges of the drop ceiling grid as he hid from the nightmare below.

How am I going to get to Maggie and the kids?

Forget that, how am I going to get out of the school?

Something hit his head.

Ken’s heart felt like it was trying to pummel its way out through his face, slamming hard against his ribcage and then his throat.  He dropped backward in the darkness and his teeth gritted as though in weak parody of the viciousness of the children he could still hear killing one another below him.  But it wasn’t mindless savagery that made him clench his jaw, it was raw terror.  The knowledge that something else had found him.

That he was going to die.

He held still in the dark, trying to ignore the terrible screams and somehow-worse growls below him.  Trying to ignore the pain in his body, the pain in his soul.  Trying to forget the fact that he had only minutes before killed one of his students.

Who was here?

Nothing else moved.  Nothing else breathed.

Nothing growled.

He was alone.

After a moment he reached out.  Felt for what had touched him.

His bruised and abraded palm sung on harp strings of pain as it brushed against something cool and unyielding and he realized that nothing had touched him.  He wasn’t in danger – at least, no more than he had been a moment ago.

No, he was simply at the end of the line.  He had run out of crawlspace.  The plenum ended with a wall, and he had no way of knowing where he was in relation to the school’s layout.  He could still hear growling, so he suspected he was over the hall, but he couldn’t be sure.

He waved his hands.  Felt nothing.  He began to move laterally, inching in the direction he hoped was the outer wall of the school.  Nothing concrete in his mind, other than the idea that he didn’t want to descend in the hallway.  That would be suicide, and he hadn’t stayed alive this long just to throw it all away in a painful splash of red.

He kept Maggie in the front of his mind.  Kept her smile before his eyes.  It was hard.  The dark kept crowding out the image, kept replacing it with thoughts of what might have happened – what must have happened –

(she had three kids with her, do you think she could have survived this?  could she possibly have survived this?)

– kept replacing the sight of her grin with a sickening view of her face ripped to pieces, her jaw gone like the student that had trapped him up in the ceiling.

He kept moving.

He lost track of time, moving inch by painful inch through the darkness.  It could have been minutes or hours.  All he had was memory and pain, a mixture of pleasure and distress.

Thoughts of asking Maggie to marry him.  He hadn’t had the money for a diamond ring, so he’d bought a simple gold circle, but she cried like it was ten carats of perfect clarity.

Thoughts of Matt going through the window, a sullen growl the last thing the world would have to remember him by.

Thoughts of little Liz, taking her first steps and slapping her naked baby belly in pleasure, her mouth open wide in a grin that seemed to light up the whole world.

But could it light up the world now?

Ken stopped moving suddenly.  He held himself motionless.

Everything was still the same.  Darkness all around.  Pain biting at his face, his legs, his hands.

Everything was still the same.

But somehow, it was all terribly different.

15

It took a moment for Ken to figure out what had changed.  Longer than it should have, in fact.  The darkness had become an audible force, a seething surf that pounded against his ears and deafened him to everything else.  So he very nearly missed what was happening.

And what was happening was silence.

Or no, not silence.  There were still screams and cries and whimpers.  Sounds of pain and misery.

But the howling, growling cries of predatory rage were gone.  Like the kids and teachers who had been afflicted by the hideous transformation had simply disappeared.

Was that possible?  Ken tried to reach through a dark-sodden memory, tried to pinpoint the moment when the snarling sounds had ceased.  Was it gradual?  Sudden?  Did it sound like they’d run out of the building?

He couldn’t be sure.  Couldn’t remember.

Memory was a funny thing.  It could make you remember your first kiss with fondness, even though it was a travesty of bumped noses.  It could make you remember your baby’s birth with love, even though it resembled a charnel house.  And now, when Ken needed his memory to function with sharpness and clarity, it was apparently playing hard to get.

Not cool.

He debated only a moment about what to do next.  Because in that moment, even the cries and whimpers disappeared.  He had no idea what that could mean – surely the wounded couldn’t have run out of the place, could they? – but knew it was probably bad.  If for no other reason than because anything good happening at this point seemed highly unlikely.

He couldn’t stay here.  Couldn’t remain in the comforting cocoon of darkness.

Ken didn’t let himself think about his decision.  Just reached below his face and felt for the edges of the nearest tile.  He intended to pull the edges up a few centimeters, enough to peek around and get an idea what was happening without being spotted.

Adrenaline betrayed him.  His jittery fingers ripped the corners of the tile upward so hard he banged himself in the face with the tight square of recycled mineral fibers.  He tasted salt and copper in his mouth.  Almost grinned at the irony of giving himself a bloody lip in the middle of a city-wide apocalyptic event.

But didn’t.  Because he looked down.

16

Faces.  Lots of them.

Ken almost screamed, but managed to bite back the sound.

Kids, teachers.

Standing, sitting, some splayed out full-length in pools of blood.  Others sat on top of what looked to be their own internal organs, as though they were playing the world’s strangest game of King of the Hill.

As Ken watched, several of those with the worst wounds closed their eyes and slumped.  Their chests stopped moving.  They were dead.  They must be dead.

The rest, though….

They were staring straight at him.

A moment later – an eternally long moment in which he was certain he had at least three separate heart attacks – Ken realized that they weren’t staring at him.  They were just staring up.  Staring at the ceiling.  And he just happened to be in the ceiling.

Their eyes were rolled back, the way Matt Anders’ eyes had been right before he went bugnuts crazy and attacked Ken.  Only the whites showed, not even the tiniest traces of iris visible.

Their mouths were open wide, like they were straining to catch invisible rain.

They were all panting, and Ken realized that they were breathing in sync.

In-out-in-out-in-out-

(Two students slumped, blood loss too great to live….)

-in-out-in-out-in-out….

For some reason, the synchronized respiration made Ken feel like this was a nightmare.  People going crazy en masse was one thing.  That could actually happen, right?  Mass hypnosis, too much MSG, everyone holding their cell phones too close to their heads while Googling porn on the internet… there could be an explanation.

But breathing in harmony?

Then he remembered the way Matt’s eyes had snapped back into place.  How the boy had gone from normal to killing rage in the space of seconds.

Don’t do this, Ken.

There’s no other way.

There’s gotta be something.

But there wasn’t any other way.  He could stay up in the ceiling and die like a rat, cowering and waiting for larger predators to hunt him down, or take his chances now.

He dropped down to the hallway.

Into the midst of the quiet monsters.

Quiet.  But for how long?

17

When Ken dropped down, he found himself between a girl who looked remarkably unscathed, and one of the school’s security guards – only distinguishable by his yellow jacket with “SECURITY” written across it in bold black letters.  The guard’s face was mostly gone, nothing but a single unmarred eye in the midst of raw red meat that looked like it was already suppurating.  The man’s cheekbones poked through the mangled tissue of his face.  The air he breathed whistled in and out not only through his nostrils but also through flapping holes in what was left of his cheeks, through broken bones that allowed free access to his sinus cavities.

Ken didn’t move for a moment, frozen not by the awesome damage that had been done to the man, but rather by the single unharmed eye.  It seemed almost profane, to have a part of him so perfect in the midst of such destruction.

He suddenly remembered a scripture from his childhood: If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.

Then he realized that shock was sinking in again.  That his brain was making connections that weren’t necessary, that weren’t even there.

Move.

Move.

MOVE.

He turned.  Took a step.

And knocked into another student.

He knew this one.  It was a freshman he had in one of his classes, a kid named Ethan Miller.  A good kid.  He looked like he’d been bitten, staring up with white eyes at the nothing above him.

Ethan snapped at Ken, teeth clicking together a few inches in front of Ken’s nose.  Ken had to swallow a scream, and was sure he was going to die; sure that everyone must be coming out of whatever creepy trance/fugue had bought him this little time.

But no.  The kid went back to his upward stare, mouth open and panting, and Ken realized that the boy probably hadn’t been trying to actually bite his teacher.  At least, not purposefully.  It looked like this was more of an instinctive reaction, an animalistic response to unwelcome stimulus.

So don’t touch anyone.

He looked down the hall.  Fifty feet to the nearest stairwell.  Then down two flights of stairs and at least another hundred feet before he got to an exit of any kind.

And there were kids and staff everywhere.  All of them face up, panting, mouths open.  Some wounded, some whole.  All ready to pounce and bite if he touched them, and God only knew when they could return to their rampages.

Maybe they won’t.  Maybe they’ll just fall down.  Go unconscious.  Die.

But he knew that was wishful thinking.

And he knew that Maggie and the kids weren’t going to get any closer to him if he stayed here and waited for the things around him to start moving again.

He took a breath, and started his slow movement through the hall.

18

Once, when Ken was a teenager, he played a game of Jenga at a party.  The first person who lost – a girl who had had a bit too much to drink – removed her t-shirt.  Strip Jenga was born.

The rest of the kids in the circle thought it was a great idea.  Particularly since the inebriated girl seemed hell-bent on getting naked.

Ken, however, hated it.  Hated the idea of a game that was supposed to be just plain-ol’ fun turning into something where he might end up baring himself in front of peers.  Any titillation he might have felt at the idea of ogling partially naked girls nearby was completely lost in the embarrassment he was already feeling, both for the wasted girl beside him and for his future self.

Now, pulling himself through spaces far too small for his frame, he found himself desperately wishing for those days.  Strip Jenga was eminently preferable to Death Pick-Up Stix.

Every time he got too close to one of them, the student- or teacher-thing he was near would snuffle.  Its breathing would momentarily fall out of lockstep with the unified panting of everyone else in the hall.  Its mouth would close, its teeth would grind.  Ken would freeze, unsure whether it was better to remain motionless or inch slowly away.

As soon as the person – or the thing that used to be a person – looked back to the ceiling, he would keep on going.  Inch by painful inch.  Trying not to smell the coppery scent of blood, the musky odor of urine and feces that seemed to be everywhere; that pounded at his nose and made him want to vomit again.

He slipped.  His hands went out, heading straight for a girl who stood ramrod still in the middle of the hall.  For a moment he had the crazy thought that if he fell on her, if an adult male teacher fell hands-first against a barely post-pubescent girl the way he was going to, a lawsuit was a certainty.  Then reality asserted itself.  Lawsuits weren’t an issue.  His survival was at stake.

He had the barest instant to force his body to one side.  His back twisted unnaturally, and he felt something twinge in his spine.  Pain ran up and down the length of his left leg.

He wanted to scream.  Instead he just grunted, and even that sound was mostly swallowed.

He didn’t understand anything that was happening.  Didn’t know what would make the things around him go crazy again.  Sound?  Smell?  Psychic emanations?

He just didn’t know.

He didn’t know anything.  Other than that he had to get to his family.

He half-slumped against another bank of lockers.  Tried to convince himself that the sticky wetness he felt against his hands and cheeks where they pressed into the metal were nothing more than wet paint.

He focused on the pain in his leg.  He had hurt himself lunging out of the way of the student.  Whether it was a bad injury, something that would fatally slow him down or not, he couldn’t say.  All he knew was that his left leg throbbed, then alternately sent spike-shocks of pain rippling from his pinky toe up to his hip.

He pushed himself away from the lockers.  He knew he had to keep moving.  Knew that if he let himself stop to “rest,” there was every likelihood he wouldn’t be able to start moving again.

He took stock of his position.  Still in the midst of a frozen explosion of mayhem, still surrounded by people he had once known but whose humanity had mysteriously disappeared.

He was ten feet from the stairs.  More importantly, maybe twenty kids and two adults clustered between him and the top of the steps.

Snap.

Like they were all part of some twisted remote system, every single mouth of every single person slammed shut.  Their teeth clicked together audibly, and Ken didn’t think he’d ever heard anything so terrifying.  Not even the sounds of the wounded, the dying, the transforming students and faculty competed with that single massive crack of thousands of teeth coming together in a single instant.

And one by one, the things started dropping their chins, looking down from whatever invisible sight had held them fast.  Their eyes swung back into view.

They shook their heads as though confused.

Ken ran.

19

He made it to the top of the steps.  Barreling through anyone who was in his way, doing his best impression of Stu Clancy at a home game.

Only no, that was wrong.  Stu was crazy, he was gone, he was one of them now.  So Ken wasn’t pretending to be a star tackle in a clutch situation, he was just himself, just a single normal person in a world that had tossed sanity out the window.

He hoped that would be enough.

He hit the first person in his way hard, lowering his shoulder and plowing into soft tissue that had begun falling from a deep gash in the student’s guts.  The kid snarled and snapped, but didn’t seem to fully engage.  Not yet.

But it was going to happen soon.

The kid fell back, knocked over two more of the creatures.  They all tumbled to the floor in a tangle of limbs, snarling and nipping at one another like rabid animals.

Ken was already past them.

He sidestepped two more things.

Not students.  Not kids.  You didn’t kill a kid, didn’t kill Matt Anders, you killed something but not him….

Juked around a clot of four or five of them.

They all dropped their chins.

One focused its eyes on him.  A hand reached for him.  The thing – a thing that had once been a student, had once been someone’s daughter – growled.

The sound moved through the hall like a ripple in a once-calm pool.  It bounced over the lockers, up and down the walls, growing louder and louder as it did.

Ken felt warmth on his legs.  He didn’t know if it was blood from his wounds, or if he had just pissed himself.  He didn’t know if it mattered, either.

The things were around him.

And they were, once more, awake.

He was at the top of the stairs.  He threw himself over the lip of the steps, tossing himself bodily down and trusting to gravity to get him to the bottom faster than he could do if running.  It was a good way to break a bone, he knew, but he also knew that broken bones would be irrelevant in the next moments.  Speed was all that counted.

The growling behind him took on a heightened, fever tone.  He knew somehow that every eye – or at the very least, every eye that hadn’t been gouged or bitten or otherwise mangled into oblivion – was swiveling in his direction.  Orienting on a threat.  On prey.

Then he realized that the bigger problem was in front of him.  Two students, arms wide to catch him, stood on the steps at the landing a few feet below.  He was pitching straight at them, no way to halt his fall.  Their hands opened and closed spastically, their faces ran red with blood.

Their teeth chittered and snapped, eager for his flesh.

20

Ken didn’t try to stop.  For one thing, he was sure it wouldn’t work.  He had already fully committed to his headlong flight down the stairs, and the treads themselves were miniature waterfalls of blood that allowed next to no purchase for his feet.  For another, even if stopping were technically possible, he felt his left leg cry out in anger as he twisted away for a moment.  His knee buckled and he almost went down.  The only thing more dangerous right now than falling into the arms of the things on the landing would be rolling into their arms, he reasoned.

So he didn’t attempt to halt his downward trajectory.  Didn’t try to grab the blood-slicked banister with his own blood-slicked palms.

Instead he put his head down, his arms out.  He felt like he must look foolish, like if his kids could see him they would think he was doing a funny dance of some kind.  Some weird imitation of a crab with hip dysplasia meant to amuse them.

But there was nothing amusing about his intent.  He didn’t want to stop, he could only speed up.  Could only drop his head between the two students, grabbing onto both of them with his arms, lurching forward as they grabbed at him, screaming as their nails drew red furrows in his back, screaming again as he felt them leaning down to bite him to tear him to turn him, then….

The tinkle of plate glass, double panes heavy enough to deal with winter storms but not prepared for the weight of three bodies hurled at them…

… shearing, screaming pain as glass fell all around him…

… growls, something tugging at him…

… falling…

… he hit something hard.

And then all was dark.

21

Something was tugging at him.  Pulling his arm.

Ken opened his eyes.  Or thought he did.  He couldn’t see anything.  What was wrong with his eyes?

He smelled smoke.  Wondered what was burning.  What was happening, where he was.

Where are the kids?

Is it my birthday?

His thoughts spun around in his mind like the lights on a police car, all atwirl and making no sense at all.

Have to go to the zoo.

The thing that was pulling at his arm yanked harder.  Ken felt himself blink.  Light started to make its way to his brain, started getting parsed and evaluated.  Nothing concrete yet, but he thought it was only a matter of time.

The pulling at his arm was getting somehow more… serious?  Severe?  Like whoever was doing it was really wanting him to pay attention.

Probably Hope.  She’s never been very patient.

He knew that wasn’t right.  Knew that he was hurt, that his thinking was askew, but knowing it didn’t stop the flurry of nonsense that seemed determined to captain his mind for a bit.

The light he was seeing started to resolve into colors.  Orange.  Red.

Fire?

That was the first thought he had that he knew made sense.  Something was on fire.  Something close.  It explained the smoke he smelled, the colors, the heat he suddenly realized was washing across his face and making his skin feel like dried parchment.

Then more detail.  He swiveled his head.

Looked at his arm.

Screamed.

There was something there.  It used to be someone, perhaps, but no longer.  Not now.  You couldn’t call it someone when it was only there from the waist up.

Another student, Ken realized.  And with the realization came the return of memory, the recollection of what had happened.

How long was I out?

The thing next to him had been torn asunder somehow, and now lay in a blackened, curdled heap of its own innards.  Ken looked around and saw that the student’s lower trunk and legs – still clad in a mini-skirt that was definitely not dress code-approved – were laying in the grass a good ten feet away.  They were half-pinned under an SUV that was burning brightly, sending black puffs of smoke into the air like an old West smoke signal, like it was humanity’s last chance to ask for help.

Maybe it was.

Ken’s gaze went back to the girl.  She was still alive.  She couldn’t possibly be alive, couldn’t be moving.  But she was.  She was pulling at his arm, using him as an anchor to draw herself closer to him.

Her teeth were only inches from his fingers.

He screamed and rolled away.  The motion made the world spin into darkness for a moment, made nausea and pain roll through him in competing surges.

He opened his eyes again.  The girl was still there, a few feet away.  She looked enraged, like he had broken some basic rule of the universe by refusing to be bitten.

“Screw you,” he said.  He meant it as a personal buck-up.  It came out as a whisper, as something that scared him.

How did I get here?

Then he remembered: the stairs.  The window.

He must have gone right through.  Not his intention, but whatever worked.

What had happened to the other two?  To the ones he took with him?

He cast his eyes around, looking for them and seeing nothing.  That was bad.  Not knowing where the monsters were, he sensed, was a good way to a quick death.

Or worse.

He tried to keep looking, but sudden exhaustion gripped him and he went limp.  He was on his back, and his eyes went skyward of their own accord.

He looked up, realizing he was still directly below the window – two and a half stories high – that he had come out of.  Only the fact that the ground below was new-sodded grass, and a very lucky landing, had kept him from being killed.

He also saw the reason the two students he’d taken with him hadn’t followed him down and killed him.

They were hung up on the outside of the building.  One had been pierced through the middle by a shaft of glass, hanging just outside the window itself.  The other kid had somehow gotten tangled on a flagpole that bore the school’s banner.  The teen-thing was snarling and growling like an oversized fly caught in a spider’s web, but at least it wasn’t paying attention to Ken.

For now.

He looked around.  Didn’t see any more of the things nearby.  But he didn’t think that was likely to last.  Not that he had any basis for that assumption.  For all he knew they would sit down and start composing beautiful haiku in the next few minutes.  But it seemed to him that the safest course was to assume the worst.  And the worst assumption included the things in the school making their way outside.  And soon.

As if to congratulate him on his sound thinking, he heard a door open nearby.  It was one of the emergency exits, the sound of the door slamming open against the brick façade of the school accompanied by a harsh electronic alarm.

Maybe it’s someone normal.

Whoever it was screamed.  Not in pain, but in rage.  The shriek of an animal hearing a hated sound.

Ken rolled to his hands and knees.  The world kept sliding out from under him and he suspected he was probably seriously concussed.  Maybe worse.  He needed medical attention.  A hospital.

The angry growl nearby suddenly changed.  Now it sounded distinctly like a beast that had just caught sight of a meal.

22

Ken tried to stand.  Made it to his knees before pitching forward face-first into the lawn.  The grass was soft enough to save him from serious injury, but still felt bone-shatteringly hard as it ground his lips into his teeth.

He pushed himself up again.  Blood and spit oozed out of his mouth.  He saw a tooth, bright white in the sunlight, sitting naked on the grass.

Whose tooth is that?

The growling behind him was louder.  Much louder.  Like more than one voice, too.

Ken forced himself up.  He felt sick to his stomach, felt like dying might not just be inevitable but welcome.  The only thing that kept him going was a sense that he had to be somewhere.  Was supposed to meet someone.

Where am I supposed to be?

He took several lurching steps.  Vomited on himself but managed to remain upright.  He seemed to recall that puking was a sign that a concussion wasn’t too bad.  Or was it the opposite?  Was he dying?

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 definitely 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 three, 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.”

Dorcas’ face tightened.  “Where?”

“Wells Fargo Center.”

She nodded.  “Well, we best get to it, then.”

“To what?”

“To them.”

She started moving toward the front doors.  Ken moved after her, pausing only a fraction of a second.  He didn’t have to ask her why.  He knew what she would answer.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

26

The Wells Fargo Center was less than two miles away.  Less than a half hour’s hard walk under normal circumstances.

But then, these were hardly normal circumstances.  Now, with the world spiraling into a maelstrom of chaos and violence, two miles could take a day.  Longer.  There was no way to know.

Ken took a moment to search the receptionist’s desk.  It yielded little more helpful than the pencil he had already seen.  Just a ruler too flimsy to use as a weapon, and a plastic stapler that would probably fall apart if he tried to use it for anything more strenuous than attaching one sheet of paper to another.

Welcome to the world of disposable living.

Looked like he would be leaving the office as empty-handed as he came in.  At least he was still alive.

Dorcas led the way out, creeping on cat-feet to the front of the drab room.  She unlatched the door, and Ken was amazed anew at the woman.  Not only had she rescued him, not only had she dragged him a quarter-mile through decidedly hostile territory, she had had the presence of mind to lock the front door when she came inside.

The tax preparation office was in the middle of a small line of businesses.  One of the little groupings of buildings that would grow a few stories every block or so until they became the dozen or so high rises at the center of downtown Boise.

Ken looked around.  Smoke clouded the air, turning day into a half-lit twilight.  It was hard not to cough.  Pits of brightness peeked through the air in every direction as dozens of fires burned unchecked, as though Hell itself was forcing its way through to a higher plane – or dragging this plane lower.  Cars lay askew in the streets, some crumpled into each other, some crumpled into buildings, others simply abandoned.  There would be no driving anywhere within city limits, not in the permanent gridlock that had fallen upon Boise.

Ken could also hear the sounds of chaos.  The crackle of flames.  Glass tinkling.  Sounds of concrete and shearing off in the distance, and steel bending under some unimaginable forces.

Car alarms chirped all around him, a cacophony of noise that mixed and mingled and could almost hide the other sounds.

Almost.

But the electronic screams of the car alarms could not quite mask the flesh and blood shrieks of people being maimed and dismembered and killed.

And turned.

“Have you seen anyone get bitten and not turn?” he whispered.

“Turn?  What’re you talking about?”  she looked up and down the walkway.  Ken followed her gaze.  There were four cars in the small parking lot.  Two of them had their doors hanging open, their own alarms blaring and adding to the bedlam.  But no one could be seen.

There was some blood on the sidewalk below his feet.  Nothing like it had been at the school, but more than you could write off as a passing nosebleed.

“Turn.  Into one of… one of them.”

Dorcas swiveled to stare at him with wide eyes.  “You mean if you get bit you turn into one of these crazies?”

Ken nodded.  “It happened to one of my studen – I saw it happen,” he amended, trying not to think about Stu, screaming as blood streamed through the bite on his shoulder, staining his letterman jacket even as his eyes drained of their humanity.  It was an impossible thing to try.  Ken suspected that moment would be present in every moment he experienced for the rest of his life, like a horrible stained glass window through which he viewed the world.

“So they’re zombies,” said Dorcas.

“What?”

But she was already moving away, almost dancing down the sidewalk, hugging the walls of the building as long as she could.  She looked like she’d trained for this.  Maybe she had.  Ken again regretted not going hunting.

He also wondered at what she’d said.  Zombies?

He was a history teacher.  He believed in facts and events, in what actually happened.

But he also knew that much of history was a lot closer to fiction than to fact.  Often “history” was simply what the winners of major conflicts got to call their propaganda.

So… zombies.

Zombies – at least in the movies and stories he knew of – were mindless.  That certainly matched up with the things that had taken over Boise.  The trouble they obviously had with doors seemed to bear that out, as did their lack of speech and their incapacity for fear – the ones that had come out the window with him hadn’t been afraid, just angry.

Zombies were hard to kill.  Ditto the things here.  They had been bashed, blown up, pulled to pieces.  And still they kept coming.

So how did you kill a zombie?  Ken tried to remember the few zombie movies he’d watched.  He preferred light comedies or straight action to horror films.  But he thought it was shooting them in the head.  Major brain trauma.

And that didn’t jibe.  When Becca hit her head she went berserk.  When Ken kicked Joe Picarelli’s skull bones back into his brain, the gym coach rampaged throughout the hall of the school.  Neither died.  They just went even crazier.

So no.  Not zombies.  Or if they were zombies, then the stories had gotten some things very wrong.

He realized that Dorcas was holding up her hand, motioning for him to stop.  He skidded to a halt, instinctively drawing as close to the nearest wall as he could.  It was an ice cream shop.  Baskin Robbins.  The neon sign that usually bragged about its “Thirty-OneDerful Flavors” was dark.

Come to think of it, Ken realized that the lights had been off in the accounting office where Dorcas had taken refuge.

Were lights on anywhere in Boise?

In Idaho?

How far did this go?

Dorcas spun around.  “Go!” she whisper-shouted.  “Go, go, go gogogogogo!”

She looked terrified.  Ken would have bet she could play a game of high-stakes poker against a room full of Bond villains.  He had no wish to see what had scared her.

So he ran.

27

Ken thought they were going to end up back in the office of Brooke Gale, CPA, but before he’d taken more than a few steps Dorcas grabbed him and propelled him sideways.  He thought she had gone crazy; was going to ram him into one of the cars whose alarms was screeching away.  But at the last second she swung him and instead he found himself shoved through the open door of the passenger side.

A moment later, Dorcas was slinging herself in after him, jabbing at him with her elbows and screaming, “Get over, get over!”

He heard something clang.  Her monster-sized lug wrench.  He wondered why she had dropped it, then realized she’d done so to make room, to make it easier to close the car door.

As soon as Dorcas had clearance, she slammed the door shut.  Ken heard a meaty thud as it closed and Dorcas grunted.  She must have closed it against her foot or hip.  She didn’t seem to care, though.  Nor did she appear to mind the loss of her formidable weapon.

She just hunkered down in her seat and motioned for Ken to do the same.

Ken was still half-straddling the gear selector, so he lurched over until he was fully in the driver’s seat, then he slunk down as well.

The car alarm was deafening inside the vehicle.  Even so, he thought he could hear a strange sound.  A low, vibrating drone.

“What is that?” he whispered.

Dorcas looked like she was about to respond, but instead of answering she said, “The vents!” in that whisper/shout that Ken was starting to associate with the new normality of his existence.  She batted out her hands, seeming to punch at the dashboard.  A moment later Ken realized she was slamming the air conditioning vents into their closed positions.  He did the same for the ones on the driver’s side, still unsure what was going on but trusting in Dorcas’ sense of what should be done.

The sound grew louder.  And with it, screams.

A moment later, Ken saw.  He understood why Dorcas had done what she had done.

And hoped it would be enough.

28

Ken thought at first that he was seeing a sentient cloud.  That a piece of the smoke that had engulfed much of Boise must have broken away, gained intelligence – at least on a rudimentary level – and begun prowling the streets.

It was an insane thought.  But the world had very recently gone insane, so he didn’t think he was too out of line having things like that in his mind.

Then he realized that what came into view – what he glimpsed over the edge of the car door and the dashboard – wasn’t a cloud of smoke.  It was black and constantly shifting.  Composed of millions of bits of what looked like particulate matter.

But it wasn’t smoke.

It was a swarm.

The low humming he had heard when Dorcas pushed him into the car: the buzz of millions of wings.

And the screams were coming from deep within the cloud.  Shrieks that sounded like someone being burned alive.  Worse.

The swarm paused in the middle of the street, as though having a committee meeting about which direction to move next.  Ken realized he was holding his breath.

The bees hovered an eternal moment.  Then headed right at the car.  Right for them.

Dorcas started muttering under her breath.  Ken couldn’t tell if she was cursing or praying.

He started tearing off his shirt.  Buttons popped.

Mags gave me this shirt.  She’s gonna be pissed.

“What are you doing?” hissed Dorcas.

“The vents!”

“We closed ‘em.”

“You wanna trust that?”

She hissed.  Started to take off her own blood-spattered flannel shirt, leaving her in a once-white tank top that had already turned cataract gray.

Ken shoved the fabric of his shirt against the air conditioning vents on his side of the dashboard, trusting Dorcas to do the same.  In almost the same instant, it sounded like a hailstorm had engulfed the car.  Sharp raps and taps against the windows, lower thunks against the roof and side panels.

The swarm had engulfed them.

29

He felt like screaming.  The only reason he didn’t was that Dorcas was perfectly silent beside him.  Providing a sense of calm that he could not have maintained on his own.

No, that wasn’t true, he realized.  He wasn’t screaming because he was sure if he started, that would be it.  He would just keep on screaming until whatever madness had infected the world made its way fully into his mind as well.  He would scream until the world ended.

And then what would become of Maggie?  Of the kids?

He knew he was deluding himself.  Knew they were probably dead already.  But he also knew that he had to cling to something.  Sanity hung by the slim thread of hope.  He wouldn’t be the one to snip it.

The bees were so thick outside the windows that he could see nothing else.  Just masses of black and flashes of orange-yellow in the dark cloud.  Just millions of stingers punching ineffectually at the windows.

He felt something under his fingers.

Please, dear God, please don’t let that be –

Another movement.

“They’re getting in,” he said.  He practically had to scream to be heard over the din.

Dorcas nodded.  “I feel ‘em.”

Ken looked around the car, trying to spot something else that would provide a better seal than their shirts.

Something buzzed.  Not outside the car.  Inside.

And he realized that they hadn’t covered the lower vents.

A moment later he felt the first insect buzz by his ear.

A moment after that Dorcas shouted in pain.

And a moment after that the first face appeared at the window.

30

It was one of the things.  One of the zombies.  Dressed in the outfit of a motorcycle cop, the rounded helmet making him appear almost as insectile as the bees that surrounded him.  His mouth was open, and Ken could see bees crawling around the thing’s gaping maw.

They didn’t seem to be stinging him.  Or rather, it.

The thing’s mad eyes oriented on Ken.  It growled that horrific growl, and started to pound a gloved hand against Ken’s window.

Ken felt a searing pain at the nape of his neck.  Bee sting.

He wondered how long it would take for either him or Dorcas to just lose it and drop their shirts from the vents, allowing more bees to flood in and hastening their deaths.

He wondered why it mattered.  Maybe it would be best to just let it happen.

Another thump, another face.  This time at Dorcas’ window.  It was a little girl, barely tall enough to look into the car.  She had blond hair that had been braided into pigtails.  Ken was sure before all this happened she had probably been beautiful, a shoo-in for the next Swiss Miss ad campaign.  But now her pigtails had been dyed red, and her lower face was caked in gore.

Her teeth started clicking together, chittering, a sound that penetrated the thick hum of the bees and made Ken feel like someone was stabbing his soul with a psychic icepick.  Like the cop, she started pounding on the window.  She had to reach up to do it.

Bees crawled over her skin.  Her open eyes.  She paid them no heed.  Only scrabbled at the glass, trying to get inside the car.

Liquid heat poured over the skin on Ken’s knee.  Another bee sting.  A groan escaped his lips.  He glanced at Dorcas.  She was still holding her shirt against the vents, but she was white-faced and shaking.  She had blood running down her chin, and Ken thought she might have bit clean through her lip.

Whump.

Ken looked back at his window.  The cop wasn’t hitting the glass with his gloved hands anymore.  He had switched to headbutting the window with his helmet.

Whump.

He rebounded off the window.  Growled and hit it again.

A crack appeared in the safety glass.

One more hit and the window would shatter.  The bees could come in and Ken didn’t know if he’d die in a flood of stings, or if he’d survive long enough to turn into one of the things outside.

The once-cop reared back.

31

The final hit didn’t come.  The cop leaned back, but didn’t punch through the glass with his helmet.  He just kept leaning and leaning, until he was almost bent over backward.  A glance out the other window showed the child doing the same.

Their mouths opened.  They were breathing in unison.

“What the hell – Ow!” said Dorcas.

“I’ve seen this before,” said Ken.  “I don’t know what it means, but we have a couple minutes before they start pounding us.”

“Fat lotta good that does us with the bees.”

A noise that sounded half solid, half gaseous, drew their attention.  The windows cleared of the millions of bees.  They hadn’t flown away.  They just fell to the ground in a carpet of bodies that was inches thick for fifty feet in every direction.

“What the hell…?” Dorcas said again.

“Come on,” shouted Ken.  “We don’t have much time.”

He threw his door open.  It knocked into the cop, who fell to the ground.  Ken jumped out of the car.  His feet came down on the bees and crunched through them to solid ground.  He felt sick to his stomach at the sound.

The nausea increased when he saw the cop, flat on his back in a sea of insect bodies, panting that strange pant, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolled back to white.

Ken couldn’t tell for sure if the bees were dead, or just stunned like the zombies.  He thought dead, but he didn’t plan to stick around and check for tiny pulses.

A thud sounded behind him as Dorcas got out of her side.  He looked over and didn’t see her, then she rose into view, shaking motionless bees off her super lug wrench with a grimace of disgust.

She looked at the little girl.  “What’s this?” she said.  It was a question to herself, Ken was sure.  Just a whispered bit of reflection that he had overheard.  But it made him ask as well.

What is going on?

He still didn’t know.  Didn’t even know if this was the same thing he had seen before, or something totally different.

It didn’t matter.  He was alive.  That mattered.

Dorcas was alive.  Another thing that mattered.

He hadn’t found his family.

That mattered most of all.

“Time to go,” he said.

Dorcas nodded.  “Hell, yes.”

32

They ran to the street first, heading in the same direction they had before Dorcas spotted the bees.  Ken led the way this time.  He suspected they only had a few minutes of peace before the zombies came out of their trances and resumed attacking anything that moved.  So he ran as fast as he could, given his injuries and the exhaustion that was starting to creep in like a dark smudge at the edges of his vision.

But as fast as he wanted to move, he was compelled to slow down when they came to the three lumps in the middle of the street.

“Bees,” was all Dorcas said.  Then she was past, gesturing for him to come on.

Ken nodded, sparing one more glance at the three things in the road.  They were only recognizable as people because of the clothing that wrapped their bodies like too-tight sausage skins.  The rest was a bloated, swollen mass.  Thousands of stings covering every inch of exposed skin.  He shuddered to think how close he had come to looking like this.

Day’s still young.

He ran.  Caught up to Dorcas.  He didn’t know if she was slowing down due to age or exhaustion, if she was simply letting him keep up, or if he was getting some extra charge from the fear for his family that kept nipping at his heels.  No matter which it was, he was soon in the lead.

He didn’t know how long they had to run.  He had been in the high school ceiling last time this happened.  Had it been seconds?  Minutes?  Time and panic had bled any sense of time from his mind.

They ran toward the Wells Fargo Center.  Bearing east.

One block.  It took forever, moving around the shattered remnants of cars and debris fields that looked like they belonged in warzones and not in middle America.

Two blocks.  Ken tried not to count the bodies he saw.  It was a lot.

They passed a clot of about fifty zombies in the street.  Some of them held pieces of a recently torn-apart person in their hands.  All stared at the sky.  Breathing in unison.

Three blocks.

Two more zombies in the street.

Ken ran past.

And Dorcas screamed.

33

They were awake.  The zombies were awake.

One looked like it had reached out for Dorcas as she passed and now it had a tight grip on her arm.  She couldn’t swing her lug wrench, either, because the zombie – a fat, middle-aged man wearing board shorts and no shirt – had grabbed her on the side where she held her weapon.  She couldn’t get a swing.

The other zombie was another man.  Younger, with tattoos running up and down thickly muscled arms.  He was reaching for her from behind as Dorcas struggled to keep away from the fat man in front of her.

Ken moved without thinking.  He ran to Dorcas, grabbing her wrench.  She resisted for a fraction of an instant before realizing that it was him grabbing, then let it loose and used her now free hand to keep the fat man at bay.

Ken didn’t have time to swing the wrench at the younger of the monsters.  He just flipped it sharp end up and jabbed.  The flat end of the lug wrench slammed right through the zombie’s head, going up through the base of its nose and then out the back of its skull.

Pink ooze flowed down the length of the lug wrench.  Ken wanted to drop the thing, but forced himself to keep hold.  Even when the goo ran down onto his fingers and arms, feeling like a thick, warm, melted milkshake.  He had to hang on.  Because the zombie – or whatever it was – didn’t die.

The wound was mortal.  There was no way for something to survive a hit like that.  But the strong young man didn’t fall.  Didn’t die.  He started shrieking, screaming, snarling, and gnashing his teeth.

He grabbed Ken’s hands, effectively pinning them to the lug wrench.  And started pulling himself down along the length of the iron haft.  The flat end of the wrench seemed to grow like an iron plant out of the back of his head.  His jittering teeth came closer and closer to Ken’s hands.

And Dorcas was still screaming.  A good thing, he supposed.  It meant she was alive; that she hadn’t been bitten.  Hadn’t turned.

The tattoed zombie was still sliding itself down the lug wrench.  More and more of that pink goo welled from the zombie’s wound, and the more that dripped across Ken’s hands and arms, the more the thing seemed to go completely insane.  Its body spasmed, its head tried to whip back and forth even though pinned in place by the bar.

Ken grunted.  Inches from a bite.

He threw a quick look over his shoulder.  Dorcas was on the ground, the fat man on top of her.  One arm was twisted strangely at her side.  The other was pressed flat against the fat man’s forehead, trying to push his teeth away from her face and throat.  And failing, an inch at a time.

Ken grunted.  Stepped back and tried to play the world’s deadliest game of Crack The Whip as he spun the zombie around in a tight arc.  At the same time, he fell to his side.

The move jerked the lug wrench free with a snap and a spray of blood and sludge.  It also tore the zombie’s head sideways, pulling off a good amount of skin.

There was no way Ken was going to get his feet under him in time to counter any further attack.

But that was the risk he had taken.  Hoping that this zombie, like the others he had seen who had suffered major head trauma, would lose whatever sense guided it to attack only humans.

And it worked.  The thing’s face swiveled as the wrench pulled out of it.  Its gaze fell on the fat zombie that was only an inch from chewing through Dorcas’ cheek.

The younger monster, still oozing puddles of viscous pink slime, fell on the back of the fat man with a scream.  Began beating at it with fists, biting the back of its neck.

Ken got to his feet and ran at them both.  He body checked the fat man, pushing the squirming mass of madness partway off Dorcas.  Then he yanked her the rest of the way out.  She screamed when he pulled her by her broken arm.  He ignored it.  No time to be gentle.

The young zombie and the fat one were biting at one another.  Screaming.  Blood and flesh started to flow as they pulled each other apart, one piece at a time.

“Come on,” said Ken to Dorcas.  He pulled her to her feet.  She almost fell, her knees wobbly from fear or shock or pain.  “Come on,” he said again, giving her a quick shake.

He leaned down and scooped the lug wrench off the ground, then stood and put Dorcas’ good arm over his shoulder.  He didn’t know if she needed it or not, but he wasn’t going to chance his only friend in the Apocalypse falling over and dying of shock.

Not when there are so many more exciting ways to die.

“Ken,” she said.

“If you’re about to say, ‘Just leave me,’ forget it.”

She snorted.  “I was going to say, don’t you dare leave me.  Not after I saved your ass.”

He almost laughed.

But didn’t.  He had to save his breath.  Because he heard something that sounded like thunder.  Only there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

34

They were on South Americana Boulevard, crossing West River Street.  A few blocks ahead of them, the massive footings of the I-84 freeway dropped to earth.  The freeway curved and dropped down a ramp and converted gradually to city streets.

The thunder sound was coming from in front of them.  From the rear.  From all sides.

“What is that?” Dorcas panted.

Ken just shook his head.  He had no idea.  But knew it couldn’t be anything good.

Ahead, the darkness where South Americana crossed under the freeway ramp seemed to roil.  It billowed in on itself, then exploded.

Dorcas cursed, the word spitting out of her like a bullet.

It was like the bees again.  Only this time it was a mass of things that had once been human.  He couldn’t make out any details, couldn’t see the eyes or the madly gaping mouths.  But he didn’t have to.  There was something tremendously unnatural in the way they were running.  Pounding along the blacktop at bullet speeds, but not in any way he associated with a panic riot.

They were running as a unit.  Coordinated.  No unnecessary bumping or shoving.  Together in a way that was almost as disconcerting as the mayhem he felt rolling off them in waves.

He skidded to a stop.  Turned.

Saw another dark mass of death speeding at them from the other end of the street.

He broke right, running to the closest building with windows: a homeless shelter.  He hadn’t even known the place existed, and felt a strange pang of shame at that.  Boise was one of those places where no one seemed to be homeless.  People had money problems – he was one of them – but they always seemed to be in the “pain in the ass but manageable” category.

The place looked like a warehouse, mostly brick and concrete.  But the front was a series of windows.  Which made Ken very uncomfortable.  He remembered the cop, beating against the windows of the car.

How long will those windows hold up if the zombies try to get in?

Beggars can’t be choosers, Ken.

He pulled Dorcas toward the place.  She resisted long enough to pull her arm from around his shoulders, then she was running under her own steam.

The thunder was deafening.  A thousand, maybe ten thousand, pairs of feet hitting the pavement in a cadence that was somehow both chaotic and unified.  Each running at his or her own pace, but all with one purpose: to rend and kill and change.

They got to the front door of the shelter.  Glass, just like the ten-foot windows that fronted the place.  Most of the windows had smears of blood across them, inside and out.

Ken hit the door with his shoulder.  A sign across it said, “We are open for YOU!”

The door shuddered in its frame, but didn’t open.

Locked.

Ken looked inside the shelter.  He didn’t think he and Dorcas had time to go somewhere else.  But he also didn’t want to just break the glass – what would be the point of hiding somewhere with a wide open door?

He saw what looked like a soup kitchen setup: long tables, benches.  Hot food setup in the back.

Everything was in disarray.  Tables upended, benches overturned.  A folding metal chair hung from a sparking bank of fluorescent tubes.

Lots of bodies.  Lots of blood.

Nothing moving, though.  Whatever happened here had remained here.  Had stayed contained.

Not like the now-deafening thunder.

“We gotta get inside,” said Dorcas.

Ken nodded.  He rattled the door once more, as though hoping it might have magically unlocked in the last second.  Then he raised the lug wrench to smash through.

And a man appeared in the wreckage beyond the door.

He looked terrified, worry and grime and blood caking his face and making it difficult to see how old or young he was.  But he had dark hair and a bristly-looking goatee.

“Let us in!” shouted Ken.

He could hear individual footsteps in the thunder, now.  The shelter was slightly recessed from the street, but he had no doubt that the mass of monsters was only maybe a hundred feet away.  Less.

The man in the shelter just shook his head.

“Let us in!” Ken screamed, fear cracking his voice into sharp jags.

Dorcas pounded her good fist against the window beside the door.  “Please, we’ll die!” she screamed.

The man pointed beside him.

There was a little boy there.  Holding the man’s hand.

Ken cursed.  “We can help you!” he screamed.  “We don’t have to do this alone!”

The man shook his head.

Ken raised his lug wrench to smash through the window.

“What about the boy?” said Dorcas.

“I have a family, too,” said Ken.  He looked at Dorcas.  She seemed to be considering his words.  “We’re better off together,” he said.  He brought the lug wrench down.

And stopped it in mid-air.

The man in the shelter had drawn a black, snub-nosed revolver and was pointing it right at Ken’s chest.

Ken looked at the man’s eyes.  Had no doubt the man would shoot him if he continued his swing.

He nodded.

“Come on.”

They would have to outrun the thunder.

He turned.

And saw the first creature come into view past the corner of the building closest to them.

35

It was a man in blue jeans.  He was wearing a Boise State U. baseball cap and matching blue and orange t-shirt.  No blood on him, other than a single spot on his hand where he must have been bitten.

He saw Ken and Dorcas and snarled.  Swerved to run at them.

Ken ran.  He knew Dorcas was right behind.

They ran in the only direction open to them: the thin bit of asphalt between the homeless shelter and the building beside it.  The slap/crash of ten thousand feet pounded into the area after them.

Ahead was a chain-link fence that enclosed the back of the shelter as well as some other structure that looked like a supply building or maybe a large disconnected garage.  Either way, it looked like it was closed up tight, and was certainly too tall to get on top of.

Beyond the chain-link fence – almost irrelevant information for Ken’s brain to process since there was no way they could climb over the twenty foot fence before they were overwhelmed by the horde behind them – there was just a blank wall of concrete.  A huge footing of the I-84, an unbroken length of concrete where the freeway lowered to within thirty feet of the ground.

Dorcas started to slow.  Ken could tell she had seen the same things he had.  The fact that they were running into a dead end.

“Come on,” he barked, grabbing her arm and yanking it.

“Why?” she muttered, but ran on.

He felt like she was right.  But felt like he couldn’t just stop.  He owed it to his family to try.

All the way to the end.

Then he saw something.  Tossed the lug wrench away.  Dorcas veered as though to grab it.

“Leave it!” he shouted.  And grabbed what he had seen.

Dorcas gasped as though realizing what he was going to do.  She grabbed it as well.

The zombies were only fifty feet behind them.

And now he realized that they were in front of him, too: filtering into the space on the other side of the fence, between the shelter property and the freeway footing.

“We can’t go over,” panted Dorcas.

“I know.”  He veered to the sturdy structure on their right.  “Change of plans.”

As he turned, he saw the zombies that had followed them into the funnel between the shelter and the other building, a concrete block of a place with a sign proclaiming, “Get fit for the rest of your life!  Free introductory YOGA classes!”

The things were thirty feet away.

He ran the last feet to the disconnected concrete building behind the homeless shelter.  Threw what he was holding against the side.  Dorcas helped him, adjusting the tall ladder that had been laying against the side of the shelter until it cleared the roof of the storage building.

Twenty feet.  The growling hit him hard, worse even than it had in the school.  It felt like he was being punched by someone who had a roll of nickels wrapped in his fist.

He shoved Dorcas up the ladder ahead of him.  She started moving, faster than he would have thought someone could climb one-handed.

He was up an instant later.

The zombies were ten feet away.

Dorcas cleared the ladder.  On the roof.

Five feet.

Ken jumped up the last few rungs.  Onto the roof.

Two feet.

The zombies, led by the blue-jeaned BSU fan, reached for the ladder.

Ken grabbed the ladder and pulled it up after him.  He felt it shudder in his hands as some of the zombies’ fingers brushed it, but none managed to grasp it or pull it down.  He didn’t know if they could use it, but he didn’t want to find out.

He flipped the ladder up over the edge of the building.

It hit the roof with a clank.

Safe.

Then he felt Dorcas’ hand on his shoulder, tight and slick against his still-bare skin.  She squeezed convulsively.

Ken looked down.  His breath caught painfully in his throat.

The zombies didn’t need a ladder.

36

The zombie in blue jeans was gone.  Probably still there, but gone just the same.  The press of zombies had filled in the space between the homeless shelter and the ten-foot-by-twenty-foot structure Ken and Dorcas were crouched on top of.  There were so many of the things in the space that it was impossible to see where one left off and another began.  It was like the mass was a single amorphous organism, squeezing every possible cell it could into the area in search of food.

Over the booming growl of the zombies – or maybe between it, since Ken couldn’t imagine anything being heard over it – came the sound of tinkling glass from the front of the shelter.  A few gunshots.

Then just the zombies.  The throng that was so thick it was almost a jellied version of humanity.  Pressing.  Pressing.  Pressing into the space behind the homeless shelter.  Pressing up to the base of the building.

Pressing over and on top of one another.

It was like watching ants swarm up an anthill.  The zombie in blue jeans was probably at the bottom, supporting others who came after, who in turn supported still others.

“Dorcas…,” said Ken, staring transfixed at the boiling mass of bodies that was rising ever closer to the top of their momentary safe haven.

“Already on it,” she shouted.  She ran quickly around the perimeter of the roof, clutching her injured arm but betraying no sign of pain.

Adrenaline is a wonderful thing, Ken thought.  He suspected he would drop dead at any moment.  If he got far enough to enjoy that luxury.

“They’re everywhere,” said Dorcas.  “Not as close as here, but moving up.”

The zombies at the base of the storage building were ten feet away from reaching the roof.  Now nine feet.

Ken looked around.  The roof was unbroken.  No way to get inside and take cover.  No weapons.

He looked over the side.  The things were seven feet away.  Bubbling ever closer to their goal.

What the hell is happening?  Why?

No answers.  Never any answers.

Ken thought for a moment about trying to hit a few heads with the ladder; maybe that would start a chain reaction of crazy that would stop the threat.  But he discarded the idea as soon as it came.  There was no way that dropping a less stable zombie into that mix would even be noticed, any more than the ocean would notice someone pissing in it.

Five feet away.  The ones at the top reached for the roof before being buried under the next wave of zombies.  Their fingers missed the lip of the roof, but not by much.

Ken ran back to the ladder.  It was an extension ladder, opened up to a length of probably twenty feet, but it looked like it could be opened out another four or five feet.  He hoped it would be enough.

He pushed the ladder out.  Over the edge of the roof opposite the one they had climbed up on.

Fingers reached for it.  Came up empty.

He kept reeling the ladder out.  It touched the top of the chain-link fence surrounding the shelter property.  He kept pushing it, using the fence for stability as he shoved the ladder up and over.

It ended about five feet short.

Five feet before touching the lip of the freeway just above and to the side of them.  Ken pushed the leading edge of the ladder forward another inch, but any farther and he knew it would just fall off the building, teeter on the fence for a moment, then plummet into the horde below.

Just like they would fall if they tried to get out on the ladder.  It would tip over into the zombies as soon as they crossed the fulcrum point of the top of the chain-link fence.

“So much for emergency bridging out of here,” he said.

He looked at Dorcas.  Out of ideas and not knowing what to say.  Goodbye seemed trite, seemed ridiculous in fact.

The look in her eyes stole his thoughts.  Not just strong.  If he had to pick a word at that moment he would only have come up with holy.  This, he realized, was what he had always pictured avenging angels looking like right before they started kicking celestial ass.

Dorcas stepped onto the first rung of the ladder, the only rung that still rested on the roof of their all-too temporary sanctuary.

“I’ll anchor it,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You’ve got family.  All I’ve got is an ex-husband who was probably banging some girl half his age when this all went down.”  She grimaced.  “I hope she bit his wiener off.”

Ken still didn’t move.

Dorcas grabbed him with her good hand.

“Go!  Get your family.”

Behind them, he heard the fleshy slap of a dozen palms on the roof.  The growling all around them grew more focused, as though they knew that this was it.

The first zombies pulled themselves onto the roof.

37

Ken moved past Dorcas, stepping onto the ladder.  But he didn’t up it, didn’t run over the point where it crossed the chain-link fence, didn’t attempt to jump from the end of the ladder to the edge of the freeway five feet away.  He just moved a single rung past Dorcas, then spun around, one foot planted unsteadily on the rails on either side of the ladder.

Below him, the zombies reached for the ladder, reached for him.  They hissed and growled like boiling tar in a moat.

“What are you doing?” Dorcas shouted.  “Go!”

He ignored her.  Waited.  Watched.

The first zombies pulled themselves fully erect on the roof.  Looked around as though taking stock.  Spotted Dorcas.  Spotted Ken.

“Come on!” he screamed.  He grabbed her good arm and yanked her toward him.

“We’ll fall!”

He didn’t answer, just pulled her onto the ladder.  It held up, supported by the roof on one side and the chain-link fence on the other.

“As soon as we get past the fence, we’ll tilt it,” she said, not adding the words, “and we’ll fall!”

Ken heard them anyway.

He kept moving forward.  Crabwalking up the incline, hearing the clank-clank-clank of Dorcas doing the same right at his heels.  Hearing even more the zombies growling and shrieking only a few feet below, boiling ever higher as they piled on top of one another to get to their prey.

The fence.  Almost there.

Now Dorcas did say it.  Screamed it.  “We’ll fall!”

“Keep going, trust me!” shouted Ken.  No time for explanations.

They reached the fence.  He put his hand over the invisible line that would quickly turn the ladder from bridge into unbalanced teeter totter.  He kept going.

Passed onto the other side of the fence.

Teeth and madness below.

Dorcas put her hand over the fence.

The ladder started to shift.

Clank.

Ken looked back as the ladder slammed back to the rooftop, borne down by the weight of the two zombies fighting to crawl out after them.

“Keep moving!” he screamed to Dorcas.

One of the zombies fell off the ladder with a scream of rage.  Two more took its place.  Then another three.  The horde-organism had extended itself to the roof, and now pushed its living pseudopodia out onto the ladder, each with its own face and mouth and gut.

The ladder clanked.  Groaned as more and more of the mindless things pushed their way onto it.  Ken didn’t know what the ladder’s weight rating was, but doubted it was designed for lateral use by ten – eleven, twelve – full-grown people.

He pushed forward.  The gap was ahead.  Five feet.  A longish jump on solid ground.

But when you were running up an incline that was mostly made of holes, one of you concussed at least twice over and the other one nursing a badly broken arm… impossible.

38

“I can’t make it,” shouted Dorcas.

“You’ll make it.”

“I can’t hang on.”

“You won’t have to.”

He was at the end of the ladder.  It crackled as though nervous.  Something pinged and one of the beasts clambering up its length behind them toppled off, still holding one of the ladder rungs, and was swallowed up by the swelling host below.

Ken stood up, balanced precariously on the last rung of the ladder.  He thought a stiff breeze might blow him off.  He tried not to think of what was below.

He turned to face Dorcas.  Saw her.  Saw the ten man-beasts only a few feet behind.  Seven on the other side of the fence.  Three on this side.

The ladder started to buckle.

Ken nudged himself up onto his toes.

Tipped himself back like a diver doing a reverse swan…

“NO!” Dorcas screamed

… and fell.

39

Two things happened almost at the same moment.

Ken felt his blindly reaching hands slap against the rough concrete lip of the freeway behind him.

And the ladder gave out a shuddering scream and started to bend, folding over the top of the fence like it had grown suddenly exhausted by its efforts and just needed to relax.

Dorcas screamed.  Hitched up on her knees and reached with her good arm.

Ken flipped his toes from their position atop the last rung, jamming them under the rung, then knifing his toes up over the top of the ladder’s support columns.  The full weight of the ladder and the occupants on this side of the fence came down on his shins, his feet, his hands.

Ken screamed.  Felt the skin peel off his shins as the ladder pulled on him.

But the ladder didn’t fall.

“Climb!” he shouted through gritted teeth.

Dorcas got to her feet, leaping across the last few feet to the end of the ladder.

The three zombies on this side of the fence started growling louder, as though sensing that they were in danger of losing their meal.  They skittered on hands and feet across the final yards of the ladder.

Dorcas pulled herself one-handed up Ken’s body.  Planted a foot on his leg, another fell right into his crotch.  He shouted in pain.  A memory flashed through his mind: Derek’s first year, when he had started crawling and then walking.  His favorite thing to do was crawl or walk from one end of the couch to another, clearly enjoying the bounce of the cushions.

If Ken was sitting on the couch, it was an even bigger treat.  Like a small mountain to be climbed.  A fun obstacle for the infant.

And every time – every single time – the kid crossed over, he managed to put a surprisingly hard baby foot in Ken’s crotch.

When Hope came, Ken joked with his wife that he was surprised his sperm count had survived the continuing assault of Derek’s climbing trips.

He wondered if this was going to be his last memory.  His little boy slamming him in the nuts on at least a daily basis.

There are worse ways to go.

And he would have paid Dorcas back.

The back end of the ladder, the part beyond the fence, cracked in two with a sound like a rifle shot.  The seven monsters crawling its length fell with a scream.

The three on this side were still coming, held up by the fence and by Ken’s rapidly tearing tendons and muscles.

Dorcas’ weight left him.

Her voice came from above.  She sounded like an angel.

“Let go,” she said.  “I’m here, let go!”

Ken almost let his hands relax.  A move that would have been suicide since Dorcas wasn’t holding onto him; and even if she had been, it wasn’t likely she could haul his body weight up and over the edge of the freeway shoulder.  Then he realized what she meant.

The closest of the three zombies still on the ladder leaped at him.

40

Ken relaxed his feet.

The ladder fell with a clang and a wet thud as the weight of two full-grown men drove it into the pile of bodies below.

The thing that had jumped for Ken was still in the air.  Snarling.  Mouth open.

Its fingers brushed Ken’s chest.

Ken swung back in a short arc as his feet – which had been anchoring him as much as the ladder – let go.  Just out of reach of the monster, which fell close enough that Ken could smell its breath, dark and damp and rotten, as it fell past him and was swallowed up in the monstrous swirl thirty feet below.

Ken swung backward into the concrete freeway footing.  His feet and legs hit hard, further abrading the torn and lacerated flesh there.

He felt himself slipping.

He had originally intended to flip himself into a pull-up position, but now realized that was going to be impossible.  He didn’t have the leverage for it, since he was essentially reaching behind himself at this point.

“Hold on!” he heard Dorcas screaming.

Sure.  No problem.

He felt numb.  Everywhere but his head, which throbbed.

Something smacked him on the nose.

“Sorry,” said a gruff voice.  He didn’t recognize it, only realized that it certainly did not belong to Dorcas.

He realized that he had been hit by a belt buckle.  One of the kind that were almost the size of a salad plate and could only be worn by ironic hipsters or deadly-serious cowboys.

A hand grabbed his arm, arresting his slow downward slide.  The voice spoke again, sounding very much the opposite of an ironic hipster.  “Grab it, boy.”

For a moment Ken couldn’t peel the fingers of his free hand away from the concrete.  Now that he was supposed to let go, he couldn’t.

Then his fingers came away.  He swore he heard a wet ripping, like the sound of Saran Wrap pulling off itself.  He swung into space for a dizzy second, his body only anchored at one point, before managing to grab the belt.

The things below screamed.  Piled up, piled up, piled up, still looking like some huge version of rabid ants.

Ken couldn’t climb.  He was done.  All he could do was clench his hand around the well-worn strip of leather.  He couldn’t pull himself up.

He didn’t have to.

He heard a grunt, then started to rise, pulled at a slow but steady pace.  He heard Dorcas say, “You got him?”

“Yup,” said the unseen gruff non-hipster.

The hand that had been holding Ken’s other hand trapped to the side of the freeway footing let go.  And another hand – larger, matching the roughness of the voice it belonged to – wrapped itself around that hand a second later.

A third hand – Dorcas’, he figured – grabbed him under the armpit.

And together they hauled him up.

Ken’s bare back scraped something metal.  A moment later he could see that it was the small fence beside the freeway.  Just strips of sheet metal with reflective stickers to warn motorists not to drive off the side of the freeway.  They were sharp as knives.

And the pain as they bit into Ken’s back was probably the greatest feeling he had ever experienced.

It meant he was still alive.

They pulled him over.  Dorcas and another someone Ken still hadn’t seen.  He fell full-length to the ground, the hot pavement biting at his raw back.  Smiling.

“We safe?” said Ken.

Dorcas grinned back.  “For the moment.”

“Good.”

He meant to thank the mysterious benefactor who had saved them, but passed out instead.

41

Music.  Boisterous and bright.

Click.  Bzzzzz.

Click.  Silence.

Click.  Micky Mouse talking.

Click.  Two kids arguing.  One of them said something snarky and a crowd of people laughed.

Click.  Silence again.  Then… the growl.

Ken’s eyes fluttered.  He jerked into semi-wakefulness.  His body slammed upright, registering only peripherally that he was laying on something cold and very hard.

It was dark.  Everything was dark.  He felt like he’d been blinded.  The only illumination came from one of the things.  Not three feet away.

He screamed.

The thing looked at him.  Its face was creased and blood-stained.  Its eyes glinted like those of a wolf.

It opened its mouth.

“Easy, partner,” it said.

And it turned its gaze from Ken.

Ken felt his mouth slam shut, the scream cutting off abruptly.

A hand touched his forehead, and he almost screamed again before he realized it was Dorcas.  “You’re hot,” she said.  “We’ll have to find you some meds.”

“I’m fine,” he mumbled.  He looked at the thing again.  The glowing figure.  Only now it seemed his eyes were working better, because he could see that it wasn’t a thing, and it wasn’t glowing.  It was a man, hunched over a box that seemed at once familiar and alien, a relic of a world already ten times removed from Ken’s reality.

A television.

The man was sturdy and squat, with relaxed features and a weathered face that spoke of a life spent outdoors.  He looked, Ken thought, like one of those men you ran into who “wrassled” things – things like bears, gators, and small countries – for a living.  Men who had an ageless quality about them.  Beards flecked with gray, as this man’s beard was, but whose hands and arms were the hands and arms of a man in his prime.

He looked like – and probably was – a cowboy.  The real kind.  Not a poser, the kind who bought hundred-dollar blue jeans and rode horses on weekends, but the kind of man who was as much at home on a horse as off, and whose jeans were designed for one purpose only: to take as much punishment as possible and keep on going.

“That’s Aaron,” said Dorcas.  “He’s the one who rescued us.”

“Lucky us,” said Ken.

“Luck nothing,” said Dorcas.  “He said he’d been watching from the freeway, trying to figure out a way to help us.”

“You obliged by coming to me, so thanks for that,” said Aaron.  His gaze didn’t waver from the television.  The TV was turned away from Ken, so he couldn’t tell what the other man was watching.  But he still heard the growl that had awakened him.  The sound of at least one of those things.

“What are you watching?” he said.  “Where are we?”

He tried to stand up.  “Maybe you should –” Dorcas began, but he waved her off.  She sighed and put an arm under one of his.  Helped him stand.

He realized Dorcas’ arm was bunched under fabric, not just slapping against his bare skin.  In the strange, flickering light he could see he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt said, “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP).”

He looked at Dorcas.  She grimaced.  “We didn’t think you should just go around nekkid for the rest of your life.  Don’t ask where we got it.”

The back of Ken’s head felt strange.  Taut, like a drum that had been tightened too zealously.  He touched it and felt something hard and knotted there.

“You were banged up pretty bad,” said Dorcas.  “Aaron found some superglue and just glued you back together.”  She glanced at the cowboy.  “He’s handy.”

Ken noticed that Dorcas’ broken arm had been set, her forearm duct-taped to a ruler and then hung from a sling made from an oversized handkerchief.

“Looks like he is handy,” said Ken.  He took a few steps toward the older man, who still hadn’t looked away from the television.

The sound of Ken’s shoes echoed strangely and he looked around for the first time.  The flickering light of the TV bounced off four walls that seemed to be made of burnished metal with tiny knobs set every few inches along their surfaces.  The ceiling had the same reflective quality, a long expanse with a small vent set into the middle.

“Bank vault,” said Dorcas.

Ken thought of Maggie and the kids.  The Wells Fargo Center.  Could it be possible he’d made it there in his sleep – or unconsciousness?

Even in the dim light of the television set, Dorcas must have seen the hope on his face.  She shook her head.  “We got as far as 11th Street when we saw another one of those… hordes… coming at us.  We were carrying you so we had to get away as fast as we could.”  She nodded toward Aaron, who was still glued to the TV set like it was final seconds of an epic Superbowl.  “He was the one who thought of getting to the bank.”

“What bank?” asked Ken.  He tried to stand on his own.  His head started throbbing again, but he didn’t want to throw up.  Progress.

“Bank of the Falls,” said Aaron.

Ken’s stomach plunged.  They had actually gone backward.  The Bank of the Falls was several blocks north and west of where they had been, nowhere near where Ken wanted to be.

Dorcas touched his shoulder.  “We’re doing our best,” she whispered.

Ken realized his face must be an extremely open book.  “Sorry,” he mumbled.  “Just worried.”

The sounds coming from the television got louder.  The growl.  Ken felt like he should have been elated at the fact that there was still power in at least some parts of the city: the world couldn’t have ended yet if you could still watch a show; could still microwave a burrito, right?  But instead he just felt dread at the sound of that enraged snarl.

He moved toward the TV.  He remembered the feeling he had had when he first saw the bugs on his classroom window: that feeling of not wanting to see, but needing to know.

He worried that kind of thing would kill him.

But he worried more that not knowing would kill him faster.

He joined Aaron in front of the television.

42

At first Ken didn’t know what he was looking at.  The camera kept tilting and moving.  Then he recognized the bits and pieces of the background as the studio for one of the local news affiliates: all greens and blues and expensive-looking graphics.

And in the background, like the world’s most macabre laugh track, the continuing noise of the growl.

“Where’s it coming from?” said Dorcas.

A moment later, the answer presented itself.  A woman came into view.  She was close to the camera, her hands on either side of the frame as though she was embracing the equipment.  Her hair and makeup had clearly been beautiful at one point, but were now a nest of snarls and streaks.

She stared into the camera.

“That’s Marie Wells,” said Dorcas.

“Who?” said Ken.

“She’s one of the anchors for Channel Seven News.”

Marie didn’t look like she’d be anchoring anything anytime soon.  She growled louder, as though knowing that the people she desperately wanted to attack were on the other side of the camera.  Her lips pulled back, baring teeth that were stained and clotted with the remains of something Ken preferred not to think about.

She headbutted the camera.

The movement came without any kind of telegraphing.  One moment she was growling and snarling, the next her forehead slammed into the lens.  There was a splash of red as some part of the equipment sliced her forehead wide open, and when she drew back the image was blurred – whether because of blood or because of makeup Ken couldn’t tell.

Marie could be made out, a crimson curtain running down her face.  She stumbled around, still growling.  No longer interested in the camera, but still clearly searching for something – someone – to kill.

“Change it,” whispered Dorcas.

Aaron reached out and touched a button on the television.  It flipped over to at Tom & Jerry cartoon.

“That’s good news, right?” said Ken.  The others looked at him.  “Things can’t be too bad if the televisions are still going.  Maybe this is only happening in Boise.”

Aaron and Dorcas shared a glance.  Dorcas nodded.

Aaron flipped to a new channel.

43

Ken didn’t watch much news.  His interest in news stopped right around the end of the Korean War.  After that, things got too muddy for him.  In fifty years, maybe the dust would have settled enough for him to look back and understand just who had done what to whom, but for now he mostly avoided contemporary information.

But he still knew what the CNN logo looked like.

Usually, however, the logo hung next to a ticker that highlighted breaking news items, and behind it would be an anchorperson and a studio.  Now the logo was beside a ticker that sprouted nonsense, as though someone had fallen face first onto the teletype.

There was no anchor.

There was a studio.  Clusters of computer towers and monitors.  Most of them splattered with blood.  Bodies laying across several tables.

And more than a dozen of the things, the zombies, walking around between the dead.

Ken was reminded of the zombies that had followed him out of the school.  Like those few, these moved in a strangely coordinated way.  Not as though they were telling one another what to do, more like….  He frowned, trying to conceptualize what he was seeing.

It was like they were tied to one another.  As though an invisible rope that permitted only a few feet of slack tied every zombie in the room to every other zombie.  They almost orbited each other.  Moving over and around the debris-strewn warzone that the studio had become, but never straying far from the other monsters.

As Ken watched, one of the bodies that he had thought was dead stood up on legs that were clearly broken and began shuffling around as well, growling and snarling.  Blood spurted out of its legs with every step.

It fell eventually.  But didn’t stop growling as it crawled on the floor, pulling itself along on hands that soon bled.  Trying to stay with its brothers and sisters.

“That ain’t Boise,” said Aaron.

“No,” said Ken.  The word came out as a whisper, sounding almost like a prayer.

Dorcas reached out and changed the channel back to Tom & Jerry.  The mouse had enlisted the aid of a bulldog to destroy the larger cat.

Ken looked at the TV.  It was on the vault floor, the electrical and cable inputs trailing out of the barely-cracked door.  Aaron or Dorcas must have grabbed it and brought it in here.

“What about computers?” he said.  “The internet?”

“Checked it already,” said Aaron.  “A lot of the ‘net’s still active, and the power’s still on – in this building, at least, and who knows how long that’s even going to last – but there’s nothing about whatever all this is.”  He heaved a sigh, and now he did look old.  Tired.  He drew a hand over his face.  “Whatever happened, it happened so fast no one was ready.”

“What was it?” said Dorcas.  “What did this?”

Before anyone could answer, a new sound forced its way into their world.  One Ken had heard before.  One they all had.  And one that was both comforting and terrifying at the same time.

44

The tone reminded Ken of old modem connections: a grating computer modulation, followed by a high-pitched tone designed to demand attention.

“EAS,” said Aaron.

“What?” asked Dorcas.

“Emergency Alert System,” said Ken.

“I thought they got rid of that,” said Dorcas.

“They got rid of the Emergency Broadcast System.  In favor of the EAS, which is more localized,” said Aaron.  He flipped channels.  The tones were on every one.

“I thought you said they were local,” said Dorcas.

“They are,” said Aaron.  “Only one person has access to nationwide EAS.”

At that moment, the tones cut off, replaced by a voice from the television, playing over the cooking show that Aaron had stopped at.  The voice was male, but somewhat androgynous.  Computerized, Ken guessed.

“The President of the United States is dead,” said the voice.  “So is the entire Cabinet, and their Secret Service details.  Washington, D.C., has fallen.”

Ken looked at Dorcas.  She looked more afraid than she had at any time before, even when they were stranded atop a roof and surrounded by thousands of zombies.

“I’m the only one left to do this, so… Jesus.  I don’t even know why I’m doing it.  So you can know.  So you can take whatever measures you deem necessary.”  Even computerized, the voice sounded drawn and weary.

“Get off the air, you stupid ass,” muttered Aaron.  “You’re just scaring people.”

“Who do you think it is?” asked Dorcas.

Aaron shook his head, whether because he didn’t know or didn’t want to say, Ken couldn’t tell.

The strangely asexual voice continued.  “We barely had enough time to read the first reports before it hit us, too.  It’s worldwide.  Moscow sent us half a flash over the emergency channels, then nothing.  A minute later we got garbled reports of zombies from Germany, maybe thirty seconds later we heard a few sentences from London before they went dark, too.  A minute and a half later it hit us.”

The voice went dead for a long time.  Long enough that Ken thought maybe it was done speaking.

“I can’t tell you what to do.  I can see swarms of them in the streets – the whole city, what people are left alive.  There are dozens of the things outside the door here, and I only have a few seconds.  Don’t wait for help from the government.  If you’re alive, you’re alone.  You’re on your own.”  Another pause, then the voice said, “Near as we can tell, over fifty percent of the world’s population was susceptible to the initial effect.  That fifty percent attacked the rest of us, and now we –”

The tones returned.  The beeps and the modem sounds that reminded Ken of someone taking a Brillo pad to a disk drive.

“He’s gone,” whispered Dorcas.  She sounded like she was holding back tears.

“He was gone before he started that broadcast, the dumb kid,” said Aaron.  The short man reached up and put an arm around Dorcas’ shoulders.  She wilted into him.

Ken looked at Aaron.  The other man stared as though to say, “What now?”

Ken twisted his back, feeling his joints.  Everything hurt.  But everything seemed to be working, if only just barely.

The television flickered, then went out.  Ken heard snaps and relays as the power grid failed.  He didn’t know if it was just here, in this block, or if this time it was city wide or state wide or everywhere.

And it didn’t matter.

He could still feel Aaron staring at him in the darkness.

“I’ve got to get going,” he said.  “My family’s out there.”

45

If he had been a movie hero, Ken would have accompanied that statement with a dramatic turn toward the vault door.  He would have swaggered over to the thin line of light that was the only demarcation between their dark bunker and the greater darkness outside, and left to save his loved ones without a second thought.

But he wasn’t that guy.  He was a history teacher.  Granted, he thought of himself as fairly resourceful, okay in a fight.  But he was still just a normal guy.  Still scared witless at the idea of going out there alone.

So he waited a moment.

The moment stretched out.  He could hear Dorcas sniffing, sounding like she was trying to suffocate her sobs before they could be born.

Aaron made no sound at all.  The epitome of the strong silent type.

Ken realized he was waiting too long.  He turned.

Aaron spoke.  “They’re probably dead.”

Ken didn’t turn to face the other man.  If he turned away from the vault door, he thought it likely he wouldn’t have the strength to leave.  He would just cower in the darkness until the hordes found him, or until hunger and thirst claimed him.  Either way, he was dead.  And he preferred to die looking for his family.

“I know,” he said.  “But I have to look.”

Aaron exhaled, a long, steady breath of air that sounded like a man getting ready to do something deeply unpleasant.  “All right, then, let’s go.”

Ken felt his legs trembling.  “Dorcas?” he asked.

Dorcas, still sniffling, said, “Don’t be stupid.  You think I rescued you and dragged you all over creation – twice – just so you could go off and die without me being there to save you again?”

Ken felt something move past him in the dark.  A moment later, a deep grunt signaled that it was Aaron.  The crack of light at the vault’s entrance widened slightly, and Ken could make out the squat man pushing the thick steel door open.

As soon as it was wide enough, Aaron slipped through the gap.  “Come on,” he said.  “I don’t plan to be out at night.”

Ken nodded.  He reached behind him in the darkness.  Dorcas’ hand clasped his.

They stepped out of the safety of the vault.  Into brightness.  Into danger.

Into hopeless hope.

46

Ken hadn’t seen the bank coming in, of course.  So he wasn’t prepared for what waited outside the vault.

Like a lot of banks in Boise, this one was fairly small.  Just a vault that led into a small anteroom, then directly into the bank proper.

It was filled with the dead.  People who must have been here right before or during lunch breaks.  Ken realized that Becca had noticed the first bugs at around 11:30.  And now it was… he glanced at a wall clock.  Analog, and it must be running on batteries, because the second hand was still sweeping along like everything was normal.  2:25 in the afternoon.

It had only been three hours.  Three hours, and according to the faceless person on the television, almost everyone on the planet was either dead or converted to one of the things, one of the zombies.

None of the zombies were in here, only the aftermath.  Limp forms laying across desks, tables, the floor.  A pair of men lay atop one another nearby, frozen in a final tableau that made it all too easy to determine how each had died.  A few feet from them, a woman slumped across one of the teller stations, her arm reaching under the bulletproof acrylic as though to take a deposit from a customer.  Only the woman didn’t have a hand at the end of her arm.  She must have bled out and died like that.

Bodies and blood everywhere.  Made even more gruesome in the half-light that illuminated everything: the sunlight filtering in through polarized windows at the front of the bank.

The street outside appeared deserted.

Ken realized he hadn’t tried to call Maggie.  He hadn’t had a single moment to do so, not more than ten seconds where he wasn’t concentrating on the pressing question of his own survival.  Now he took his cell phone out of his pocket.  It turned on as though everything were normal, and he saw three bars at the corner of the display: enough to indicate plenty of coverage.

He dialed Maggie’s cell number.  Held the phone to his ear.

Ken saw Aaron turn and spot him.  The other man’s eyes widened.  “Don’t –” began the man.

Ken ignored him.  Turned away.

The phone rang once.

Ken felt Aaron pulling on his shoulder.

The phone rang again.

The line picked up.

47

Ken was grinning, even though Aaron was pulling on him.  Expecting to hear Maggie’s voice.  Maybe one of the kids.

What came out of his phone, though, was the background noise of a nightmare.

His first thought was that it was the EAS; that the President was still alive, and was somehow broadcasting aid instructions to cell phones in the area.  Certainly the noise that came out of the phone possessed the same grainy, rasping quality that the computer tone at the beginning of the televised alert had.

A moment later, though, the sound seemed to be drilling holes in Ken’s brain.  It was like he had found a way to access every horrific memory of his life, and have every one of them come tumbling forward into the forefront of his mind.

The time Derek swallowed a marble and almost choked to death.

Hope’s pneumonia.

The months after Ken graduated college and found that the job market had dried up and he was about to bring a child into a world without any idea of how to take care of it.

His parents’ deaths.

The pain when he had surgery as a child, the doctor digging in his shoulder with a scalpel without using anesthesia because doing so would have made it harder to find the source of the infection.

On and on and on.

And under it all, a current of something worse than the pain and terror and rage and fear.

It was something Ken didn’t have a word for.  Something beyond hopelessness.  A sense that all was not merely lost but worthless.  That any value he might once have felt in his life, his loved ones, was overblown and ridiculous.  Muted by the reality of a universe that would not notice at all if the world were swept clean of all human life.

He wanted to lay down and die.

A hand closed over his.  He barely felt it.  But when the hand tore the phone away from his ear… that he noticed.  It was the most exquisite pain, the most divine of agonies.  The horrific memories that had bubbled to the surface of his mind became stronger for an instant – an instant that seemed an eternity – and then sank back to the depths of his consciousness.

“No phones,” said Aaron.  He pointed at something.

Ken felt fuzzy, like he was waking up after a night of heavy drinking.  But he managed to look in the direction Aaron was pointing at.  It was a man in a nice suit, laying in the corner of the bank.  He had a phone to his ear, and his eyes stared sideways at nothing.

He wasn’t breathing.  Ken suspected he had listened to the sounds in the phone until he had simply shut down, until his mind somehow managed to tell his heart to stop beating.  Until oblivion became not merely a respite, but the only way to escape the mental rapine of the tone.

“How’d you know?” said Ken.

“I tried to call my brother,” said Aaron.  “Dorcas saved me.”

The look in Aaron’s eyes told Ken that the admiration Dorcas had for the cowboy was mutual.  That made him feel good for some reason.  Like even though the world was ending, there was still a chance as long as people were making connections.

He glanced at Dorcas.  She was actually blushing.  And that made Ken feel better still.

Then the pounding started.  And that made him feel much, much worse.

48

Ken looked around and saw every single one of the zombies pounding on a car parked at the curb outside the bank.

Just one.  But by now Ken’s brain automatically figured that it was like seeing a single ant at a picnic.  “Just one” really meant “more to come.”

He dropped to his knees, moving behind one of the freestanding counters that the bank provided for people to fill out deposit and withdrawal slips.  Dorcas and Aaron were already hunched behind another one.

“Is it locked?” Ken whispered, signaling at the door.

Aaron shook his head.

Ken sighed, but figured it didn’t matter much.  The things would get in if there were more than a few of them.

A scream.  Raw and thin, as though the person screaming had exactly enough energy left for that single sound.  Ken couldn’t tell if the noise came from a man, woman, or child.  And he didn’t want to know.

But he poked his head over the top of the counter.  Because Dorcas had saved him.  Aaron had saved both of them.  So if he could help someone else, he would have to do it.

The scream was coming from the car outside the bank.  The one the zombie was pounding on.  Only now the zombie had been joined by three others.  They were all large men, brawny in a way that Ken associated with bouncers or bikers: thick through the chest and gut, wearing cut-off sleeves that showed tan and muscled arms.

Another scream from inside the car.  And Ken didn’t know what to do.

He heard a whirring, clicking sound beside him.  Looked over.  It was Aaron.  He was holding a pistol, what looked like a .357 Magnum, black and bug-like and deadly.  The clicking came as he spun the cylinder, which was hanging to the side.  Then he looked at Ken and shook his head, holding up two fingers.

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 through 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.

He fell eighteen thousand feet.  Slammed into pine trees and the snowy ground of the Third Reich.

And found he had not only survived the fall, but done so with nothing more than a sprained leg.  He was captured by the Gestapo, who, upon verifying his claims of falling almost four miles out of a plane with no chute, made him a prisoner of war… and treated him more or less like royalty.

Now, moving swiftly into the remains of the top of the One Capital Center, Ken wondered how those Germans would have reacted to an entire building plopping down apparently untouched in their midst.

The interior of the building was surprisingly intact.  Chairs had rolled around, papers were everywhere.  But a lot of the desks and filing cabinets appeared to be close to where they should be.

Some of the desks still had people sitting at them.

Bloody, broken.  But still there.  As though even death could not stop some of the more dedicated workers from running the rat race to the bitterest of ends.

The survivors moved through the outer office, which was mostly cubicles and secretary stations.  Through a door.

The screams behind them sounded muffled for a moment.  Ken remembered that the things at the high school seemed to have trouble with doors.  He hoped that was a problem shared by all of the zombies.

Aaron took the lead, breaking to the left in the hallway the door opened into.  The floor slanted subtly upward, creaking underfoot.  Ken wondered how much stress this piece of the building could take before just folding into itself like a hundred thousand ton house of cards.

The building shuddered.

“They’re inside,” whispered Dorcas.

“Yup,” said Aaron.

“Doors,” said Ken.

“What?” said Aaron.

“They have trouble with doors.”

Then he heard the noise of a door swinging open.  The growl bounced its way into the hall.

“Apparently not anymore,” said Aaron.

“Run!” Dorcas screamed.

56

His feet pounded through the near-dark of the corridor, a place that had no business being here.  And Ken couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t belong, either.  That he had overstayed his welcome in a world that had changed so radically that he no longer understood it.

Not that he ever had.  Not really.  All he had ever been one hundred percent sure of was that Maggie loved him.  And that he loved her and the kids.  So if they were gone… what use sticking around?

He turned a corner.  Felt his depression lessen.  Realized it was that damn screaming.  That growling, that psychic attack.

They’re getting stronger.

That had to explain why they were barreling through the doors, too.  Ken had led the way, pushing through several fire doors in the halls of the dismembered structure, slamming each shut behind them.  It made no difference.  The zombies opened the doors just fine.

They’re getting smarter.

He looked behind him.  Couldn’t see their pursuers.  But he could hear them.  Slavering, growling, too many bodies crammed into too small a space.  But he knew that they wouldn’t be falling over one another like a human mob would do.  They would all know exactly where the others were, would move and adjust to make way when necessary.  Only when there was a need to climb atop their unnatural brothers and sisters – like when they had climbed to reach for Ken and Dorcas on top of the garage outside the homeless shelter – would they step in one another’s path.

Ken pushed himself to run faster.

The hall grew brighter.  Shattered windows ahead.  A way out.

He could see Idaho Street, littered by more refuse.  Something that looked like a plane fuselage.

And another screaming horde of zombies coming right at them.

57

“Ken,” said Aaron.  The cowboy still sounded so matter-of-fact it was creepy.

“I see them,” said Ken.  He did not sound matter-of-fact.

“Where do we go?” said Dorcas.  She was panting, and sounded as panicked as Ken did.  For some reason that made him feel a bit better.

Small consolation not to be the only terrified person when you get torn to pieces.

“Up,” said Aaron.  He jerked his head to the side.

There was a small side branch to the corridor.  A dark sign that said “Exit” in what had probably once been brightly-lit green.  Now, in the darkness, it looked like it was written in frozen ichor.

They ran down the side hall.  Ken hoped they weren’t just running to an elevator – one that was probably still lodged somewhere in the rest of the One Capital Center, a block away.  Or that if they were heading toward a stairwell, that that stairwell was going to be usable: no guarantees the rest of the building’s upper levels would be in as good a shape as the part they had already passed through.

So many things to go wrong.

Just run, Ken.  Worry later.

He ran.

The corridor ended in a bank of elevators.  One of the sets of steel doors was shut, the other featured doors that had been twisted and bent by the massive forces that had sent the building here.

“Shit,” said Dorcas.

“Here,” said Aaron at almost the same moment.  A small door they had already passed.  They had missed it in the near-darkness of this part of the building.

The zombies were behind them.  Ken could hear them in the darkness.  Moving slower, as though searching more carefully in the depths of the structure.

Something creaked.  The building lurched under their feet.  Ken shouted.

The zombies screamed as though in answer.

Lights in the darkness.  Ken realized he was seeing the zombies’ eyes.  They glinted like those of hyenas around a tribal fire.  Hungry.  Lapping up the light and holding it inside.

“Go!” Aaron cried.  He sounded nervous.  Ken did not feel at all happy about that fact.

The three survivors ran through the stairwell door.

58

The hall had been dark.

The stairwell was black.

Ken froze automatically.  As though the lack of visual input was a wall that he had walked into face first.  An immovable object met by a very stoppable force.

Then he heard the noises.  The things.

He reached out.  One hand feeling for a banister, the other for Dorcas.  He found both at the same moment.  “You guys with me?” he asked.

Dorcas said, “Gotcha.”

Aaron grunted.  Ken took that for a yes.

He started up.  He had no way of knowing what lay before him.  He could be marching them straight at a sheer drop-off.  And worse than the sense of physical disorientation was the emotional vertigo.  A few hours ago he was part of the human race; a member of the top link on the food chain.

Now he was a blind grub, running through the torn remnants of humanity’s iron trees, blindly burrowing for shelter from the new apex predators.

He drew Dorcas and Aaron up, up, up.  Climbing – slipping, tripping – up unseen stairs toward an equally dark future.

Below them, the fire door opened.

Snarls.  Growls.  The unspoken imperative to give up, give in, give up, GIVE IN.

Ken kept pulling, kept climbing.

The banister twisted under his hands.  He thought it must have warped in its strange flight through the air.  Then realized it was just the turn at the landing.

The things below began climbing.  He could hear them, but it seemed like they were quieter.  His own labored breathing almost overpowered the noise of the throng pressing into the stairwell behind him and his new friends.

The near silence of the zombies scared him.  Badly.  Things were changing in the world.  And the changes were all for the worse.

One of the zombies coughed.  The sound seemed to be swallowed up by the stairwell.  But not before the others began making the same sound.  It wasn’t a normal cough, not the kind of thing Ken associated with a cold or a bit of dust gone down the windpipe.  It was hacking.  Painful.  It sounded like the things behind them were in the throes of some horrific ordeal.

Dorcas’ hand crushed his knuckles.  He guessed she was trying to keep from screaming.  He knew he was.

He kept moving up.  Step after dark step, the blind literally leading the blind.

The coughing, chewing hack-sound remained below them.  Whatever was happening was keeping the zombies locked in their place.

Then the coughing stopped.

The growling started again.  And maybe it was just Ken’s imagination, but to him the sound was deeper now.  Stronger.

“Faster,” whispered Aaron.

Ken rounded another landing.  Stepped forward.  His foot slammed into something hard and unyielding.  It was his left foot, of course, the pain of the hit mixing with the pain he was already feeling in his left leg.  He almost yelped.  Bit his lip and swallowed the sound.

Dorcas, moving quickly behind him, slammed into his back.  The momentum drove him forward, and then another, softer hit as Aaron hit her and pushed them both into whatever Ken had knocked into.

Ken pushed himself away from the thing.  Felt it with his free hand.  It felt like a file cabinet.  A big one, made of heavy sheet metal or maybe even steel.  Ken pushed it.  It didn’t budge.

“Back,” he whispered.

The growling below was closer.

He hoped that there was a door at the landing they had just passed.

He hoped that they could get to it before the zombies got to them.

59

Ken did not like to race.  It was one of the reasons he enjoyed the martial arts: there was no running.  At least, not to see who could get to the finish line first.  His body type was just a bit on the thick side to be effective as a sprinter.  Not that he was fat, but he didn’t have that long, lithe form that enabled people to knife through a hundred-yard dash in record time.

Now he was running the most important ten feet of his life.  Down stairs, in pitch black, to a finish line that might or might not hold the hoped-for door.  And even if there was a door, what if it was warped in its frame, like the elevator doors had been?  Or what if something was blocking it from the other side?

He ran like Maggie was on the other side of the door – the door that he hoped was there.

He heard the growling, the tramping of more feet than he could count.  His pulse thundered in his ears, but did not take away the sounds of the things coming straight at him.

Forget about them.  Think of Maggie.

She’s dead, you know.

Maggie.  In her bathing suit, like she was in Kauai.

Like she was in your dream.  Dead and pulled to pieces.

He slammed into the wall.  His whole body hit at once, nose and groin and knees and toes.  He groaned.

The growls seemed to orient on the sound.  He felt a hot hand on his arm, a hand slick and wet and lacerated.

A gust of warm air as something moved past him.  He heard a grunt – a reassuringly human sound.  The thud of flesh on flesh.  Then Aaron bellowed, “Get the door open!” from just to Ken’s side.

Down the stairs, in the midst of them.

Ken tried to yank his wits back into place, one hand reaching out to fumble around on cool concrete, the other moving around his face of its own accord, as though he was worried he might find that parts of him had fallen off with the impact.

There was another thud.  A screech that disappeared into nothing.  One of the zombies must have fallen – or been thrown – over the stairwell.  Not that there could be far to fall – the decapitated building only went down to the street level thirty feet below.  But the screech cut off with a wet smack as the thing hit whatever rubble and wreckage served as the non-building’s foundation.

Not that it mattered.  There were probably a hundred – a thousand, ten thousand – more of the things.  A single one falling wouldn’t make a difference to the survivors’ chances.

Ken’s fingers found a seam.  A steal plate that probably covered a locking mechanism.

A doorknob.  His hand closed around it at the same time Dorcas’ did.  They both twisted.  The doorknob rattled…

… but didn’t turn.

“No, no, no!” screamed Dorcas.

Another zombie shrieked and fell.  Aaron was silent, and Ken wondered how he was functioning in the darkness.  How he was fighting.  How long the man could survive.

The cowboy screamed.

60

Dorcas screamed, too, and pulled away from the door.  Her hand got tangled in Ken’s, and that’s how they found out that the door was locked, but not locked shut.  The knob wouldn’t turn, but when she pulled away and her hand knocked into his arm, he pulled back automatically without letting go of the doorknob… and the door just swung open.

He grabbed Dorcas, who was lunging toward Aaron, by the back of her tank top.  Yanked her backward.  She screamed, reaching for the cowboy.

Aaron had his right hand clutched to his chest.  His left circled the neck of a zombie.  The cowboy slammed the beast’s neck into the stairway railing, hard enough that the crunch of the thing’s windpipe collapsing was audible over the roar of the hundred-plus other zombies that were pushing up the stairs.

“Aaron!” Ken called, backpedaling frantically through the open door.

Aaron followed, kicking and punching so fast that Ken almost couldn’t see the movements.  Ken was a decent fighter.  But he wouldn’t have wanted to face off against the old cowboy.

Aaron threw another flurry of punches with his good hand, then turned and threw himself through the fire door.  Ken slammed the door shut, looking around for some way to barricade it.

Something battered at the door from the other side.  Hard enough that Ken bounced a foot off the door before pushing back.  But he couldn’t get the door to meet the jam.  It was a full four inches away from meeting that safety point.

Hands – big and small, light and dark, whole and mangled – curled around the door.  Reaching for him.  He shrank from them, but couldn’t move too far or he would give up the frail leverage that was letting him hold the door this close.

“Help!” he screamed.  The scream came from somewhere deep within, from a place in his soul so dark and profound that it had never before been given to light.  More than panic, more than terror.  It was a lust to hang on, a need to live, to continue.  “Help me, dammit, someone help me!”

Aaron launched himself at the door.  The cowboy’s strength stopped it from opening any further, but didn’t get it closed.  And even if it had, Ken didn’t know what they’d do to keep it closed: the thing was unlocked, and he didn’t see a locking mechanism on this side.

Dorcas was nowhere to be seen.  Ken wondered if “the right thing to do” had finally been to run away.

Aaron’s face was pale.  The old cowboy still held his right hand against his chest.  The fingers of that hand were curled and twisted, broken in too many places to count.  The thumb hung loose, sprung free from its socket and wagging grotesquely with every movement Aaron made.

One of the zombies’ hands snaked out from behind the door and grabbed a hank of Ken’s hair.  He screamed as the thing pulled him toward the edge of the door.  Toward the darkness beyond.

He gritted his teeth and pulled back.  Felt wads of hair separating from his already bruised and bloodied scalp.  But the thing’s hand was too strong, and had too good of a grip on his hair.  It pulled Ken closer.  He couldn’t get away.

He heard the moaning growl of the zombies, only inches away.

The chittering click of teeth, snapping toward him.

Felt hot breath on his skin.

Closed his eyes.

61

“MOVE!”

Ken’s eyes snapped open.  He reacted instinctively, a final surge of adrenaline enabling him to yank his head a few inches to one side.

“Close your eyes!”

Again he acted instantly, conscious thought an interloper that would only have gotten in the way.  His eyes shut again, even as he registered that the shouting voice did not belong to Aaron or to Dorcas.  It sounded young, the voice of a teen or a man in his early twenties.

The world caught fire.

Even through closed eyes, pink blooms of flame burst across Ken’s vision, burnt his retinas and made him feel like he’d just stepped face-first into a laser show at a rock concert.

There was an explosion, then a scream.  Another sparkling fireball, another explosion.

The wet hand that had been pulling at his hair shook suddenly, then let go.  The door fell shut behind him.  Something that sounded like a stampede was happening beyond the steel fire door.

Ken opened his eyes.

It was a kid.  Ken guessed he was eighteen.  Good looking in the way that only the rich can be: well-scrubbed, well-coifed, well-dressed.  A visual triple threat and a danger to any woman within ten years of his age.  Unlike Ken, Dorcas, and Aaron, the kid had somehow avoided getting his clothes trashed.  He looked like he had just happened along in between college classes.  Or during a break at his fashion photo shoot.  As though the impending end of the world was something that probably inconvenienced him, but not to the point that he would leave without doing his hair.

The kid held up three colorful cardboard tubes, each over a foot long and several inches wide.  Blue-gray smoke curled out of their blackened edges.  The pungent smell of gunpowder – almost a perfume compared to the ever-present scent of death that had so consumed the world – pricked Ken’s nostrils.

“My dad always buys too many fireworks on the Fourth of July,” the kid said with a lopsided smile.

The growling beyond the door started again.  So did the horrible, hacking coughing.

The kid’s smile dissipated but didn’t disappear.  “I think we should vamoose,” he said.

62

The kid spun around, revealing a backpack crammed full of lumps that Ken assumed were more fireworks.  The kid ran down the hall, toward a shattered window where Dorcas was waiting.  The older woman looked on the verge of a heart attack.  She must have gone to look for some way to block the door… and found a strange, pyrotechnic guardian angel instead.

Ken pushed away from the door.  He helped Aaron stand as well.  The cowboy nodded thanks, then the two of them ran after the kid.

They joined Dorcas at the window.  It was a hard run: unlike the lower floor, this one had not escaped the destruction of being flung a block over and two hundred feet down.  The floor was uneven, gutted.  It creaked and groaned under Ken’s feet, and at one point Aaron’s right leg fell through completely.  His leg just disappeared up to the knee.

He didn’t make a sound.  But his white face grew several shades paler.

Ken helped him pull himself free.  Hard because he didn’t even dare touch the walls on either side of the corridor.  They looked on the verge of collapsing, and he suddenly felt like he was in some strange above-ground mineshaft that might simply disintegrate around them at any moment.

He helped Aaron up.  The cowboy’s leg came out of the floor, and as it did the entire structure shuddered.  As though Aaron had loosened some hidden keystone that the architects had put just under this particular spot with instructions never never ever to touch it or the entire thing would come down.

He and Aaron both froze.  The rational part of him realized that if three entire stories of a skyscraper were about to come down around you, the last thing you wanted to do was freeze.  But rationality wasn’t always the commanding impetus.  Sometimes instinct ruled.  Sometimes we stood still in the face of danger.  We played dead in the hopes that the destroying angel would pass us by.

The building stopped shifting.

But now Ken thought he heard the rattle of something reaching for the doorknob of the stairway door they had just left behind.  He and Aaron looked at one another.

They ran again.

They reached Dorcas, who was still waiting at the end of the corridor.  The hall turned into an L-intersection, branching to the left, a solid wall hiding a bank of what Ken assumed were offices to the right.

The kid was gone from view, but Ken heard him scrabbling around the side of the broken floor-to-ceiling window.  Ken leaned out and felt his jaw fall open.

Each window of the One Capital Center was taller than a man, and several of them hung together in floor-to-ceiling sheets.  Every six windows, a thick concrete mullion separated the next set of windows.  Most of the windows were gone, or at most holding a few razor shards like angry teeth grimacing at the unfairness of what had happened to this once impervious-seeming structure.

The kid had moved out of the window the hall faced, shimmied onto the outer sill, and then moved right across the outer face of the building, clinging to the muntins that remained – many little more than jagged bits of metal and weatherstripping – and then slipping past the concrete mullion to the next bank of windows.

He showed no inclination to go inside the building.  When he saw Ken gawking at him, he grinned.  He still looked like a cover model for a teen magazine, and Ken suddenly hated him just a little bit.

Irrational, but then, so was the fact that the young guy looked so nice in the middle of disaster.

“Come on,” shouted the kid.  “Safer out here.”

Ken didn’t like it.  But then, he liked the idea of staying in the hall even less.  Especially since he heard the sound of growling behind them.  The things in the stairwell sounded like they had regained their composure.  They were coming.

He looked at Dorcas.  Arm still in a sling.  At Aaron, his good right hand looking like a spider that had been squashed by a steel-toed boot.

“Can you guys make it?” he said.

“We’ll have to,” said Aaron.  His face was still white, but he looked less like he was going to fall over than he had a moment before.

“We stay in here and they get us for sure,” agreed Dorcas.  “Nowhere to go.”

“You first,” said Ken, gesturing for Dorcas to go ahead of him.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

He didn’t have time to argue the finer points of chivalry.  He climbed out the broken window frame.  Glass crunched as he stepped onto the outer sill.  His body seized up automatically as his eyes tried to convince his mind that he was walking out the thirteenth floor of a high rise.

“I’m not that high up,” he said to himself.  Trying to persuade himself that a fall wouldn’t kill him.  The fall out of the school earlier hadn’t killed him, had it?

He looked down.  Searching for a way to convince his recalcitrant body that stepping outside the building was the right thing to do.

He looked down.

And that was a huge mistake.

63

In his flight up the dark stairs, through a disembodied structure that had no right to be there, Ken had forgotten that the zombies following them weren’t the only ones they had to worry about.

There were also the ones that had been coming in through the other side of the building.

Those zombies had come in, had joined with the ones following the survivors.  And Ken had assumed for some reason that that was it.  Done deal.

But he was wrong.  The ones that had joined up with their pursuers were just a small portion of the horde that had come at them from ahead.

This horde numbered at least in the tens of thousands.  And they were all crammed into the street right below Ken’s feet.  Growling and howling in a macabre imitation of a New Year’s celebration at Times Square.  Only instead of waiting for a glowing ball to drop, they were reaching up in the obvious hope that flesh and bone would plummet to their grasp.

And as they had done when he and Dorcas were on the garage, they were swarming on top of one another.  A dark wave of unlife: burying itself, rising a bit, burying itself again, rising still further.

They were easily thirty feet below him.

Only now it was twenty-nine.

Twenty-eight.

And the growl….

Give up.  Give in.  Give up.  Give in.

“Now would be a good time to move,” said the kid.

Ken almost jumped off the side of the building.  The kid had come back, sidling silently to Ken’s side and standing within a few feet of him.  He was holding one-handed to a piece of weatherstripping that looked almost strong enough to hold up a malnourished infant.  Still grinning.

“Just follow me, bud,” said the kid.

And Ken hated him not at all.  Just followed him.

He heard crunches and crackles and knew that either Dorcas or Aaron was close behind.  But he didn’t look back, afraid that if he did he would also see the surging things below.

How close are they, Ken?  Give up….

Just climb.

Twenty feet?  Eighteen?  Give in….

CLIMB!

The kid moved quickly but carefully, and Ken realized his motions were slightly exaggerated: he was showing the others where to grip, where to place their feet.

“What’s your name?” said Ken.  Not an appropriate moment, perhaps, but he didn’t want to think about what he was doing, didn’t want to think about what was below, didn’t want to ponder what might lay ahead.

“Christopher.  Watch out for that glass.”

Ken shifted his hands in time to avoid gashing his palms.

The end of the building was coming up.  He didn’t know what they would do then.

The growls below were close.  Getting closer.

Worse, he heard growls inside the structure.  The zombies inside seemed to have been thrown off by the fact that their prey had disappeared from the building, but how long before one of them spotted the survivors at a window frame?

Aaron grunted.  “I think we got trouble.”

Ken looked at Christopher.  The kid was grinning again.  Or still.  Maybe he hadn’t stopped.  And now Ken was unsure whether he hated the kid or not.  He suspected the teen might be a bit crazy.

Crazy or not, Christopher didn’t seem perturbed by the sound of zombies closing in on them from inside the building, or by the zombies surging toward their feet.  He swung his pack around and unzipped it.

“You trust me?” he said to Ken.

64

Ken felt suddenly ill.  “Do you trust me?” was the kind of question designed to make someone uncomfortable.  Like saying, “I love you” to someone, there were only two possible outcomes: bliss or Titanic-scale wreckage.  And the possibilities for bliss were limited when zombies were coming at you from all sides and from below.

A new set of noises chipped in at the edges of Ken’s already severely fragmented thoughts.  He looked up, unsure if he was trying to zero in on possible new threats or just avoiding the kid’s question.

And saw that the zombies were above them as well.  On the roof.  Leaning over.  Leaning out of the windows of the floor above them.

Some of them leaned too far.  They fell.  Not afraid, still reaching as they fell.  Dorcas screamed as one of the plummeting beasts almost grabbed her tank top on its way past.  Another of the falling creatures actually got a hand on the sill that Aaron stood on, but the cowboy kicked the beast in the face and it, too, fell.

Not far.  The rising, turbulent mass of the creatures on the street was now only about fifteen feet below them.

Give up.  Give in.  Give up.  Give in….

“Do you trust me?” the kid said.

Ken looked at him.  The words, “Hell, no,” sprung to his lips.

And died there.

The kid wasn’t grinning.

Ken nodded.

The grin came back.  “Good.  Then I need you guys to stay right where you are.”

“WHAT?” Ken shrieked.  Then he had to flatten himself against a shard of glass, trying not to impale himself as another zombie threw itself at him from above.  He felt it pass by, felt the small hairs on his neck – the few that hadn’t been burnt, bludgeoned, or beaten into oblivion – blown by the wind of the thing’s passing.

When he pulled back again, the kid was gone.

“Where is he?  Where’s Christopher?”

Neither Aaron nor Dorcas answered.  They were busy dodging the things tossing themselves down at them like grasping, bloody spears.

Ken looked to his left.  The building ended in a corner about twenty feet away.  No idea what was beyond that.

But he couldn’t stay.  He knew that was what the kid – Christopher – wanted.  But staying was suicide.

Zombies below.

Zombies above, throwing themselves down.

Ken thought about going back in the building.  He looked through the shattered glass of the window he stood before.

It looked like it had once been an office.  Maybe an insurance company or a brokerage firm.  Something that used a lot of cubicles, a lot of phones.  Everything was a wreckage of wires and computer pieces and modular foam walls that had been tossed around like the building blocks of an angry child.

The wreckage was the only reason the zombies in the office hadn’t grabbed Ken, Dorcas, and Aaron yet.  As it was, they were only a few feet away.

The zombies growled.

Ken felt something grab him from behind.  Felt something clinging to him, felt a heavy weight hit him like a bludgeon.

His foot slipped.

65

Ken felt something breathing in his ear.

Then he heard Dorcas scream and saw her kick out.  The thing on his back chuffed, not in pain but in something like irritation.  She kicked again.  It fell.

Ken almost fell, too, his body fairly leaping upward as the extra weight left his body.  He lurched forward, not caring that he almost skewered himself on a shard of glass.  Just wanting not to fall to the things below.

Ten feet below.

But not as close as the zombies within the building.  They were only a few feet away.

Reaching for him.  For Dorcas.  For Aaron.

And where was the kid?  Where the hell had Christopher gone?  Had he abandoned them?

It was a tough world – and it had certainly grown tougher in the last hours.  Even in a place as neighborly as Idaho, people didn’t leave their doors unlocked anymore.  People worried.  They didn’t just trust.

But Christopher had asked Ken to trust him.

So did Ken trust him?

Yeah.

The things inside were five feet away.

Ken knew he should run.  Not that there were many places to run.  But he could have edged toward the corner of the building.  Tried to get away.  Tried to flee.

He didn’t.  He stood firm.

He trusted.

66

There was a moment of peace.  A single second - the fraction of an instant between seconds – where the world seemed to pause.  There was no fear, there was no blood and violence.  The zombies throwing themselves from above seemed to pause in midflight, the things cascading over each other in an effort to reach up seemed to stop piling higher.

The monsters that were now only inches away from reaching Ken and his friends seemed to cease all motion.  He could see their teeth bared, the blood caked on so many of their faces, the skin pulled from bare bones on others.

But he felt no fear.  He felt only regret.  Sadness that he wasn’t going to see Maggie, wasn’t going to kiss her one last time.  That he wouldn’t hold Derek, Hope, or Liz.

And then even that was gone.  There was only a strange something that was at once familiar and unknown.

Resignation?

No.

Then, before he could figure out exactly what the feeling was, he heard four words.

“Hold on to something!”

Ken’s hands clenched.  He didn’t even know what they were holding.  But they held on tight.  In the next instant there was a flash so bright it felt like a new sun had been born right in front of him.

The world snapped back into motion.

The feeling that he had been on the verge of understanding was gone.  Disappeared in the brightness.

Boom.

The zombies in the building, the monsters that had a moment before been only inches from grabbing him, screamed in what sounded like rage, loss, anger.

Ken opened his eyes.  Stars and neon Rorschach inkblots swam past his face.  But even through them he could see the zombies.  No longer inches away.  No, they had been decimated.  Incinerated, blasted to pieces.  Some of them – the ones closest to Ken and the others – were still in one piece.  But they were dazed.  Confused.  Skin shredded from bones in awful wounds that would have killed a human and should have killed these things.

They stood.  Probably a dozen of the zombies left within range.  Still more than enough to kill Ken and Dorcas and Aaron ten times over.  Especially since a single bite would finish any of them.

The closest one to Dorcas – a man with a mangled face who wore a bright shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT OUR DAILY SANDWICH SPECIALS” under swaths of blood – reached for her.  Dorcas leaned back, but couldn’t get far because the things above were still flying over the edges of the roof and the fourteenth floor, only the arc of their momentum keeping the creatures out of range.  And Dorcas only had one good hand.  No way for her to hold on, lean away, and fight off the things outside and inside the building.

Sandwich Special grabbed at Dorcas.  Put a bloody hand on her arm.

Ken moved toward her.

And again the voice: “Don’t move!  Just hold on!”

Sandwich Special yanked Dorcas forward, drawing her through the empty hole of the window by her broken arm.  She screamed.  Cried.

Something cracked.

The entire floor of the office beyond the windows turned from a chaotic shambles of blood and equipment into a shifting quicksand of concrete and steel.  The zombie let go of Dorcas, sliding into the hole that had opened up ten feet away.  It slid through and disappeared, followed by the other zombies in the room and covered by equipment and bodies.

Dust puffed out of the rooms, as though Sandwich Special were an overzealous illusionist seeking to obscure his his exit.

The entire building shook.  Not like it had when Aaron went through the floor.  That had been a shudder, a twitch.  This was a determined tremor, a seismic event.

“Come on,” said the voice, the same voice that had warned Ken and the other survivors to hang on.

Ken looked over.  And there was the kid.  There was Christopher.  Grinning again.

His backpack was gone.

The building lurched, and Christopher’s feet came off the sill he stood on.  His smile wavered, but didn’t disappear.  He got his feet back under him and started moving toward the corner of the building again, as though none of what had just happened had been at all unnerving or unusual.

Ken looked over at Dorcas.  She was gaping past him, so at least he wasn’t the only one stunned by what was going on.

Aaron just looked on.  Waiting to start moving.

Another zombie fell from above.  Fell to the horde that was now only about eight feet below them.  Ken felt his lips curl as he saw them, crushing one another to get to the few people above.  Destroying themselves in their single-minded need to kill.

He turned his head to the left.  Started moving.

Time to go.

67

They all stayed as close to the building as they could, trying to be at one with it, even as it shimmied and fractured within.  Ken would have gone inside again if there had been an inside to go to.  But the entirety of the office they faced was gone, slanting away to an anemone-like pile of rebar, wiring, and building materials.

In the darkness of the hole beyond the windows, Ken thought he saw some of the pieces of the pile moving.  Buried bodies, crushed forms that could not be alive but were somehow still animate.

He looked away.  Concentrated on sliding a foot at a time toward the corner.  On ignoring the bodies casting themselves from on high like angels determined to fall to Hell as fast and as hard as possible.

Dorcas shouted.

“You okay?” called Christopher.  He didn’t look back, though.  He was almost at the corner.

“I will be if you move faster,” she snapped.

Christopher made a noise that sounded strangely like a chuckle.  Ken couldn’t be sure – it was such an out of place sound that cognitive dissonance set in and insisted that it couldn’t be laughter or any of its subsets.

The growling below was so close.  Calling them.  Insisting without words that Ken just let go and drop down.  Each handhold became harder to maintain, each time he slid a foot it got a bit tougher to care if the spot he chose was a good one.

Christopher slipped.  Almost went down into the massive tumor below them.  Ken wondered if the kid was still smiling.

He didn’t think so.

The kid pulled himself back up.  And then he was gone, disappeared around the corner of the building.  A moment later, Ken began to move around the corner as well.  It would have been an impossible move under normal circumstances – there were no real hand- or footholds, and the windows on either side were too far apart to simply reach around and grab hold.  But the building was shifting every second now, and the quoin stones on the corner had pulled apart enough to allow easy movement around the edge of the building.

Ken took a step, moving blind.  The corner was actually inverted, jutting into the building and then out again before becoming the adjoining face of the structure.  He couldn’t see Christopher, and had no idea what the kid had planned – if anything.  He hoped there was something good, though, because the things below were close enough to smell.  Blood, sweat.  Voided bowels.  Desperate madness and a hunger that was beyond alien.

He shimmed across the first angle of the corner.  Reached across to the next face of the corner.  Put his left hand in a crack between the huge stones of the building.  Put his left foot between another.

Dorcas started coming into the recess as well.

The building heaved suddenly.  Metal sheared off inside the structure.  Another pitch and roll.  Aaron shouted.

Then pain.  Agonizing, white-hot.

Ken screamed.  He looked at his left hand.

The crack he had wedged his hand into had fallen shut.  The stones had rejoined, lonely lovers too long apart.

He was stuck fast.

And he felt a hand caress his foot.

68

“What is it?  What happened?”

Ken heard the words, but couldn’t answer.  Everything he had, everything he was, was focused on the nova of pain at the end of his left arm.

“What happened?”  Same words, different tone.  The first time it was Dorcas, asking him.  This time it was Aaron, leaning around and asking her.

“He’s caught,” she said.  She kicked down.  Something snarled.

Ken felt something touching the ragged bottom hem of his pant leg.  Didn’t care.

He was whispering.  Holding fast to the stones of the building with his right hand, stuck via his left.  Whispering.

“Give up, give up, give up, fall down, we all fall down.”

Dorcas smacked him.  A quick, almost light slap across the back of the head.  It reminded Ken of all his other aches and pains, made him aware that he hurt all over.

And it was perfect.

He stopped whispering.  Kicked at the thing below him.  Aaron and Dorcas were talking in low tones.  Aaron handed her something.  She passed it to Ken.

A knife.

Ken stared at it.  He didn’t realize what he was supposed to do with it for a moment.

“You’re not gonna die here,” said Dorcas.  “You have a family waiting for you.”

“I can’t,” said Ken.  He looked at the knife; knew that it must have come from the cowboy.  About four inches long, one side a curved razor-edge, the other a serrated saw blade.

“I can’t,” he whispered again.

The hands grabbed his legs.

“You have to,” she said.  “We can’t get by you, so you have to or we’ll all die.”

He took the knife.

69

Ken realized that he wasn’t completely trapped.  He realized the crack hadn’t completely sealed around his hand.  He realized only his left pinky and ring fingers were pinned.    He realized that he couldn’t even feel them.

He realized none of that mattered.  Cutting off a part of your body – any part – was not something the human race was equipped for.

Something scraped at his lacerated legs.

“Move it, boy,” said Aaron.  The cowboy sounded composed as always, but Ken heard terror seeping in around the edges of the calm tones.

He leaned into the wall.  He wiggled the knife blade between the two stones that had clamped him in place.  He couldn’t just take a swing at himself – the angle was bad, there was no way he’d do it right.  He’d end up bleeding to death and still be pinned there on the side of the wall.

Instead, he pushed the knife blade under his fingers.  Using the knife hilt as a fulcrum and the blade as a bar, he levered the knife upward just behind the point where the fingers disappeared.

The pain bit him hard and deep.  He screamed.  Leaned down harder on the knife.  He couldn’t even saw.  Just had to use his body weight to drive the knife upward, parting flesh and tendon and bone a millimeter at a time.

Warmth trickled out of the gap between the stones.  The things below seemed to delight in the life raining on them.  They raked at his legs.  He had to stop, his fingers half-severed, and step to higher footholds.

Three shadows fell from above.  Dorcas screamed.  She fell back but Aaron grabbed her and managed somehow to yank her back to safety.  They both climbed a bit higher.

Ken leaned on the knife again.

The last bits of tissue separated.  The knife blade flew upward as resistance disappeared, and the knuckles of Ken’s right hand scraped against the stone below as the hilt went down.

He realized at that instant that his wedding ring was still attached to his dismembered finger.  The gold circle crushed between stones.  He would never see it again.  That fact hurt almost as badly as the physical pain.

Then he felt himself falling.  He let go of the knife so he could grab onto the wall.  His entire soul ached at the idea of putting his right hand – his remaining good hand – in another gap, but he had no choice.

He pushed his bleeding left hand against his chest.  He felt the pain, but it was cloaked, like a fire under a blanket.  It was there, it would consume the blanket and be all the brighter for it in a moment.  But for now it was only a hint of itself.

Ken moved quickly.  He didn’t know how long he would be able to keep climbing.

He moved across the rest of the span of the inverted corner.  He reached around to the adjoining face of the building.  He could hear Dorcas and Aaron, grunting and shouting almost nonstop now as they fought off the waxing tide of zombies that were reaching for them.

Ken pulled himself around the corner.

70

The growling fell away the second Ken turned the corner.

It was still there, but so much less.  The weight of the sound, of the call to lay down and die or become one with the horde, fell off Ken’s shoulders and suddenly he felt like he could get through this.  The fact that he was in a very real sense less than he had been a moment ago was something to be considered and dealt with… but it could be dealt with.

He also realized that the scrabbling, grabbing hands that had been reaching for him an instant before were no longer doing so.  His legs hurt, and it seemed likely they always would, but the pain was less an immediate thing.  More a memory than a now.  Something that had receded into the background wall of noise, not a tidal wave but merely storm surf crashing nearby.

Ken looked down.  This face of the One Capital Center building rested on the rubble that had once been the northeast side of this portion of Idaho Street.  The mountain of debris was covered in jagged forests of rebar and concrete, glittering glasswork shrubberies.  The zombies crowded behind Ken, but they clearly couldn’t climb it.  At least, not as fast as they had climbed each other and the smoother sides of the decapitated skyscraper.

Nor could the zombies above reach them: the ones that threw themselves off the roof or the floor above were impaled on rebar, or shattered on concrete pieces, or simply fell brokenly down the mountain that had once been a monument to human industry.  A few stayed close, but they seemed hurt badly enough that they couldn’t move quickly, couldn’t grab at their prey or bite them.

A reprieve.

“Come on!”

Ken looked over and saw Christopher, waiting about twenty feet down the side of the building.  He was holding tight to a mullion, pulled in close so as not to be grabbed by any of the falling creatures.  But he was still grinning.  Just a walk in the park.

Ken pulled himself toward the kid.  The building kept shaking, and he wondered what came next.  They couldn’t keep going around the skyscraper indefinitely – even if there hadn’t been zombies on the front and back, he didn’t think the thing was going to last much longer.  Especially not if more and more zombies were climbing into the stressed structure, which seemed likely given their single-minded pursuit of anything human.

It struck him that he had started to think of himself as human, and them as something else.  Not simply human and once-human, but human and other.  Human and alien.  Human and less.

He slid over the last few feet to Christopher.  The numbness in his left hand was starting to recede, that blanket starting to be consumed by the underlying pain.

“What now?” he asked.  He heard the muffled sounds of Dorcas and Aaron behind him.  Realized with macabre amusement that all three of them were operating one-handed.  Only Christopher looked fine, like he had rolled out of bed, gotten ready for the day, and then decided to hang on the side of a beheaded skyscraper rather than go to the mall or become a movie star.

Christopher looked up.  Another zombie fell, shrieking, and just missed pulling the kid over the slope of the rubble and glass mountain.

“You kinda gotta time this right,” he said.  “And I can’t really come back to show you twice, so be careful, okay?”

A zombie flew past them.  Rolled over the piles of glass and steel.  Impaled itself on a long spike of rebar, the metal going through its face and out the back of its skull.  It didn’t die, just as the other zombies that Ken had seen suffer major head trauma had failed to expire.  That viscous pink fluid spurted, and the zombie began screaming and dancing a strange dance on the side of the mountain, madness on chaos.

Then the zombie did something new.  The rebar spike entered its face through its cheek, emerging just above the thing’s hairline in back.  It couldn’t get off, but it stopped shrieking and twitching.  Its jaw opened, dropping down while its upper head remained pinned in place by the rebar.

It coughed, the same coughing that Ken had heard in the dark stairwell minutes before.  A strange noise, one that sounded like pieces of gravel were grinding together in the zombie’s throat.

The thing vomited, expelling ropy strands of bile.  Some of the fluid splashed against the concrete that held the rebar in place, and on the rebar itself.  Black smoke poured upward from the concrete and steel, and even from this distance Ken could hear the acid hiss of materials being broken down.

“Good God,” said Dorcas.

They were all transfixed by the sight for a moment.  But only a moment.  Another zombie pitched itself off the top of the building, sliding away to oblivion – but only after nearly grabbing Aaron on the way down.

“Time to skedaddle,” said Christopher, tearing his eyes away from the zombie.  Its flesh was now smoking, whatever acid it had expelled eating away at its own skin and bone as it screamed.

“Watch close,” said the kid.  “Remember: no second chances.”

And he jumped off the side of the building.

71

At first Ken thought Christopher had just chosen an outrageously extravagant way to commit suicide: rather than face the end of the world, he’d find a few struggling survivors, con them by pretending he could save them from a conveniently placed pair of zombie hordes, blow up half a building to do so, then convince them to throw themselves into the equivalent of a thirty foot tall pile of knives and broken glass.

In the next moment Ken changed his mind.  The kid wasn’t a suicide, he was a magician.  Christopher slid down the mountain about seven feet, narrowly missing hitting the same jutting rebar that had skewered the still-jittering, still-melting zombie… and then he disappeared.

“What the…?” said Dorcas.

Christopher’s head popped into view.  It seemed like it just appeared out of nowhere, the world’s largest groundhog taking stock of the apocalyptic winter the world had spun itself into.  “Come on!” he shouted.

Ken shimmied over a few feet.  Moved quickly.  He didn’t give himself a lot of time to think about what he was doing.

When he was a senior, he and some high school friends had found a pair of thick pads that the wrestling team left out.  They dared each other to greater and greater gymnastic attempts.  One of Ken’s buddies bet him a crisp ten-dollar bill that he couldn’t do a backflip.

Ken stood on the pad.  Flipped.  Earned himself ten bucks.

Another friend asked him to do it again.  Awestruck and disbelieving at Ken’s athletic prowess.

Ken, more than a little surprised himself, stood on the mat.  But he wasn’t worried – he’d just done it five seconds before, so no big deal, right?

And not only did he fail to land the backflip, this time he was completely incapable of even moving.  The other guys jeered him about it, riding him mercilessly about his complete lack of balls for most of the year, apparently forgetting that he had knocked their socks off moments before.

Ken couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.  Couldn’t figure out why he could do it the first time, the time he didn’t know what he was doing, but not the second time, when he did.

It wasn’t until reading about World War II landing invasions in college that he realized what had happened.  Reading about them, reading how the first wave guys weren’t the bravest: it was the second wave soldiers.  The soldiers who knew what was going to happen.  What waited.  The enemy, the bullets, the death.

His body and mind had realized what could happen.  That he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and could have broken his neck.  He got lucky once, but they weren’t about to let him risk it again.

Sometimes reckless action was the best way to proceed.  Sometimes it was the only way things could possibly work out.

Ken jumped.

He realized he hadn’t bothered looking up, and hoped none of the rooftop zombies had chosen that moment to come lurching down after him.

Reckless action saved him.  He hit the concrete mountain untouched.  His feet slipped in dust and pulverized concrete.  They went out from under him and he slid headfirst toward Christopher’s still-waiting head.

He passed the spiked zombie.  It seemed to be wilting.  The black acid it had vomited had melted most of its front, and Ken’s nose twitched as something that smelled like vinegar seared his nostrils.

He looked back at Christopher.  At the kid’s grinning, disembodied-looking head.

The head disappeared.

A moment later, Ken did, too.

72

Ken fell into strong arms, and immediately lashed out.  He knew it was zombies.  Because what else could it be?  What other thing would there be in this place, in this new earth, that would hold him?

“Easy, man.”

The arms righted him.  Held him until his feet found purchase on solid ground.  Then shoved him away.  Ken wheeled his arms as something dark slid between him and the silhouette he recognized as belonging to Christopher.  He heard Dorcas hiss as the kid caught her as well, probably knocking her broken arm painfully.

Aaron fell down into their hidey-space a moment later, not needing Christopher to steady him but landing gracefully as a cat with the barest of sounds as his cowboy boots hit the dusty material underfoot.

“Where are we?” Ken said.

Christopher didn’t answer right away.  He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief that he handed to Ken, gesturing to him to wrap his hand.  Ken did, grimacing as the pain of his missing fingers – both of which were still spitting blood out of stubs that ended just past his knuckles – hit him anew.

He also thought it strange that a kid this age should have a pocket handkerchief.  Even before the world came tumbling down, that would have been weird.

Aaron reached over and tied a quick and efficient field bandage around Ken’s hand, knotting the handkerchief so tightly it ached.  Ken tried not to groan.  Mostly because Aaron didn’t make a sound about his own mangled fingers, using his one good hand and his teeth to tie the handkerchief and moving so quickly it seemed he had been born doing so.

“We’ll have to deal with this soon,” said Aaron, looking at the already-reddening fabric on Ken’s hand.

“Sure, we’ll just stop at St. Luke’s on the way downtown,” said Ken.  He meant it as a joke.  It came out thin and pallid, almost hopeless-sounding.

Aaron nodded as though taking Ken’s statement seriously.  And Ken suspected that if anyone could find a working hospital in this mess of a world, it might be the cowboy.

“Come on,” said Christopher.  He pulled a small flashlight out of his back pocket and started leading Ken and the others into a narrow passageway.  On all sides were bits of cement, metal, glass, wood.  Everyday life reduced to formless nothing.  Reality crushed by forces it had been neither designed nor prepared to meet.

“I saw some people come out of this hole a few hours ago, so I explored it,” said Christopher.  For a moment Ken didn’t understand what the kid was saying, then he realized he was responding to Ken’s earlier question regarding where they were.

“Why would you do that?” said Dorcas.  She sounded winded, but Ken was amazed at the woman’s stamina.

“Why not?”  Ken didn’t have to see Christopher’s face to know the kid was smiling.  “Not much else to do, other than stay alive.”

Ken didn’t know whether he was hearing sublime wisdom or utter stupidity.  On the one hand, it sounded like Christopher was handling the collapse of humanity better than anyone here.  On the other hand, Ken thought he would have found something better to do than just go exploring.  Hell, he was doing something better.

“What happened to the people?” asked Dorcas.

“Some of the creeps got ‘em.”

“The what?”

“The things.”

“So you went in to explore?”  Incredulity spiked Dorcas’ voice.

Christopher didn’t sound offended when he replied.  “Sure.  Lucky for you I was doing it, too.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted you guys getting into trouble and wouldn’t have been able to do my Knight in Shining Armor act.”

“You were all alone?  Where’s your family?” said Ken.  He wanted to slap himself as soon as he said it.  It was the kind of thing you asked about before.  Not now.

Christopher sighed.  “Lucky us, we were all together when it happened.  Dad killed Mom, she took him down as she died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dorcas.

Christopher’s shoulders bounced up and down.  “I think they’d been wanting to do it for a while.  The only reason we were together was for a photo op.  The marriage was mostly for electoral purposes, you know?”

Behind Ken, Aaron chuckled.  “Thought I recognized you.  Your Elgin’s kid.”

“Guilty as charged.”

Ken kept following the kid – the young man, he corrected; he now knew that “the kid” was in fact twenty-two years old – but his footsteps stuttered a bit.

“You’re Bud Elgin’s son?  Governor Elgin?”

Christopher didn’t answer.  He clicked off his light, but Ken could still see enough to make his way through the fissure in the ruined building.  Light clawed at them from somewhere ahead.

There was a huge rumble, then a thud that shook Ken’s teeth in his jaw.  He fell into the side of the narrow passage, leaning against what looked like a desktop that had been thrown sideways and embedded in a wall of gravel.  He kept his wounded hand buried against his chest, but even the vibrations of the collapse that made it through to his absent fingers wrung a cry from him.

He looked back at Dorcas and Aaron.  Aaron had his feet planted wide, his mangled hand clutched to his chest but otherwise looking fine.  Dorcas had fallen down.

“I think we left that building just in time,” said Aaron as he helped Dorcas to her feet.  Her face tautened, but Aaron just looked like he was providing basic information: it’s eighty degrees out, today’s a Tuesday, and… oh, yes, the world’s ending and the building we were in just collapsed.

Ken turned back to Christopher.  The young man was making his way toward the light.  “I’m not the Governor’s son,” he said.  “There is no governor.  In case you hadn’t noticed, the United States disappeared a few hours ago.”

73

“Sorry about leaving you guys on the side up there, but I saw the floor looked like it was collapsing, and figured if you were hanging out there as bait none of the creeps would notice me sneaking in and dropping off a care package.”

Ken focused on Christopher.  The young man walked effortlessly, as though pulling himself through a wrecked passage in the middle of a collapsed building was something he did every day.  Ken kept slipping and sliding in dust and wreckage.  He could hear Dorcas doing the same behind him, and even Aaron cursed under his breath every once in a while.

“You meant for that to happen?” said Dorcas, breath huffing out between the words.  “How’d you learn to blow up buildings?”

Christopher laughed sheepishly.  “I didn’t mean that to happen.  I figured I’d knock a hole in the floor, knock back the creeps –”

“Zombies,” said Ken without thinking.

“Huh?” said Christopher, then nodded almost immediately.  “Yeah, they are kind of zombie-esque, I guess.  Anyway, the building coming down was definitely outside the scope of my plans.”  He chuckled.  “Still, dream big, right?”

Ken could see what he assumed to be their exit ahead: a crack that seemed like it was hanging in gray space.  A moment later he followed Christopher out a rift in the side of the ruined, sagging building.  His fingers throbbed – strange, because they weren’t there.  Stranger still, he could feel his wedding ring, even though it was clamped around his dismembered finger and wedged between stones in a destroyed building far behind him.  The ring wasn’t touching him, but it felt too tight.  It hurt.  A lot.

His wedding ring had never bothered him before.  Not since the first moment that Maggie slipped it on his finger.  He always loved wearing it.  But now it hurt.

He hoped that wasn’t an omen.

The passageway exited at a rickety metal stairwell midway up the slumped over pile of rubble and junk that had been a fully functioning building only a few hours before.  Ken couldn’t tell if it the stairwell was a fire escape or simply metal stairs to the second level businesses.  It was bent and twisted, a blasted mockery of itself.  Black metal peeked out from a heavy layer of gray dust and dark soot that coated this side of the structure.

Ken recognized this area.  They were facing south on 9th Street.  He didn’t know how that was possible, since he was sure they had been a block north of here.  Either the rubble they had climbed through had covered several blocks, or the top part of the One Capital Center building through which they had escaped had lain at a strange angle, so when they jumped off of it they were on a different block than he had calculated.

Either way… he looked to his right.  And there it was.  The Wells Fargo Center.

“So,” said Christopher, reaching out a hand to help Dorcas onto the stairwell landing, “do you guys have a plan or – hey!”

Ken barely heard the last.  Barely heard the others shouting for him to stop.  All he could see was the building where his family had been when this happened.  All he could hear was his wife calling him in his mind, his children crying out, screaming for Daddy.

He forgot everything but his family.  Forgot the zombies, forgot the pain in his phantom fingers and in the rest of his body.  He forgot his new friends.

He ran down the stairs and was on the street in the dust and smoke in seconds.  The others were racing after him, and he heard Christopher saying, “What’s going on?  What’d I miss?” over and over.

The street was covered in debris and blood and bodies.  But the bodies were of the normally horrific variety.  None of them were moving, they were dead and dead to stay – at least, until the universe flipped on its axis again and once more rewrote the rules of mortality.

No zombies.  There had been tens of thousands crowding up against the head of the One Capital Center building.  Where were they now?

It didn’t matter.  Maybe the shattering of the building had scared them off, maybe they had found new prey, maybe they were late for a mass hairdresser’s appointment.  Ken didn’t care.  All that he cared about was the clear sightline between him and the Wells Fargo Center.

It was a little more than a block away.  It took him less than a minute to run it.  The smoke grew thicker as he approached, and he remembered what seemed a lifetime ago, seeing something explode at the base of the huge crane next to the Wells Fargo building, seeing the crane tilt sideways against the structure.  He looked up and saw the massive crane, almost at the corner of the building, leaning at an angle against the northeast face.

He ran below it.  He could hear the metal creaking far above him.

Below him, he heard something like dead leaves.  He looked down and saw a thick blanket of insects.  All dead.  Not bees, not what had attacked him and Dorcas before.  These looked like millions upon millions of ants.

He ran over the dead bugs.  He did not slip.  Nor did he much care what had killed them.  He was too close to the end of his search to care.

The Wells Fargo Center was shaped like a right triangle, and at the square of it there was an entrance, a bank of glass doors.  The middle two were revolving doors, and both of them were grotesquely jammed shut, dead bodies tangled within them like clots in the building’s ventricles.

On either side of the revolving doors were simple hinged doors.  One of them was whole, the other had been knocked out and was only a metal frame holding nothing but air.

Ken ran for the empty door.  He didn’t care at that moment what dangers might lay beyond that dark hole.  Only that his family could be there.  Must be there.

Sometimes, reckless action was the only available substitute for hope.

74

The Wells Fargo Center was one of Boise’s largest buildings.  Wedge-shaped, eleven stories tall, hundreds of offices.  Ken had no thought of what to do beyond going to the Wells Fargo branch office that he knew was in the far corner of the first floor.

He ran into the lobby, trying hard to convince himself that he was running this fast because he was about to find his family.  Trying hard to believe they had a chance at life.  Trying hard to believe it was excitement and not pure panic that was driving his heart against his ribs in machine-gun bursts.

Failing in all of those attempts.

Something buzzed.  The sound reminded him of the bees that had died as one while he and Dorcas cowered in the car outside the CPA’s office.  He dropped down, almost going to hands and knees as though his body were determined to burrow right through the floor if necessary to get away from another cloud of the things.

It was not bees.  It was an elevator.  The doors slid halfway shut with a tired whirr before stopping against the body of a man laying facedown half in and half out of the elevator.

It registered on Ken that there was still power in the building.  How much longer that would last, he had no way of knowing.  The grid was failing in huge swathes, that much was clear.  And equally clear was that Idaho Power was not going to be sending out teams to deal with power failures anytime soon.  Perhaps ever.  Power fled from an area was power likely gone forever.

He heard feet behind him.  The others.  They caught up to him now, easy enough since he was no longer moving.  Just standing.  Just staring.

Not at the man.

Not at the elevator, opening and closing and opening and closing with the restless action of an ocean tide.

Not at the other bodies that lay every few feet throughout the lobby and hall.  Not even at the ones who had been pulled viciously apart and whose innards painted the walls like a grotesque mockery of Christmas garlanding.

“Ken?”  Dorcas’ voice was soft.  She sounded worried.  “What is it?”

Ken didn’t answer.  He just walked to the elevator.  Stopped in front of it.

Knelt down.

75

Ken was very much of the opinion that mommies and daddies served very different purposes, and nowhere was that more evident than when he and Maggie went to Babies “R” Us looking for something for one of the kids.  It didn’t matter if it was a pacifier or a crib: Ken looked for the cheapest one.  Maggie looked for the one that had the highest safety ratings, preferably achieved while the product was submerged in lit napalm in the middle of a nuclear reactor that was suffering a core meltdown.

They usually came down somewhere in the middle.  Ken would remind Maggie that he didn’t have the money to purchase the blanket that could also be used as a parachute in case of forced landings during supersonic flight, and Maggie would remind Ken that children were more important than things like having a nice TV or what the neighbors thought of their car.  Ken would shift his budget priorities, and Maggie would eventually admit that having exceptionally-protected children wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t have money for food while sitting in the middle of a crib equipped with changing table attachment and capable of warding off evil curses.

The stroller Ken was kneeling beside, the one only inches from the bloody hands of the dead man wedged half in the elevator, had been the subject of a particularly lengthy compromise session.  The school district had just informed Ken and the other teachers that budget freezes would keep any raises “at current levels” (meaning nonexistent) for the next two years, and he thought that baby Liz might just have to make do with being Velcroed to a skateboard or something equally cost-effective.

Maggie did not care for that concept.

They argued.  Divorce was out of the question – it was never an option, not ever – but he thought a few nights on the couch loomed large in his future.

Eventually, Ken caved in.  Because he loved Maggie.  Because he recognized that, yes, the stroller was going to be used for years and should be a good one.  Because he hated sleeping on their second-hand couch.

The stroller became the newest, nicest thing they owned.

Of course, that didn’t last long.  Babies had a way of casually destroying things.  They had a lot in common with earthquakes and rabid dogs that way.  It wasn’t long before the once-pristine light-green body and plaid seat became blotchy and stained.  Grimy beyond recovery, no matter how much Maggie washed and wiped.

Ken knew every spot and stain.  He knew where many had come from, and thought that was an indicator he was a good dad.  He cared enough to be there for the spills, to try to help with the cleanup.  Even when he wasn’t there, he noticed.  He asked about the stories, he found out what had happened.  He wanted to know.

But now… he didn’t know if knowing would be good for him.  The old stains were still there, were still familiar.  But there was one more: a large, bloody handprint across the back of the stroller’s chair.

Right where two-year-old Liz’s head would have rested.

76

Keep it together.

Liz was the first baby he was able to enjoy.  With Derek he was too terrified about screwing it all up to properly revel in the experience of being a new father.  With Hope he was terrified anew – already projecting forward to her teen years and wondering if he was equipped to deal with the contradictions inherent in protecting a Princess and teaching a girl to be her own strong woman.

He finally settled in and learned to have fun with Liz.  With the little girl who smiled so wide.  Who growled and jumped on his back every chance she got.  Who sat and watched cartoons in a little chair he made her for her first birthday.  Who fell asleep in his arms the way none of the others had ever done.

And there was a bloody print where her head had been.

Keep it together, Ken.

Blood.

Keep it together.

That’s a lot of blood.

Keep it –

They’re dead.

No.

Dead.

Not yet.

The baby, the kids.

You don’t know –

Maggie.

NOT UNTIL YOU SEE THEIR BODIES.

He realized he was rocking back and forth, his arms clasped tight around each other.  Dorcas’ hand was on his shoulder.

“We should go,” she said.  Her voice was soft.

Ken nodded.  He looked at the tray that snapped into place across Liz’s lap.  There were some Goldfish crackers in the cup holder.  Liz always tossed her sippy cups over when Maggie put them in the cup holder, so that nook had become an impromptu Goldfish sanctuary.

The orange crackers were flecked with blood as well.

Ken stood.

Dorcas’ hand was still on his shoulder.  Aaron and Christopher waited a few paces away.  They both looked at their feet, like there might be comfort somewhere on the blood-streaked floor, if only they could find it.

The elevator whirred.  Closing on the dead man.  Opening again.

Whump.  Whirrrr.  Whump.  Whirrrr.  Whump.

Ken looked at the corpse.

Dorcas moved away, as though giving him space to commune with the dead – both the ones whose bodies were present and the ones whose bodies were not.

Ken stood still and silent for a long moment.  Then his face knotted, becoming a tight mass of confusion.

He took a step.

“Where you going?” said Christopher.

A moment later, Dorcas said, “Ken?”

Ken didn’t answer either of them.  He didn’t dare.  He just kept walking.

77

Ken felt like if he spoke, if he did anything other than breathe, then it would fall apart.  It would disappear and be gone.  Just a vivid dream dashed upon waking into the nightmare of his new reality.

So he ignored the others.  Just kept his eyes locked on what he had seen, kept his heart locked on hope, and kept his mind locked away from the impossibility of what he was hoping for.

Whump.  Whirrrr.  Whump.  Whirrrr.  Whump.

If the elevator doors had been closed, he wouldn’t have seen it.

If the elevator light had been extinguished, the interior dark, he wouldn’t have seen it.

If he hadn’t been kneeling next to the stroller, he wouldn’t have seen it.

If, if, if….

But he did.  He did see it.

Just beyond the dead man’s legs, trailing limply into the elevator, there was a small pile of color on the brown floor.

Goldfish crackers.

That might not have been enough.  Might not have been enough to spur Ken to movement.  They could have come from anywhere, after all.  Or they could have been flung there after the zombies… did what they would have done to his baby.

But next to the goldfish was another item.  A sippy cup.  Purple and pink.

And above both, on the mirrored back of the elevator, someone had written something.  The lettering was tan, a color he recognized as well: Maggie’s lipstick.

“Ken: 9th Fl.”

78

Ken ran the last two feet, leaping over the dead man.

“Ken!”  Dorcas joined him in the elevator.  “What are you doing?”

“They’re alive.”  Ken leaned over, barely noticing how badly his back hurt, not even registering his missing fingers, and grabbed the dead man’s legs.  He shoved them out of the elevator.  Not far enough.  He began muscling the dead weight out of the cab.

Aaron stood just outside the elevator.  He looked at the mirror in the back of the cab and it seemed to Ken like the man’s face slackened.  Not in hope, but in sympathy.

“Going up is a bad idea,” he said.  “Nowhere to retreat to if the things come again.”

“Seriously,” said Christopher, taking up a position behind the older man.  “We should get outta here.”

Ken didn’t stop moving.  “I can’t ask you to come with me.  You’ve all saved me, and I can never repay you.”  He kicked the dead man’s trailing foot out of the track of the elevator’s doors.  “But I have to go.”

“Bad idea,” said Aaron.

“Yeah,” said Christopher.

They both stepped in.

Dorcas pressed the round circle with a “9” in the center.

The doors shut.

The elevator started to rise.

With it, questions rose in Ken’s mind.  What was happening?  What were these things, that had destroyed almost everyone and everything humanity held dear in less than a day?  Why did they stop moving and breathe in time, why were the times they did so decreasing, and what would happen when that “countdown” reached zero?  What had killed all the insects?  How come one had vomited acid?

What would he find when he reached the ninth floor?

Ken looked at the other survivors.  At Christopher, to whom he had said less than a hundred words.  At Aaron, who had saved Ken’s life but who remained a complete enigma.  At Dorcas.

She caught his gaze.  Raised her shoulders as though unsure of why they were coming, and said, “It’s still the right thing to do.”

Ken didn’t know if he would find his family when the doors opened.

But he knew he had family here with him.

END OF BOOK ONE

THE SAGA CONTINUES IN BOOK TWO

THE COLONY: RENEGADES

Author’s Note

I like zombie books.  But almost all of them move from a place of despair – not merely that zombies exist (as if that weren’t bad enough), but that humans are so rotten that the zombies are probably the least terrible thing to deal with anyway.

I wanted to do something different.  Something that had never been done before.  One thing I wanted was to show a real collapse – a lot of books about apocalyptic events seem to have a few bad things happen, then give their characters a few days or weeks off to recuperate.  I am a mean person.  I wanted my characters to twist in the wind, to bang and batter and bruise them to the point of physical, mental, and emotional destruction.

More than that, though, I wanted to write a hopeful zombie story.  A story about humanity running into something terrible… and banding together.  Rising above the terror and becoming something more than they once had been.

Horror is at its best when it shows us not just the monsters among us, but the angels as well.

This meant that the bad guys – the zombies – would have to be truly terrible, beyond anything ever seen in a zombie story before.  So I started putting together my own zombie mythology.  Then, when I had an evil threatening enough to prove my thesis – that humanity is not only able to save itself against nearly infinite evil, but noble and good enough to actually merit salvation – I began writing.

I outline most of my books.  I do so often enough that I can usually tell how long it will get to take from point A to point B, and from there through to Z.

In the case of The Colony, I was in for a surprise: getting from point A almost to point B took over 200 pages.  We’ve met some of our main characters – some of the people whose stories I would like to tell, who have survived partly by luck (you have to be lucky to survive any war), but partly by the fact that they are smart and tough and good – but not all.  We’ve met some of the bad guys, but not all.  We haven’t scratched the surface of the story.

I soon realized that the story I wanted to tell might end up hitting half a million words.  This meant I could either release it all at once, or do a series of shorter books.  Many of my fans wanted the longer version, but a few things mitigated against this:

1)  A lot of my other fans email me regularly, asking when my next book will be out.  Responding “a few years… maybe?” seemed like a bad answer.

2)  At a half million words, I was worried that the weight – even the weight of electrons on a Kindle or a tablet device – might crush unwary readers who fell asleep while reading.

3)  I am a fairly successful novelist, but my name is not King, Koontz, or Rowling.  So waiting a caboodle of time between books meant an increased likelihood of explaining to my children that we would be cutting back on certain things, like Armani toilet paper and unicorn rides and food.

4)  Most important, my wife told me to do it this way.  My wife is very smart.  She’s also nice and takes care of me and the kids and is scorching hot.  Not a woman I care to go against if I can avoid it.

So you’re getting this.  If you don’t like cliffhangers, blame my wife.

But I do want to reassure you about a few things:

First of all, if you’re new to my books, I do know how to finish a story (ha!).  So if you love the tone, but hunger for a more complete story, pick up a copy of Strangers or The Haunted or Apparition or… well, any of my other books.

Second, the day this comes out, I will already be hard at work on Vol. II of The Colony: Renegades.  There are a lot of nifty things in store.  In addition to finding out whether Ken’s family is waiting for him on the ninth floor, we’re also going to find out what happens when you have a bunch of severely injured people with no medical care.  Who Aaron is and how he survived in that stairwell is going to be explained (a bit).  The issue of where Christopher learned how to blow up buildings is going to be discussed.  We’ll get to know Dorcas better, and find out some of her secrets.

And, of course, the zombies.  There is a reason for their existence, and eventually we’ll find out what it is.

But that’s all assuming the series sells well.  ‘Cause there’s that whole “food for the kids” thing.

So if you want to find out how this all ends, please spread the word about The Colony.  Click that “Give as Gift” button on Amazon and send a copy to your zombie-loving friends… and your zombie-hating enemies.  If you like it, leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads.  The more you buy, the faster I can finish.  Promise.

So enjoy.  Tell everyone.  Start a cult about it and hand out literature and flowers at the airport.

And keep on reading….

- Michaelbrent Collings

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michaelbrent Collings is an award-winning screenwriter and novelist.  He has written numerous bestselling horror, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy novels, including The Colony Saga, Strangers, Darkbound, Apparition, The Haunted, Hooked: A True Faerie Tale, and the bestselling YA series The Billy Saga.  Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/MichaelbrentCollings or on Twitter @mbcollings.

And if you liked this book, please leave a review on your favorite book review site… and tell your friends!

Other Novels By Michaelbrent Collings

THE COLONY: GENESIS (The Colony, Vol. 1)

THE COLONY: RENEGADES (The Colony, Vol. 2)

THE COLONY: DESCENT (The Colony, Vol. 3)

THE COLONY OMNIBUS

STRANGERS

DARKBOUND

THE HAUNTED

APPARITION

THE LOON

MR. GRAY (aka THE MERIDIANS)

RUN

HOOKED: A TRUE FAERIE TALE

RISING FEARS

BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS (Book One of The Billy Saga)

BILLY: SEEKER OF POWERS (Book Two of The Billy Saga)

Table of Contents

- 1. 1
- 2. 4
- 3. 7
- 4. 10
- 5. 13
- 6. 18
- 7. 21
- 8. 25
- 9. 28
- 10. 30
- 11. 34
- 12. 38
- 13. 41
- 14. 44
- 15. 48
- 16. 50
- 17. 52
- 18. 55
- 19. 58
- 20. 60
- 21. 62
- 22. 66
- 23. 70
- 24. 74
- 25. 77
- 26. 82
- 27. 87
- 28. 89
- 29. 91
- 30. 93
- 31. 95
- 32. 97
- 33. 99
- 34. 103
- 35. 107
- 36. 110
- 37. 114
- 38. 117
- 39. 118
- 40. 121
- 41. 124
- 42. 129
- 43. 131
- 44. 134
- 45. 137
- 46. 139
- 47. 141
- 48. 144
- 49. 146
- 50. 149