Descent
Author: Michaelbrent Collings
Date: 2013-11-11 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Zombies; Science Fiction; Post Apocalyptic; Thriller
Description: The dead will rise and the living will fall.The zombies have trapped them. Just a small band of survivors, alone in a building surrounded by hordes.Ken's family is shattered. His wife doesn't trust him. His son is gone. And his daughters... are changing.The survivors want to fight. To live. But some of them will not survive. Some will die - or worse. And the rest will find that the only way out... is through a whole new set of terrors.

Copyright © 2013 by Michaelbrent Collings

All rights reserved.

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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

THE COLONY: RENEGADES (The Colony, Vol. 2)

"Fast pace in your face, the action doesn’t stop….  This bestselling author has done it again…. I didn’t want the book to end…." – Horror Novel Reviews

THE COLONY: GENESIS (The Colony, Vol. 1)

"Once again Michaelbrent delivers a smashing novel with The Colony: Genesis, the first book in a proposed new series.  From start to finish, this novel is a fresh look into the world of apocalyptic proportions, brought on by anyone's guess.... the action and intrigue throughout is almost non-stop.  I read it in less than two days, and I'm glad I did." – Horror Drive-In

"5 out of 5 stars.... I couldn't put it down." – Media Mikes

"One hell of a roller coaster ride!” – Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award ®-winning author of Flesh Eaters and The Savage Dead.

"I barely had time to buckle my mental seatbelt before the pedal hit the metal...." – The Horror Fiction Review

"What a refreshing read.  This is the first of a series and if this is any indication of what's to come, count me in! ....  If I could, I would gladly give this novel a 10 star rating." – Horror Novel Reviews

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 The Savage Dead

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

RUN

"[A] tense and intense scary sci-fi chiller/thriller.... RUN is a winner, as fast-paced as it should be, cinematic and gripping, lots of fun but with moments of poignancy and disturbing paranoia." – The Horror Fiction 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...

Dave Butler, Carter Reid, Paul Genesse, Larry Correia,

Jess Smiley, Frank Cole, Howard Tayler,
and all the other authors and artists who make the fan conventions feel not just fun, but comfortable…

and to Laura, FTAAE.

Chapter

1. 1

2. 5

3. 7

4. 9

5. 11

6. 14

7. 17

8. 20

9. 23

10. 27

11. 31

12. 34

13. 37

14. 40

15. 43

16. 46

17. 49

18. 51

19. 54

20. 56

21. 58

22. 61

23. 64

24. 67

25. 70

26. 73

27. 76

28. 79

29. 83

30. 85

31. 87

32. 90

33. 92

34. 95

35. 97

36. 100

37. 102

38. 105

39. 107

40. 109

41. 112

42. 114

43. 118

44. 121

45. 124

46. 126

47. 129

48. 131

49. 132

50. 133

51. 134

52. 135

53. 137

54. 140

55. 145

56. 147

57. 149

58. 154

59. 157

60. 159

61. 161

62. 164

63. 168

64. 172

65. 175

66. 177

67. 179

68. 181

69. 185

70. 189

71. 192

1

“So… what do we do?  About her?  About… them?”

No one else had wanted to say it.  And Ken was a bit surprised that Christopher had been the one to get the words out.  To say what they were all thinking.  Even Ken himself.

What were they supposed to do?

The entire building seemed to shake.  A horde – dozens, hundreds, thousands? – was somewhere above them.  Coming fast.

Called.  Summoned by Ken’s own child.  By his baby, by the two-year-old girl his wife was even now holding onto, clamping the toddler’s arms down with one arm, Maggie’s other hand covering Liz’s little mouth.

But was that true?  Was it Liz?

Or something else?

Liz didn’t speak like that.  She said “Lizzy poops” or “Sez-me Stweet” or “Up-up-up!”  She didn’t look at adults with cold eyes and say, “You are not family.  You are renegades.”

But Ken’s mind kept replaying it.  Kept hearing her saying just those words, those impossible things.

Her little nostrils flared above the line of Maggie’s fingers.  She was breathing calmly.  No longer screaming.  But Maggie’s hand didn’t move away.  Ken’s wife was staring at him, and it looked to him like she thought all this was his fault.  Not just whatever was happening to Liz, but the strange behavior of their other daughter, the predicament they were now in, the fact they were on an unknown floor in the middle of a dark building, even –

(even Derek sacrificing himself saving her saving Maggie and keeping her from being bitten because I couldn’t I wasn’t strong enough or fast enough but he was oh God he was so fast too fast and he went down the crane and saved her but took the bite and changed and fell and was gone)

– for the fact of the apocalypse itself.  Like Ken was the one who had changed the world, had rained death on the globe in a ten minute transformation that ended life as they knew it.

She glared at him.  And that was another small death.

He looked away from her.  To Aaron.  The cowboy’s eyes were inscrutable.  Ken couldn’t tell if the man was implying that they should leave Ken’s daughters behind, or take them with, or was just thinking about how to destroy the universe.  The guy said he was an ex-rodeo clown, and that might be true.  But he was also much more than that.  He was good, and brave, and had saved everyone time and again.  And he was the most dangerous person Ken had ever met.

Ken shifted his gaze to Dorcas.  She was shivering. Shock or pain, he couldn’t tell.  She was shrinking against Aaron, clearly drawing warmth and strength from the slightly shorter man.  Her right arm was broken.  Aaron had made her a sling earlier, but it was little more than a rag, the memory or intimation of first aid.  Her face was a collection of bruises strung together by expanses of dried blood and split skin.  The effects of a zombie who had gone insane – as they all did when they received grievous head wounds – and tried to beat her to death before Aaron saved her.

She looked at Ken for a moment.  Then her eyes flicked down.  She wasn’t looking for answers on the floor.  Guilt had shone in her eyes.  She wanted to run, wanted to escape, wanted to flee the monsters.  And Ken could tell that included his daughters.

“I can’t believe this.”

Ken turned to the last member of the group.  A late arrival, Buck was carrying Ken’s other daughter over his shoulder, hanging slack and loose as she had been for a while now.  She had acted strange as well, vacillating between normal behavior and actually trying to be caught by the things that pursued them.

Ken didn’t want to hear Buck’s thoughts.  The big man had mostly been a whiny pain in the ass.  He had even attacked Ken for not letting him die at one point.  So he didn’t want to hear the plans of a man who had already given up.  Because Ken hadn’t given up yet.

Give up.

Give up.

Give in.

Give up.

Give in.

Ken shuddered.  He realized he could hear the zombies’ growl.  The low, thrumming sound that preceded them like lightning before a clap of thunder.  And like lightning, it could be devastating.  It seemed to have a psychic effect, a subliminal exhortation to annihilation.  Hearing them could tip a survivor to submission.

Give up.

Give –

“You hear me?”  Buck looked livid.  His voice rasped in the near-darkness that gripped them all.  “I can’t believe you.  Any of you.”

He looked at each of the party in turn.  Ken saw Dorcas look away from the man.  Her expression one that suggested she knew what the big man was going to say next.  Knew he was going to suggest leaving the girls – or worse – and not didn’t just know, but agreed with his inevitable next statement.  Hated herself, but agreed nonetheless.  Aaron’s expression mirrored hers.

Buck’s gaze reached Maggie’s face.  He shook his head.  “You’re their mother,” he nearly spat.  Then he adjusted his grip on Hope before spinning to glare quickly at Christopher and then settling his eyes on Ken.  “We’re not leaving anyone behind,” he said.  “Not anyone.”

Then he spun on his heel and strode into the darkness.

2

Ken looked at Maggie.  Only for an instant, then she was off and nearly running after the big man holding their other daughter.

She didn’t ask what he thought.  Didn’t look like she cared.

Christopher went next.  Still trying to staunch the flow of blood from his broken nose, and from the way he kept brushing at it Ken couldn’t tell if the young man was more upset about his cracked face or the blood on his designer shirt.

Aaron looked at Ken.  “Can you walk on your own?”

Ken nodded, though he didn’t know if he could or not.  He had a pair of adrenaline shots running through him, and he figured that was all that stood between him and total systemic collapse.

What do I have?  An hour?  Twenty minutes?  And then what?  Unconsciousness?

Death?

Will Maggie even notice?

He turned away from that last question, which, strangely, bothered him more than the idea of dying.  And not because he didn’t know its answer – rather, because he was afraid he did know the answer.  And didn’t like it.

Aaron motioned for Ken to move ahead.  Ken nodded.  The cowboy held Dorcas tightly to him, waiting for Ken to go forward.  Following the light that Christopher held as it bounced through the wreckage of the One Capital Center building.

“Hey!”  Christopher’s voice was excited.  “You gotta check this out!”

“What is it?” shouted Aaron.

“It’s… well, it’s cool!”

Ken looked at Aaron and Dorcas.  The cowboy arched an eyebrow – a fairly expansive sign of emotion for him.  Dorcas rolled her eyes.  Or at least one of them.  The other was swollen shut.

Christopher was an enthusiastic kid.  He also liked to scale the outside of buildings – and had apparently enjoyed the pastime even before the world turned to crap.  So his idea of “cool” allowed for a much wider range than that of most people.

Aaron gestured for Ken to go ahead of him.

Ken took a step.  Then heard something.  He looked behind them.

And saw a pair of glittering eyes in the darkness.

A zombie.

3

The thing pulled was on its stomach, pulling itself forward on a single hand.  The other arm was missing at the bicep, the stump crusted over with a yellow, waxy substance that Ken had seen before.  The zombies secreted it, much like the acid they could also use to burn through flesh or bone or steel with equal ease.

The thing’s body ended at the sternum.  Where the rest of it had gone, Ken couldn’t begin to guess.  How it was still moving, he had no idea.  It was wrong.  Just like everything else in this world, the concepts of mortality and injury had turned on their heads.

The thing – what looked like it had been a woman, if its hair length and makeup that smeared across its face was any indication – snapped its teeth and growled.  The sound was low, strangely weak.

It’s missing most of its lungs.  It doesn’t have the air to make more noise.

The thought should have been a comfort.  Anything that bought a few minutes – even a few seconds – was the closest thing they had to good news anymore.  Instead, all Ken could focus on was the thought that the thing shouldn’t be making any noise.  It should be dead.  Laying in a pool of blood somewhere.  Not moving.  Not crawling toward them inch by agonized inch.  Not growling.

He jumped as something touched his shoulder.  His heart hammered at the insides of his ribs, fluttering like a bird in a cage.  He was over-adrenalized.  His already-on-edge senses pushed over the edge by the shots he’d been given to keep him moving.

How long do I have?

It was Aaron.  “Come on,” said the cowboy.  He was staring at the thing crawling toward them, and Ken could see a question in the other man’s eyes.  He suspected Aaron was considering whether or not to try and silence the thing.

But how?  A “killing” head wound just drove them into mad, manic attacks on anything that moved – including their own kind.  And cutting them up just resulted in smaller pieces that fought on.

“Come on,” Aaron said again.

“Guys?”  Christopher’s voice came from ahead.  “Seriously, this is neat.”

Ken nodded at Aaron.  He turned away from the snuffling monstrosity behind them.

And tried to ignore the noises in the darkness behind it.

More of them.

Coming fast.

4

The things were like ants at a picnic.  See one and more would come.

Only these ants puke acid.

And you can’t kill them.

And if they bite you, you turn into one of them.

Ken hobbled through the rubble of the building, moving toward the light ahead, wondering what Christopher sounded so excited about.  The kid was a mystery.  His dad had been Idaho’s governor, and he’d apparently seen his mother and father kill each other in the first moments of the change.  But he didn’t seem like the son of Power.  He seemed like the son of Crazy, with generous side-helpings of Charm and Courage balancing things out.

Though maybe that’s what power is.

Ken felt Aaron pulling him forward.  Realized that the noises around them were growing louder.

The light was getting brighter, too.

They’d been in the middle of the building.  Now they passed through several doors – or the crumbled semi-archways that marked where doors had once been before a stealth fighter exploded on the upper levels of the edifice – and Ken knew they must be getting toward the outer ring of the building.  The office they were in now was no less destroyed, but there was light.  Not just the pin-sized illumination of Christopher’s flashlight, but a general gray gloom.  Smoky and dim, but better than the pitch black that had held them all for so long.

“Come on!”

The flashlight moved up and down.  Getting larger.

Shouldn’t it be brighter?

It was spring, so it shouldn’t be getting dark until six or seven at least.  Was it already that late?

Was it only that early?

It had been less than a day since this all started.  Since the bugs clustered on the window of Ken’s classroom.  Since Matt Anders had a seizure and Ricky Briscoe tore out Becca Lee’s throat with his teeth.

Since the zombies came.

Fifty percent of the world turned in under ten minutes.  And a few minutes later, almost everyone else was either dead or turned as well.

Things were moving fast.  Too fast.

So maybe it was getting late.

Maybe the sun was setting.

Then a familiar smell hit Ken’s nostrils, and he understood why it was so dark.  So dark, and probably about to get much lighter.

5

The darkness wasn’t the black of night, or even the gloom of twilight in a city that has lost all power.

It was smoke.

Dark clouds were now visible, pushing at the buckled ceiling tiles above Ken’s head like foggy fists trying to batter the building into final submission.

The thing behind them – out of sight but far from out of mind – groaned weakly.  It trilled, a high-pitched sound like a thousand piano wires garroting a thousand finches, and there was an answering roar from somewhere else in the building.

On the same level.

Ken moved faster.  He tried not to cough, even though the smoke in his lungs made his body itch and ache from the inside out.

Aaron did cough.  A low, wet hack.  Dorcas said, “Shhh,” though Ken get the impression it was an automatic response more than a command.  The things already knew they were here.

Because Lizzy told them.  She called them.

No.

Yes.

The smoke thickened around them.  And as Ken had suspected, it soon tinged with orange and red and yellow – flowers of color superimposed on ashen crepe.

Crackling noises.  The dry-leaf sound of fire.

Ken could see Christopher.  He was standing next to Maggie and Buck.  Maggie held Lizzy, the toddler still hanging from the carrier on Maggie’s chest.  Her arms and legs dangled, but Ken could see his daughter –

(if that’s what she is)

– looking around with eyes bright and entirely too aware.  She caught sight of him and he thought she winked.  It could have been his imagination, or a trick of the smoke and light.

It could have been.

But it wasn’t.

Buck stood slightly behind the group.  He was taller than the others, looking over their shoulders at the thing they had found.  His mouth drooped lightly, open in mute amazement.

Christopher waved at Ken and the others.  “It’s awesome,” he said.  His voice was a near-reverent whisper.

Ken didn’t understand what he was looking at for a moment.  He understood that his daughters were changing.  That his son was gone.  That his wife somehow blamed him for all of it.

That the world had ended.

But he didn’t really understand what he was seeing.

Behind him, the growl filtered through wreckage and destruction.  It pierced his mind, finding the cracks of fear and levering them into full-blown crevasses of terror.

Give up.

(no)

Give in.

(NO)

Christopher’s smile widened.  “Found our way out.”

Ken finally understood what he was seeing.  Understood what Christopher meant to do.  And said the only sane thing.

“Oh.  Hell.  NO.”

6

It looked like an airlock.  Like someone had realized ahead of time that the world was about to move to one of the rougher zip codes in Hell and had tried to construct a bunker out of the building.  This was the exit, the place to equalize between reality and the nightmare outside.

But it hadn’t worked.  Of course not.  The change had happened too fast.  Too fast, and certainly earlier than anyone could have anticipated.  Because no one thought that something like this could ever happen.

It is human nature to imagine the impossible.  But not to prepare for it.  People don’t even buy umbrellas for rainy days or put away food and money for tough times or build dykes that will withstand inevitable storms.  Forget about zombie-induced Armageddon.

All this went through Ken’s mind in the first instant that he saw the strangely slanted oval that had punched through the wall.  Smoke billowed around the edges of it, and surged from the tunnel-like interior.

The lower edge of the cylinder stood a foot off the floor.  The upper edge was almost invisible, ramming its way through the ceiling before ending in a mass of bent and smoldering metal.

From his vantage point, Ken guessed the cylinder was probably leaning on the building at a sixty-degree angle.  Maybe more.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

He didn’t know if he was addressing Christopher’s suggestion that this was a way out, or just the concept of what he was seeing.  Maybe it was both.  Or more than that, maybe he was just giving voice to his general disbelief at what the world had come to.  His life had never made sense: he was a high school teacher who made almost as much as the average fry cook.  He was an average-looking guy who had managed to score the love of his life.  He was an everyday man whose entire family had survived the world’s shift to lunacy.

At least for a little while.  Until Derek died.

But now this….

“Is that really…?”  He couldn’t even finish the thought.

Aaron left his side.  He had Ken and Dorcas lean on each other, and Ken wasn’t quite sure who was supposed to help whom.

The cowboy leaned into the smoke that billowed out of the cylinder.  He touched the lower edge.  Grimaced as he cut himself on sharp, splintered metal.

“Looks like a 737,” he said.  He looked past the outer edge of the plane’s fuselage, squinting as he tried to sight along the craft’s exterior.  “But we can’t get out through it.  Looks like it crashed, broke apart, and then slammed right through the street.”

The growl behind them grew louder.

And then it wasn’t just behind them.  It was behind them, and to their left, and to their right.

Ken felt the thud of a heartbeat.  Dorcas’ or his, he didn’t know.  But it was fast.  Terror speeding it along.

Give up.

Give in.

Join us.

Die.

A wheezing noise came from somewhere.  Ken looked and saw Lizzy.  The toddler was breathing in and out so quickly she was almost panting, the breaths coming in small puffs above her mother’s hand.  At first he worried that she was suffocating, or having a seizure.  Or worse, that she was doing that strange thing the zombies periodically did: looking up, opening their mouths, and all breathing in unison.  He didn’t know why they did that, but it scared him.

Then he realized none of those was occurring.

No, she was laughing.

7

“We can’t go.”

Ken looked at his wife.  He could see her hand shaking over Lizzy’s face, could see terror and revulsion fighting a strange battle for control of her expression.  She looked like she had just found a dead cockroach in her shoe, and then discovered it was an advance scout for an assassination squad.

And the fact that she was looking at him at all nearly managed to drown all that out.

Ken didn’t know what to say next.  He wanted to hold her, wanted to clutch her to him and whisper that it was going to be all right.

But he had told Derek the same thing.  And look how that ended.

So he didn’t know.  He didn’t know, and he didn’t move.  Probably the wrong thing to do.  Though perhaps if he had moved she would have rebuffed him again.  Would have pushed him away and reminded him that their son was dead because of him.  And it wouldn’t matter that Ken couldn’t have done anything, that no one could have.  She was right.

He was the father.  The daddy.  The protector.  And he had failed his family.

“We have to go.”  Christopher stepped forward.  Touched Maggie’s shoulder.  The growling was louder, surrounding them like a blanket of needles.  Painful and invasive.

“We can’t.  We can’t.”  Maggie was losing it.  Losing it, and Ken still didn’t know what to say.  What to do.

Help came from an unexpected place.

“We can.”  Buck moved to the edge of the plane.  He peered into the cabin.  Ken couldn’t see what he saw.  Too smoky, and the angle was wrong.  The big man shifted Hope on his shoulders.  She moaned but remained unconscious.

Which was probably for the best.  Ken didn’t know what the small band of survivors would do if they had two erratic children to deal with.

Would this have happened to Derek?  If he had lived?

Aaron was shaking his head.  Still looking along the outside of the fuselage.  Ken thought he could see bits of blue and orange paint, though both colors had been desaturated to near-gray by the smoke.  A Southwest Airlines jet.  Ken thought their slogan was “Welcome Aboard,” but he thought this wasn’t exactly how they had meant it.

The cowboy wiped his forehead with his one good hand.  The other, his left, was a mess of broken and dislocated fingers.  He had it tucked into his belt, which must have hurt but he didn’t seem to mind at all.  “No,” he said.  “It goes straight into the street.”

The things could be heard all around them.  There were over two hundred thousand people in Boise, and most of them had been on the survivors’ trail.  Were they coating the outside of this building?  Hanging from it like so many vicious, venomous spiders?

The floor started to shudder.

“We can make it,” said Buck.  He sounded different than he had before.  Gone – at least for the moment – was the whiny, entitled man-child they had rescued.  He shifted Hope’s limp form to his other shoulder, then stood onto the lip of the plane’s fuselage.

“It doesn’t go anywhere,” Aaron insisted.  He sounded frustrated.  Not scared, just irritated.

“It does.”  Buck’s calm was oddly contagious.  Ken saw Maggie’s body stop quivering.  She stepped toward the big man.

“Ma’am,” said Aaron.

Maggie looked at the cowboy.  Her hand was still clamped over Liz’s mouth.  “What else are we going to do?” she asked.

She stepped into the plane.

Ken followed them.

“I don’t know that this is a good idea,” said Aaron.

“I know,” said Ken.  “But where my family goes, I go.”

He stepped into the plane as well.

The world shimmied underneath his feet.

8

A moment later there was a light tremor behind him, and that was when Ken realized that the world wasn’t actually rolling below him.  It just seemed like it to a mind suddenly steeped in revulsion and horror.

The dead were everywhere.

It hadn’t really occurred to Ken until this moment that the zombies weren’t dead.  Not really.  They had all been alive, then they were changed.  From human to other in the blink of an eye.  But not dead.  Never dead.  Many of them suffered wounds and damage that would have – must have – killed any normal organism.  Still, somehow they had sidestepped death, moving out of its path at the last instant, tumbling bodily into something different, something alien and frightening.

The zombies, the things, had never been dead.

What Ken saw now was different.

The plane had been struck by the same force that enveloped the entire globe, that much was certain.  Ken remembered Sunday School stories from his childhood: the God of the Old Testament cursing the people who tried to build a tower to Heaven.  He had changed their languages, confounding their speech so they could no longer work together to reach His domain.

The dark god that had acted a few hours ago had been more direct.  Bypassing simple confusion in favor of chaos, preferring destruction to distraction.

Even if he hadn’t seen the planes pirouetting drunkenly through the sky, Ken would have known in an instant what happened here.  Even through the permanent haze of smoke he could see long swaths of blood along floor, walls, even the ceiling.  Luggage had fallen in the center aisle, and much had been torn apart as though by a rabid animal unable to discern friend from foe, animate from static.

The change had hit the plane as well.  Half the passengers had changed mid-flight.  Had killed their fellow-travelers as the jet plummeted to earth.  Then the zombies had somehow survived enough to leave.  To walk or crawl away in search of more people to kill.

Not that the plane was empty.  Some of the seats – Ken guessed about a quarter of them – held silent, still cargo: all that remained of those who had not been turned by the zombies – killed but not utterly disintegrated by the crash.

The imagery was strange; nightmarish.  Torn metal, buckled plastic.  Luggage sprawled from overhead bins, wiring trailing from the ceiling in spots like the rotted limbs of willow trees.  The cabin must have lost pressure, too, because the emergency oxygen masks had all dropped.  They hung over the seats like the suckers of a tentacled monster hiding somewhere above.

The survivors had crowded into the top of the fuselage, standing at the top of a buckling center aisle that led downward at a steep angle into smoke, fire, and death.

“Where are the rest of the creeps?” said Christopher.  Ken saw Dorcas look askance at him.  “There must have been some zombies in here,” said the young man.  “Where’d they go?”

“Must’ve left after the plane hit,” said Aaron.

“You think?” said Dorcas.

No one answered her.  Either because Aaron had given the best answer or – more likely – because no one knew the answer.

“What now?” said Dorcas.

A roar behind them made the answer easy.

“We go down,” said Buck.  The big man shifted Hope’s loose form in his grip, then took a careful step forward.  Ken heard a double pop-pop and thought at first he was hearing the crackle of the fire, coming from some unseen spot below them.

Buck grinned sheepishly.  “Weak ankles,” he said.  Ken almost laughed.  Then the laugh dissipated utterly from his thoughts as Buck stepped forward again.  Forward, and downward.

Down into smoke.  Into fire.

Into the province of the dead.

9

Maggie followed Buck.  Liz continued to struggle in the carrier, and Ken’s wife still had her hand clamped over their daughter’s mouth.  The sight of Maggie gagging the toddler chilled Ken: not something he had ever thought he would see his wife doing.  He had been on the fence as far as spanking went when he entered the marriage, but Maggie very quickly let him know it wouldn’t be an option for their children.  She believed in time outs and reasoning and positive discipline.

Not shoving her hand over their child’s face.

But then, are you even sure that is your child anymore, Ken?

A valid question.  And not one he was sure he could answer.

Ken moved to follow Maggie, but before he could Christopher slipped into the aisle.  He looked over his shoulder and shrugged as though to say, “Better not get to close to her right now, man.”  Or maybe that was just Ken’s imagination, imputing meaning where there was none.

It was easy to do.  People had been doing it since the beginning of time.  Interpreting the universe in a way that had it making sense, in a way that drew order out of chaos.

But what order could there be now?  When humanity was changing before Ken’s eyes, and even the release of death was denied to so many.

He shuffled down the aisle behind Christopher.  The adrenaline that Aaron had pumped into him was still blasting through his veins and arteries, making him feel on edge.  The world seemed to have a blue tint to it, as though everything had been subtly electrified.  His aches and pains were still there, but muffled under a blanket that pulsed with the erratic beat of his overstressed heart.

He could barely feel his back, and though the nerves in his left leg still hurt considerably the pain seemed faraway and more abstract than concrete.  As though it was something being described to him rather than something he was actually experiencing.

He looked around.  The cabin was lit by fire somewhere at the bottom of the incline.  Small flames licked along lines of upholstery and carpeting along the length of the fuselage, as well.  Some of the bodies still smoldered.

The seats were arranged three on the left, three on the right.  Extending into the distance below.  Some of the seats had been knocked off their moorings and either hung dreadfully askew or had seemingly disappeared completely.  Perhaps they had flown through the front or side of the jet when it impacted the ground or the building – Ken couldn’t tell which it had hit first.  Perhaps something else had happened.  The FAA would have had a field day investigating a wreck like this.

Only there’s no more FAA.  No more FAA, FDA, NSA, CIA.  None of those good ol’ acronyms that mean everything is A-OK.

Ken looked to his right.  About three-quarters of the seats were empty, but it wasn’t a regular dispersal.  Some rows were completely vacant, others had a single body, others held a full contingent of cadavers.

Beside him now, he saw what looked like the remains of a family.  A man and a woman with a smaller body between them.  Impossible to say whether the smaller body had been a boy or a girl – the face was hidden below the parents’ forms, what was visible of the child’s flesh was torn and twisted, and the clothing was so bloodstained there was no way to discern color or cut.

The tray table on the seat back in front of the man had popped free of its little lock and punched halfway through his body, nearly cutting him in half.

“Please return your trays to their locked positions,” Ken heard a voice say in his mind, words that had been spoken a thousand times and would likely never be spoken again.  They belonged to a world that was already a memory.

The woman looked almost unblemished.  Whole.  Only the thin sliver of metal puncturing her breast giving a hint as to the cause of her death.

Man and woman – mother and father? – were twisted, almost huddled, over the smaller body.  As if they had thrown themselves across the child in the last moments before impact.

Ken didn’t know how to feel about that.  He wanted to find hope in it.  Because it showed that there was more to life than just selfishness.  There was more to existence than a clawing grasp for one’s own survival.

On the other hand, what had it benefited them?  Mother and father were both dead, and the child was a shrouded scrap of tissue between them.  At best they had the blessing of feeling the child die before they themselves expired.  Of knowing what had happened to their baby.

Was that what they were all doomed to feel?  To hope for?  Was humanity’s aspiration now merely that death would take them – and not something darker, and harsher, and far more eternal?

Ken felt Derek in his arms.  Felt him as real as he had ever been.  Felt him falling away.  Changing.  He wondered if he was going mad.

Thought it might be better.  Everyone talked about insanity as a curse.  But the reality, the dark secret that he suspected now more than ever, was that recent years had seen spikes in mental health problems because more and more people had discovered the relief of lunacy.  The comfort that came with not knowing… and never having to know anything again.

Never having to see your son fall.  Never having to see your daughters change.

Ken’s musings took him so far into himself that he almost didn’t notice the sounds for a moment.

Tic.  Tic-tic.  Tic-tic-tic-tic.

“What’s that?” said Aaron.  The cowboy was a pace behind Ken, following with Dorcas.

“I don’t –“ began Christopher.

Tic-tic-tic-tictictictictic….

And then Ken knew what the sound was.  He had heard it before.

He looked at the windows.  They were double-paned, and they seemed to have survived the crash, for which he was grateful.

Because they were the only thing standing between the survivors and the source of the sound.

10

The bugs had been the first signal of the change.

They had clustered on a window – just a single window – of Ken’s classroom.  So thick, so closely grouped that they appeared to be some kind of moving plate mail.  They didn’t fly away when Ken tried to spook them, not even when the first explosion shook Boise and rattled the very pane to which they clung.

Later, the bugs continued acting strangely.  Swarms of bees seemed to target human beings, stinging any they came into contact with.

And then… they all died.  Insects by the tens and hundreds of thousands – by the millions – carpeted vast stretches of sidewalk and street.

Ken had, in the back of his mind, assumed that the last ones he saw – a black expanse of dead bugs outside the Wells Fargo Center – were it.  The last ones in Boise, perhaps in the world.  And part of him wondered what would happen, how life would change, if the insects were suddenly just gone.

He needn’t have worried.

At least, not about that.

The air in the cabin grew suddenly dark as what little light had filtered through the soot-fogged windows dimmed and disappeared.

Bugs.

Everywhere.

Tictictictictic….

The sounds of thousands of tiny feet, so inconsequential on their own, was almost maddening.  It joined with the crackling of the fires in the cabin to create a unique drumbeat, one that captured Ken’s already heightened pulse and sent it spinning into overdrive.  He felt like his head was going to explode.

“What’s going on?” said Maggie.

“Shhh,” hissed Aaron.  Ken didn’t know if the cowboy understood something about what was happening, or if it was just good advice in general.  Either way, Maggie fell silent.

And Ken noticed that she wasn’t the only one.

“Maggie,” he whispered.

She looked at him.  Fear in her eyes, though her mouth had drawn a thin line of anger across her face.  He knew in his deepest heart that she wasn’t really angry at him, any more than he was angry at Aaron or Christopher or God or anyone else for what was happening.

Sometimes, we just needed a face to hate.

Sometimes, the face we hated just happened to be the closest one to our hearts.

“What?” she said.

“Liz,” he said.  It was all he needed to say.

Maggie looked down.  She gasped.  A tiny inhale that threaded its way between the omnipresent tictictic of insects crashing their way to the windows, clinging to one another’s backs and legs and heads.  A hand went to her mouth.

“What…?”  Ken heard Dorcas behind him, could almost hear her craning to see what was happening.

“I don’t know.”  He looked at the windows.  Black holes in the red/gray shimmer of the fire and smoke that had enveloped their existence.  The smoke wrapped around the still forms of the dead, making them seem less like corpses and more like an audience in the world’s most macabre theater.  The shifting clouds of dark fog created the illusion of motion, and the change of light as the fire moved from place to place caused subtle shifts in shadow that heightened the hallucinatory effect.

Maggie shook Liz.  Only a moment before they had all been praying that the toddler would stop shouting, stop moving, stop doing whatever it was that called the creatures to them.

Now, suddenly, Ken could feel the company lean toward Maggie, and could feel them trying to rescind that prayer.

Liz wasn’t moving.  Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, only whites showing.  Her head tilted back, her mouth open.

The rest of her hung limp.

“What is it?”  Buck looked at Hope.  The little girl was still unconscious.  Then he looked left and right at the dark holes, like black eyes that had once been windows.  “What’s happening?”

Tic.  Tictictictic….

Ken had been concussed.  Bruised, beaten, maimed.  He had also had most of his back burnt in an explosion.  So he had no small hairs on the back of his neck.  Still, he felt the muscles there tighten.  A twitching, trembling, more civilized and less developed version of the early-warning system that sent feral animals howling out of the forest mere moments before the earthquake, the hurricane.

He looked at the buzzing darkness at the windows.  The dead bodies like visions of the future come to claim them all.

“Something’s coming,” he said.

11

Everyone kept moving forward.

There was nothing else to do.  They couldn’t go back – there were Heaven-only-knew how many zombies behind them.  Couldn’t go sideways.  No way out of the airplane.  And even if they found an emergency exit, Ken didn’t want to be the first one to venture out into the swarms of insects.  He remembered the people he and Dorcas had found, people who hadn’t gotten out of the way of the swarms.  Swollen, bloated beyond recognition.  Only their clothing had identified the remains as being of human origin.

Tic-tictictic….

Ken realized some of the sound was coming from inside his head.  Panic sent a bolt of purest ice through his chest, down his stomach and testicles.

It’s happening to me.  I’m changing.

Then he realized the sound was his teeth.  Clicking.  Chattering in terror and the natural reaction to all the adrenaline that had saved him… and now threatened to overcome him.

Easy.

Easy.

Tictictictictic….

The floor of the aisle buckled suddenly after about fifteen feet, humping up and then dropping off to an even steeper incline.  The group clotted up getting over it.  Ken felt his skin continue to crawl, drawing tight against his bones and then letting go explosively, then drawing tight once more, letting go, repeating the process in an infinite loop that made him feel nauseous.

Something’s coming.

Still, he didn’t say anything.  Didn’t whisper at Buck or Maggie to hurry, because the last thing any of them needed was for someone to fall at this point.  Not now.

Tictictic….

Teeth or bugs?  He couldn’t tell anymore.  The sounds had mingled in his mind, bouncing around and creating a noise that was half alien, half familiar.  The familiarity made it worse.  Anything fully alien is merely incomprehensible; it is only when mixed with a modicum of ourselves that we understand it enough to fear it.

Tictictic….

Buck had stepped over the hump.  Not much, just a six-inch jutting in the floor.  Normally not even a nuisance, but the big man was treating it with utmost care.

Tictictic….

Buck turned and held out a hand to assist Maggie.  She looked at Liz.  The toddler’s head still pointed up, her eyes still rolled back so far only pure white showed.  It was so bright it almost glowed in the brimstone cylinder of the plane cabin.

Tictictic….

Maggie took Buck’s hand.  She stepped forward.

Ticticti –

Silence.

Everyone stopped moving.

Everyone.

But not everything.

12

The sounds stopped, and the silence was almost painful.

Until that moment, Ken hadn’t realized how much his world had come to be defined in terms of noise.

The sounds of Liz crying, of Hope and Derek playing.

Maggie laughing.

The pervasive tones of electronic media – beeps and boops and laugh tracks and commercials that were all just a bit too loud for comfort.  But you didn’t notice after a while, because even the obnoxious, even the almost-painful became mere background.  First we notice, then we tolerate, then we embrace, then we forget.  The human condition as expressed by mass communications.

Then, after the change….

Explosions.

Screams.

Shattering bones.

Breaking glass.

The growl.

Give up.

Give in.

And just like that, it was gone.  All of it.  Only the corpse-breath crackle of the flames in the cabin.

“You hear that?” said Buck.

“Where’d the creeps go?” said Christopher.

The growl was gone.  As though the zombies had, all in an instant, disappeared.

Ken dared to hope.  Dared to dream that something might be going, if not right, then at least less wrong.

He looked at Maggie.  Her arms around Liz.

The toddler’s eyelids fluttered.  The whites of her eyes, so blaring and bright they almost glowed, suddenly disappeared as her head slumped forward.

Brightness streamed back into the cabin.

“Wha –“ said Dorcas.

Ken looked at the windows.

The insects were falling away.  Letting go.

Dead?

No way to tell.  No way to know without going outside.

All was silent.

Just the breath of the survivors, the crackle of flame.

Then something shifted.

Maggie clapped her hands to her cheeks.  It was a strangely juvenile gesture, the kind of thing Ken had seen his students do occasionally.

When Ken saw a high schooler do it, he tried not to laugh.

When Maggie did it, he had to force himself not to scream.  Instead, he turned and looked at what she was staring at.  He didn’t want to see it, but he knew that avoidance was the fastest way to die.  The only way to survive this world was to keep your eyes wide open, watch for danger… and run when you could.

He saw what she saw.

And like Maggie, Ken did something he would have thought of as cartoonish if he had observed someone else doing it.

He rubbed his eyes.

He did it almost carefully, scrunching up his one good hand and pressing it against his right eye, then his left.  Each time adding a quick circular motion as if to remove whatever grit was causing this vision.

He opened his eyes.

And it was still there.

The world made less sense than it had.

The mere insanity that had gripped the world was gone, replaced by full-fledged homicidal psychosis.

Someone cursed.

Someone else screamed.

Sound snapped back to existence, found its way to a place where there was no hope for survival, no hope for escape.

Not even in death.

Because the dead themselves were moving.

13

The family Ken had spotted earlier had led to mixed feelings.  Hope and dread, poignant loss and melancholy surrender.

Now he saw them simply.  They were evil.  Evil in its purest form.

It was one thing for people to suddenly change, to turn on one another and become snarling, biting beasts.  But really, wasn’t that just a small nudge down a slope so many people already rested on the crest of?  Just a push into a shadowy precipice over which so much of humanity eagerly lunged of their own accord?

There was nothing beautiful about what had happened to this point.  Nothing poetic, nothing bright –

(nothing bright about Derek being bitten, about blood streaming from his pores, about his eyes flooding with madness, about his fall to flame)

– but there was a trace of nature to it.  The law of the jungle, if only as read through funhouse lenses crafted by a psychotic artisan.

This, though….

The family was moving.  The dead family.  The mother and father pulled away from one another, and Ken saw he had been wrong about something.  He had thought the mother unblemished.  But now he saw - heard – otherwise.  She had reached to her husband, held his hands and arms as they tried to protect their child.  Their arms had burnt and mangled together as they crashed, husband and wife had become one for a moment, in purpose and in body.

Now their flesh separated with a sound like shearing ice.  They yanked their arms free from one another and the sound ripped through the cabin, overpowering the comparatively slight noise of the flames, rasping ragged holes in Ken’s mind.

The woman tried to stand.  She pushed up, then sat back down again with a jerk.  Repeated the motion.  Ken realized that the sliver of metal he had seen in her chest must have pinned her to the seat, maybe to the wall of the cabin.

Her mouth opened, her face wrinkling in rage.  But she didn’t speak.  Didn’t cry out.  No sound at all.

The zombies, the things that had changed from live people to… whatever they now were… were almost constantly vocalizing.  But this was something else.  As though when life had left this woman, so had her voice.  And not even the power that had reanimated her sufficed to give her the semblance of speech.

She kept trying to stand.  Kept falling back to the seat.  Ken could see the shaft in her breast wiggling to and fro.  It didn’t seem to bother her, and little blood came forth.

It’s already pooled in her feet by now.

A dull thud.  Ken’s eyes flicked over.

The husband.

He had pulled himself free of the seat.  But Ken had been wrong in his previous assessment of the husband’s injuries as well: the tray table hadn’t nearly cut the man in half.

The top portion of the man slid to the aisle.  He fell on his back.  The dark gray of his spine trailed out of the sudden terminus of his body.  Entrails flopped out in looping masses.

Again, not much blood.

Again, no sound at all.

The man’s face was oriented away from the survivors.  But he began working his way around, clearly trying to face them.

Ken had no illusions about what the thing’s intentions were.

More movement.

Ken looked back.  Halfway between the still-pinned woman and the twitch-dancing feet of the man.

Something rose up between them.

Maggie shrieked.  A single word.

The thing did not make a sound.  Not even when it leaped through the air directly at Ken.

Ken didn’t shriek.  But he did speak.  Like Maggie, it was a single word.  The same word.

“Derek?”

14

Not Derek.

Derek changed.

Fell.

Died in the fire.

Changed.

It all flashed through Ken’s mind in an instant.  He saw a single bit of ash falling, backlit by a tongue of flame that streaked up the side of a blanket hanging from one of the overhead luggage bins.  Both ash and flame ceased their motion.  Energy sapped from the universe, pulled away by the power of Ken’s thoughts, the swirling vortex of burgeoning madness.

When slumped beneath is dead parents, the child-thing had been a mangled mass of nothing.  Just torn flesh and broken bone, loosely contained by threads that no doubt had once been an outfit carefully chosen for the trip.  Not human, not even a body.  Barely a carcass.

But when the thing stood up, Ken saw what Maggie had seen: the little round face, impossibly unblemished.

Tornadoes ravaged entire neighborhoods but left one home pristine.  Earthquakes sunk homes into the ground and left random bits of perfection standing on the city streets as mute witness to the past.  And apparently airliner crashes had the same indiscriminate quality.  Breaking a body but leaving a face perfectly intact, the visage of an angel peering out from the husk of a demon.

And he – Ken now saw it had been a he – looked so much like Derek.  Or maybe not.  Maybe he just wished it.  Maybe he just wished to see his son, even if seeing his son came at the cost of death revoking its sovereignty.

But no, Maggie saw it, too.  So it wasn’t imagination.  It was a cruel joke, or a continuation of the awful prank being played out on a cosmic level.

The ash was still frozen.  The flame seemed encased in ice.  Nothing moved.

The father-thing –

(and Ken wondered if it would look like him if it was a dark version of himself another man who had also lost his son and failed his family)

– broke the spell first.  Clawed, pulled its way around.

The boy/thing/beast/corpse resumed its flight through the air.  Mouth open in a scream that never came.  Silent.

The silence was the worst.  Because rage like Ken saw in the boy’s eyes, near-mindless evil of the kind that could drive broken bones to grind against themselves and push a shattered body into the air, that should scream.

It should not be silent.

Ken didn’t understand what was happening.

The living had turned to vicious, unstoppable animals.

The dead were no longer the dead.

The boy flew through the air.

Straight at Ken.

Ken couldn’t raise his hands.  Couldn’t do anything.

How could you stop something that bore the face of your dead child?

The boy-thing reached with crooked arms that ended in mangled fingers.  His mouth opened wide to show bloodied gums.  Not many teeth.

But enough.  Assuming that a bite from the once-dead could bring the change as fast and easily as could a bite from the zombies spawned from the still-living.

Ken thought that was likely the case.  The one thing that was consistent in all of this was the deadliness of the things they faced.  The only two choices seemed to be conversion… or death.

A bite would change him.

But he did not move.

He could not.  Wasn’t sure he even wanted to.

He whispered his son’s name.

15

The face was perfect.  A round face, like Derek’s.  Lightly tanned.  Button nose.

The silent snarl was not Derek’s.  Nor was the dried blood that streaked his cheeks and crumbled out of his mouth like river clay.

But it was close enough to paralyze Ken.  Close enough to make him wonder why he was fighting, if fighting would only result in death and, worse, in having to confront the faces of the dead.

The dead boy/Derek/thing’s fingers were bent every which way, twisted and curling in on themselves.

Derek always bit his nails too much.

Filthy habit.

Ken knew he should be moving.  Should be doing something.  But he just watched as the thing jumped over several seat backs, leapt over a smoldering fire, and then pounced.

He’ll hurt himself if he keeps that up.

Ken looked for the ash.  The ash that had hung for an impossible forever in the air.  It was gone.  The miracle was over.  Time had started again, marching implacably forward, resolutely pushing on to the inevitable dissolution of all things.

The ash was gone.

Derek’s gone.

Ken shook his head.  He moved.

But he was too late.  The thing’s fingers – the dead, broken fingers of the thing that had once been a boy but never Derek, never his boy – reached for him.

The thing was airborne again.  Floating like ash, but mobile.  Dangerous.  Too fast.

Ken shrank back.

The thing darted toward him like a torpedo, and then seemed to change direction at the last second.  Something grazed Ken’s cheek.  He felt blood slick his face, and didn’t know if it was his or the dead thing’s.

Then the child hit the ground.

Ken looked up.  Dorcas was laying on top of it.  She had tackled it in midair, tumbling with it to the ground.  The thing was pinned under her greater mass, but still Ken could hear its teeth snapping together as it tried to bite her.

Aaron stepped forward.  He had pulled a piece of metal from one of the broken tray tables and was holding it like a short javelin.  He half kicked Dorcas away from the boy, then slammed the metal through the back of the child’s small neck, pinning it to the floor.  The thing trembled, its fingers spasmed.  Its legs kicked, once each, though not at the same time.

All in silence.

Then it was motionless.  But only for a moment.  Then its fingers began twitching.  Slowly, as though it was figuring out how to use them again.  They opened and closed, curled and uncurled.  The unsure movements of a stroke recovery victim.

“Get on up, lady,” said Aaron, helping Dorcas to her feet.  She stood.  Then hollered.

The dead father had finally flipped himself around.  Half a man, but half a man was enough in this situation.  It had crawled forward during the scuffle with its once-son, trailing a long hose of intestine, like a man knit of too-loose thread, destined to slowly unravel.

Ken thought that strangely appropriate.

The thing had grabbed Dorcas’ ankle.

It bit down.

16

“No!”

Aaron had gone crazy before.  When he had been touched by acid in the elevator, a thin trickle that burned a line of third-degree flesh down the length of his left arm, Ken had thought he would never see anything more terrifying that still managed to be human.

He was wrong.

The cowboy’s face twisted in a way Ken had never seen.  He didn’t know a person could look like that.  Aaron had said he was a rodeo clown.  But had hinted at something else in his past.  Something darker, and infinitely more dangerous.

In his face, already wrinkled by long years in the sun, already stained by soot and grime, Ken thought he now caught glimpses of sun in alien places, of dirt that could never be washed away.  Aaron’s face was not that of a man, not that of an animal.  It was that of a machine, programmed to do only one thing.

Ken realized the cowboy’s face looked a lot like the face of the zombies.

“NO!” the older man shrieked again.  He brought his foot down on the head of the half-man that was gnawing on Dorcas’ foot.  Dorcas’ own scream disappeared in the thundering rage of the cowboy’s roar.  Then disappeared again in the dull thud-crunch of a boot slamming through hair and bone and brain and bone again before coming to rest on buckled carpet.

The half-thing began twitching.  Frenzied tremors rippled through its body as the chaos that took control of these things whenever their brains were damaged seized it.  Its fingers curled back on themselves, then one hand reached straight into the air as though the headless, legless torso were trying to pull itself erect.  The other dug deep into its abdomen and began pulling soft tissue from its body.

Aaron didn’t even notice.  His cowboy boots kept pounding down, slamming into the thing’s head – where the head had been – over and over and over until what had been brain and bone and blood was little more than a gritty stain on the warped floor.

The father-thing never made a sound.

The son-thing, moving a bit more with every passing second, never wailed.

The mother-thing kept trying to pull herself free a few rows back.  But mutely.  Mouth opening and closing in silent screams, airless breaths.

Aaron kept grinding the paste under his feet.  He didn’t look at Dorcas.

She touched him.  Laid her one good hand on his one good arm.

“I’m okay,” she said.  “It didn’t get through my boots.”

She lifted her pants to show her thick work boots – now darker than they had been, the double-stitched leather starting to fray.  But whole.

Aaron stopped as if frozen.  His foot caught in mid-grind.

The child-thing struggled.

The mother-thing pulled herself apart to get to them.

The father-thing yanked its innards out as if in offering to whatever deity had resurrected it.

Aaron fell against Dorcas.  She grunted as he hit her broken arm.  Grunted, but didn’t pull away.

The cowboy wept.

17

Ken stared at the older couple.  And realized he was jealous.

They had found each other.

All of them had found each other, of course.  But Buck had lost his mother.  Christopher had lost his family, had seen his parents rip each other apart.

Ken had lost Derek.  Maybe the girls.  Maybe Maggie.

Aaron and Dorcas were holding each other.  Clinging to one another in one-armed, broken embraces.  Weeping in relief and terror and pain.

But they were alive, and perhaps they had more now than they had when this all began.

Ken hated them for a moment.  Less than a second, just another frozen ash-fall of an instant.  But it was real.

Is that in everyone?  Can we all hate not only for real injuries but merely for blessings others have the gall to accept?

He thought so.  And didn’t know what that meant.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  If that kind of hate was buried in everyone, that kind of selfishness resided in all hearts, maybe the monsters that had come upon them weren’t unnatural after all.  Maybe they were just the next evolutionary step.

Swinging in the trees to picking fruit off the ground.

Picking fruit off the ground to cultivating crops.

Cultivating crops to building cities.

Building cities to traveling to space.

But the constant through it all was warfare.  Murder.  The attempt to bring others down and bury them beneath our feet.

The zombies were simply doing it with a bit more focus.  Casting off the subterfuge of civilization and simply being their true selves.

Ken looked at Maggie.  She was standing by Buck and Christopher, almost leaning against them.

Not me.  She should be holding me, not leaning on them.

Liz was still limp in the baby sling.  Hope flopped loose and boneless in Buck’s thick arms.

None of them noticed the things rising out of the seats behind them.

18

“Look out!”

The self-pity that had been on the verge of battering down Ken’s last defenses vaporized at the sight of the burning things standing behind Maggie.  He was moving even as he shouted, shoving her behind him, then pushing Christopher to the side as well.  The kid went sprawling into the remains of a – blessedly empty – row of mangled seats.

Buck was harder to push.  But even the big man flew to the side under the adrenalized shove Ken sent his way.  Ken saw out of the corner of his eye that the gray older man fell sideways with his body curved around Hope’s still form.  Another surprise.  Another connection found in the world of the lost.  The snippy, selfish older man had somehow discovered someone in whom to subsume himself.

In that moment Ken started to think of the man as one of the group.  One of the survivors.

Then he was past them all.

Throwing himself into the three dead bodies that had struggled to their feet two rows down.

The closest wasn’t really on fire, he saw.  Just smoldering.  Steam venting from singed rags that were the only funerary clothing the thing would ever enjoy.

The whole world was a cemetery.  But the dead were not going to stay buried.

The steam hissed and popped, and one of the thing’s eyes suddenly exploded under the internal pressure of expanding gases and liquids.  A second later the thing started to jitter.  Then it dropped suddenly, disappearing to the floor in its row of seats.

Ken didn’t know what to make of that.  He didn’t have time to wonder if it was a trap, because the two other walking corpses were climbing over the intervening rows of seats.  They could have been on him in an instant if they had come into the center aisle, but they seemed unaware of that.  They saw only him, their target and prey.  A straight line seemed to be the only way they would move.

Footsteps behind him.  Several sets.  A scuffle.

One of the zombies reached him.  It moved awkwardly.  Ken had noted that the zombies moved better the more of them there were, seeming to draw agility and strength from numbers.  He couldn’t tell if that was what was happening here, or if this one was struggling because it was born not of a living person but of a cadaver.

Either way, the thing’s tenuous movements bought Ken enough time to backpedal a bit.  The thing reached out, grabbing at him with fingers stained and bloody.  Ken’s own hands went back, and brushed into something.  He grabbed it reflexively, then yanked it forward as the zombie lurched at him.

The thing snapped its teeth.  Silently.

Ken was not silent.  He screamed in terror, but didn’t run.  He couldn’t.  There was nowhere to run.  His family was behind him.  He couldn’t let this thing get past.

Instead he used what was in his hand: the flexible tube connected to an oxygen mask.  The thing had a little give.  Not a lot, but enough that he could yank it forward and whip it around the zombie’s head.

Ken meant to throw it around the thing’s neck like a noose.  Some thought in the back of his head whispered that he might be able to hang the thing up in the tubing, stop it completely right here.

He missed.

The tubing didn’t get to the thing’s neck.  The zombie had its mouth open, trying to take a bite out of its enemy.  The cord got hung up in its maw like a bit for a horse’s bridle.  The thing gnashed down automatically, and Ken had no choice but to continue his motion, wrapping the oxygen tube around the thing’s neck.

The thing was stuck.  At least for a moment.

But Ken felt something odd.

He looked at his hand.  His right hand.  His good hand.  The hand that had grabbed the tubing.

There was a shining hemisphere of red on the meat of his hand.

Teeth marks.

He had been bitten.

19

Aaron thudded past him, bypassing Ken to get to the third zombie, the one that was still climbing over seats.  The cowboy had grabbed the severed arm of one of the passenger seats and as the zombie jumped at him he swung it.

The reinforced arm hit the zombie with a muffled thwump.  Aaron wasn’t a superhero – the zombie didn’t miraculously slam to the ground with the force of his blow – but he changed direction a bit.  Enough to get hung up in a mass of willow-wires hanging from a ceiling panel.  The thing struggled to get free, but Aaron just kept pounding on it with the seat arm, and Ken heard the wet thud/crack of flesh and bone breaking.

The zombie didn’t cry out.  Didn’t scream.

Aaron didn’t, either.  He panted with the effort of his attack, but that was the only sound he made.

Ken saw it all peripherally.  Most of his attention was on his hand.  He held it in front of his face.  Looked at the half-circle of tiny holes.  They wept red.

“Come on,” said Aaron gruffly, and turned to go.  More movement in the plane.  Other bodies were lurching to their feet.  In fact, Ken realized that all of the dead were in motion.  But most of them were having trouble getting up.

Seat belts.  They can’t get out of the seat belts.

The thought flitted through his mind, bullet-fast and leaving almost no trace of its passage.

Bitten.  I’ve been bitten.

That registered.

His hand shook.

He wondered what it would feel like.

Would he feel the blood come out of his pores?

Would he feel himself change?

Would he know it when he tried to kill his family?

He looked at Maggie.

She hadn’t noticed.  She was too busy looking right and left, back and forth, trying to see all the suddenly animated corpses that were trying to lurch out of their seats and finding themselves held strangely fast.

Buck was doing the same.

So was Dorcas.

Aaron was busy wailing on another zombie.  “What the hell are you people waiting for?” he said through clenched teeth.  “We gotta move.”

Ken found Christopher’s eyes.  The young man was staring at him.  One hand on the nose that Ken had accidentally broken.  The other held a piece of metal.  Something similar to what Aaron had used to pin that first kid to the floor.

“Shit,” whispered Christopher.  Looking now at Ken’s hand.

He stepped toward Ken.  He shifted his grip on the metal to a two-fisted one.

Ken nodded.

“Knock it out of the park, kid,” he said.

20

There wouldn’t be time for goodbyes.  Maybe that was best.  Certainly it was fair – how many of the billions of dead and changed had gotten to hold their loved ones, say their goodbyes?

No, Ken just hoped that whatever Christopher did would be sufficient to keep him from hurting anyone else.  From spreading this – what?  Disease?

Shouldn’t it have happened already?  Shouldn’t I have changed?

Christopher took a pair of quick steps, almost running.  He held the piece of metal over his right shoulder, winding up for a home run hit.

Ken felt himself grow dizzy and hot.

I thought it would feel cold.

When do I start bleeding everywhere?

When do I start screaming?

He heard Aaron, still grunting away as he smashed back several undead who had reached the aisle.

Maggie finally saw Christopher and Ken.  “What’s going on?” she said.  Then she must have noticed Ken holding his hand in front of his face.  Her gaze flicked to the zombie that was still gagged and bound to the ceiling by the oxygen mask.

Two plus two equals….

Her hand went to her mouth.

“Don’t you dare,” she said a moment later.

“Don’t have much choice,” said Ken.

He coughed.

Everything went gray, then black.

He felt the floor rushing at him.

21

Ken hit the floor face-first.  The surface was carpeted, but still rough and harder than he expected.  Explosions lit up the dark cavern behind his eyes when he slammed into the warped surface.

“Ken!”  Maggie’s scream punched holes in the fog that blanketed his thoughts.  “Ken, Ken!”

Sounded like she was screaming louder.  Either that or getting closer.  Running toward him.

Don’t do that.  Run away, babe.  Run away.

Someone grabbed him.  Flipped him over.

The explosions dimmed to gray.  A dark outline.  Someone holding something.  Christopher, ready to hit him.  Pound him to pieces small enough not to matter.

Good.

Christopher’s arms dropped.  Fast.  No longer a home run, this was going to be a railroad worker slamming home a spike.

And something else slammed into Christopher.  Knocked him away at the last second.  Ken heard a dull clunk as the bar Christopher had been holding bounced off the carpeted floor only an inch or so away from his right ear.

Ken thought it was a zombie that had knocked the young man’s hit askew.  Then realized the attacking shape was a short, stocky one.  Wearing cowboy boots.

“Don’t!” shouted Aaron.  He kicked backward, sending another looming shape crashing backward into flames that were licking closer and closer.

“He’s bit!” Christopher screamed.

“I know it!”

“You know?”  The shock in Christopher’s voice echoed the surprise bouncing through the muddled wreckage of Ken’s own thoughts.

“Yuh.”  Aaron moved again.  Another silent figure went flying.

“He’s going to change.”

“Don’t think so.”  Aaron knelt and put a hand on Ken’s shirt, yanking him roughly to his feet.

“Then why’s he acting like that?”  This time it was Dorcas speaking.  Not sounding terrified of Ken’s incipient transformation, more like normal curiosity.  She believed Aaron, Ken could hear that; believed the cowboy completely and utterly.

“Adrenaline’s wearing off.”  Aaron nodded.  “Christopher, can you hang onto him?”

“Uhhh.”  Christopher gazed at Ken.

“Oh, for good damn hell’s sake,” muttered the cowboy.  “They turn fast, kid.  He’d have changed if he was gonna change.”  He shoved Ken at Christopher, who caught him.

Ken saw Christopher was grinning.  Hassling the cowboy.  “No, I believe you, man.  Just I don’t like hauling around a guy who broke my nose.”

Aaron snorted.  Started to turn to face toward the front of the cabin.  Christopher’s voice turned him around.  “How’d you know he wasn’t going to turn?”

Aaron spun around again.  Back toward the bottom of the incline, the semi-slide the airplane had become.  “You really want to discuss that now?” he said.

Christopher gulped.  Ken saw the smile leave the young man’s face.  “Guess not.”

Ken looked.

Aaron had been busy.  Easily a dozen zombies were wrapped up in wire, pinned to seats or to the walls.

But there were still another dozen or so.  All in the aisle.  All between them and whatever might lay at the bottom of the plane.

Ken looked back.

Buck holding Hope.

Maggie holding Liz.

Dorcas, swaying on her feet.

Another dozen undead coming behind them.

22

Clunk.

That was all Ken could hear, for some reason.

Clunk.

The sound of Christopher’s makeshift weapon bouncing off the floor.

He wasn’t hearing the moan of the dozen undead ahead, the dozen more behind.

Just… clunk.  As though Ken’s only mental response to this impossible moment was an insistence that he should have died a few moments ago.

Christopher was holding Ken up, practically bearing all his weight.  Ken’s arm was over the young man’s right shoulder, and Christopher held the thin bar over his head with his left hand –

(clunk)

– as though it might scare back the two dozen assailants moving toward them.  Small chance.  Though Ken did note that these zombies seemed to move differently than the ones the survivors had encountered thus far.  Still fast, still single-minded – as far as dead things could be “single-minded” – but they seemed a bit slower.  Not all-the-way-slow, but certainly not the same super-speed that the things in the elevator had been.

Ken wondered what else was different about this brand of zombies.  What other ways the undead zombies varied from the once-alive varieties.

It was all academic.  Whether or not the –

(clunk)

– things moved super-fast or just normal-fast, they were about to pounce.  Ken could see that.  The ones in front and the ones behind.  Gathered to jump.

Maggie and Buck, each holding their frightening and precious passengers, had drawn close to one another.  Then pulled closer to the rest of the group.  Dorcas and Christopher and Ken were already in a tight knot.

Clunk.

Aaron was standing on the lower edge of the survivors, and Ken could tell the older man was debating whether to make a stand here with the last of his friends or wade into the dozen zombies that were now about fifteen feet away and go out fighting.

CLUNK.

The sound was louder in Ken’s mind, almost reaching audible levels.  Muffled but powerful, the sound of a life ending.  Hollow, as if to signify it didn’t have any meaning.

The zombies behind them, the ones that were higher on the tilting slide that the plane had become, moved closer.  As though taking care to make sure nothing went wrong.

CLUNK.

That damn hollow sound.  The empty noise of humanity’s passing.

Maggie began to weep.

Aaron tensed, and Ken could tell the cowboy was going in.  He wouldn’t go calmly, wouldn’t meet death with the silence of the undead things around them.

Buck whispered something.  Ken thought it was “Mother.”

Christopher chuckled.  A nervous laugh.

Dorcas was quiet.  Watching Aaron, just him.  Like the rest of the world suddenly didn’t matter much.  Her lips moved.  Ken couldn’t tell through the smoke in the cabin and the fog in his mind what she was saying to herself.

All he heard was… CLUNK.

Hollow.

Empty.

Aaron crouched for his final moment.

23

“Clunk!”

Everyone stopped.  It might have been Ken’s imagination, but it seemed like even the undead swiveled to stare at him for just a moment.  Like the amount of random stupidity in that single syllable was enough to stop even the world’s final death-spiral for a moment.

Then they – silently – reoriented on the group.  Began moving forward.  Most of them were focused on Aaron, as though they had figured out he was the primary threat – the thing to be first neutralized.

But the others seemed to be staring at Maggie and Buck.

Or was it that they stared at Liz and Hope?  The little girls were still insensate, limp in their carriers’ arms.

Ken fought to focus.  He hadn’t wanted to shout “clunk.”  Hadn’t wanted to say that at all.  But he had wanted to say something.

He just couldn’t remember what it was.

Everything was whirling.  Darkness taking over his vision.  He felt himself draining, emptying of life.  Growing hollow.

Hollow….

Clunk….

He found the thought.  Held it.  And shouted again.  This time managing to say the word he had intended to say in the first place: “Down!”

Everyone looked at him again.  Just for a moment.  Buck and Maggie, even Christopher all spared him only the barest of glances before returning their gazes to the menace crowding them.

Dorcas looked longer.  Confused.  Concerned.  Wondering.  Then, perhaps, a light in her eyes.  Ken knew he could explain to her.  Could tell her.  If only he could get his mouth to move.

But he couldn’t.  Everything was going wrong, not just in the world outside, but in Starship Ken.  His hull was damaged, his circuits fried, his main computer in some kind of shutdown mode.

He looked at Aaron.  The cowboy was looking at Ken, too.

And smiling.

Not a big smile, but Ken felt like someone had gotten what he was trying to say.

Clunk.

Down.

Hollow.

Starship Ken was malfunctioning, but somewhere deep within its core, there was something trying to make sense of things, to come up with a way out.  It had been barking messages at Captain Ken, trying to make him understand.  But the messages had been coming out as code; as ciphers to be interpreted.

Clunk.

Down.

Hollow.

Clunk.

Down.

Hollow.

Clunk down hollow.

Clunkdownhollow.

Maybe they weren’t trapped, after all.

24

“Get ready,” said Aaron.

Ken felt Christopher’s body jerk.  Couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or a shudder.  “Get ready?”  The young man whipped his gaze around, the implication that that kind of advice was coming their way a bit late more than clear.  “For what?”

“This.”

Ken hadn’t really seen Aaron fight before.  Bits and snatches, but it had been mostly cloaked in darkness, made nearly invisible by competing events and Ken’s own fear.

Now….

Aaron didn’t just move.  He flowed.

It was like watching liquid mercury, fashioned into the shape of a man and poured into a pair of cowboy boots.  The older man jumped the last ten feet between him and the undead that were crawling up toward them from below in a move that would have shamed an Olympic athlete half his age.  He seemed to stop in mid-jump, though, an impossible trick of physics that made Maggie gasp.

Ken was shocked as well, and would have staggered if he wasn’t already utterly dependent on Christopher for his ability to stand.  Perhaps that was why he actually saw that Aaron had snagged something – a piece of wiring conduit? – that hung down in the middle of the slanted aisle.  The cowboy used it like a pole in a jungle-gym, going from near free-fall to sideways motion, his heavy boots kicking out…

… and catching the lead zombie square in the temple.

Ken knew from his own martial arts experience that the temple was the thinnest part of the human skull – only about twice the thickness of an eggshell, and so particularly vulnerable to fracture.

Then again, he suspected that a lead plate would have crumpled under the power of the kick Aaron brought to bear on the undead before and below them.

The thing’s head caved in, going from smooth oval to concave polygon.  One of the monster’s eyes literally flew out of its socket, seeming to leap away as a sentient creature might from a doomed life raft.  But instead of swimming into the darkness it just lay on the floor, a limp, slowly deflating sac of vitreous fluid.

The zombie itself was knocked into a row of partially-askew seats.  Black-red gore spewed out of its now-empty eye socket and from the crevasse Aaron had opened in the thing’s head.

Ken could see into its skull.  Where the brain should have been.  Only there was no brain.  Just more of that grotesque viscous matter, like the thing’s brain had rotted and melted and half-congealed in the space of an instant.  It made Ken ill to see, and he suspected he would have vomited if he had the strength.

Aaron had rebounded off the kick, using the wire conduit to pull himself back away from the rest of the zombies.  Just out of reach.

So the wounded one was still close to him.

But closer to the other zombies.

It opened its mouth.  And for the first time, one of the undead made a sound.  It screamed.  A harsh, grating sound like dirt being churned in a river of blood.

Then it attacked.

25

Ken heard the scream as two things: terror and triumph.  Terror because the crushed skull of the zombie signaled the entry of one more uncertainty into their world.

Triumph because someone else had understood.  Aaron had comprehended the message his injury-addled subconscious mind had been trying to convey.

Clunk.

Down.

Like many infrequent air travelers, Ken never really thought much about the specifics of flying.  He just got on the plane at the terminal, got off at the other end of the flight.  Hopefully his luggage made a similar flight.

But there was more to it than that.  This cabin, for instance.  A quick look around showed that it only took up about half the internal volume of the fuselage.  So what else was there?

Baggage?

Landing gear?

Whatever there was, it was underneath the passenger cabin.  And when Ken had heard that muted clunk he realized there was more to the plane than what he could see.

There was a below.  Something they could flee to, if only they could find a way.

The injured zombie threw itself at its once-brothers and sisters.  The lower portion of the plane became a maelstrom of destruction, the thing that Aaron had maimed trying to destroy anything it could lay hands or feet or teeth on.

The other things tried to ignore it.  Tried just to crawl over and around and past it to get to the survivors.

The injured zombie snagged one of the others.  Ripped its nose off with a jerk of its teeth, even though its jaw hung half-askew from the force of Aaron’s hit.  Then it slammed the injured monster into the thin padding of a coach-level headrest.

More black-red gore spewed in a weird mix of liquid and congealed clay.  Now two insane zombies were in the mix, madness buying the survivors some time.

Aaron was bent over behind one of the chairs in a nearby row.  The chairs had pulled apart, spreading like fingers in a giant game of Cat’s Cradle, wires and oxygen tubes running like webbing between them.  The chairs looked like they were taller than the ones around them, but Ken realized that was just an illusion: the chairs were the same, but the flooring they were bolted to had been pulled slightly upward.  Torqued by the forces of the crash, buckled by the impact with the building against which the plane slanted.

Aaron was pulling up on the seats.  Lifting with all his might.  Ken could hear the sound of metal creaking, could see the tendons in the cowboy’s neck standing out in stark relief.

Buck lumbered over.  Saw what the other man was trying to do.  He put down Hope’s silent form in a movement that was almost too tender to be understood.  He placed her in the row of seats behind the one that Aaron was pulling on, and Ken thought he even saw the big man brush his little girl’s hair out of her face.

Then Buck leaned over.  Grabbed hold of the undercarriage of the middle chair.

Pulled.

The sound of tortured metal, the shriek of Buck as he shouted in exertion, almost masked the sound of feet slipping over cloth.

Ken turned his head.  It took far too long.  He felt like he wasn’t moving his own body, but a huge robot.  One that was vast and ponderous and weighted down by the rust and weathering of a thousand years.

The dozen undead that had been behind them were still behind them.

Behind, and close enough to touch.

Ken opened his mouth to scream.  To warn the others.

All that came out was a sigh.  Like a final whisper, a whimper to carry his soul into the night.

26

Dorcas yelled.

Only it wasn’t really just a yell.  Ken thought that every feminist who had ever talked about equal rights, every woman who had ever said something about equal pay for equal work, every female who had ever tried to make the case that they were as good and capable as men… every single one of those women must have been present in that shout.  Dorcas sounded suddenly like a lion, like an enraged beast whose domain had been trodden upon.

In that moment, Ken wasn’t sure who he would bet on for best two out of three between Dorcas and Aaron.

The older woman roared that terrifying roar, and kicked her thick work boot out so hard that the zombie that had been reaching for Ken and Christopher nearly folded in half.  It stumbled backward, up the tilted surface of the center aisle, arms flung out so that it caught – and effectively stopped – several other monsters that were coming down toward them.

“Get out of the aisle!” Dorcas screamed.

Ken felt himself jerked to the side as Christopher leapt into one of the mangled rows.  He saw Maggie following suit as well, as though everyone in the plane had fallen captive to the siren power of Dorcas’ voice.

She was already moving as she spoke, grabbing at something that was stuck in a nearby row.  She twisted and pulled, grunting in what sounded like a mixture of determination and agony – Ken couldn’t imagine how the exertion was acting on her shattered arm.

But she didn’t stop pulling.  She wrestled at the thing, grunting as she pulled it inch by painful inch into the center aisle.

It was a huge, soot-stained box that Ken finally realized was the drinks cart.  The heavy-duty metal cart that the flight attendants would wheel down the aisle and out of which they would dole out cheap sodas and cheaper snacks to the passengers.

Dorcas kicked at it.  Again.  A third time.

Gravity finally did its job.  The drinks cart flew away from Dorcas with a squeal of tortured metal and broken wheels, bouncing as much as rolling.  It gathered speed quickly, and in the few feet between the survivors and the zombies it was already going fast enough to kill.

It hit the first of the zombies – the one whose head Aaron had crushed – with a leaden thud.  Kept going as though the thing were nothing more than a paper cutout.

The other zombies – the “downhill” ones, at least – shattered like bowling pins in the path of a wrecking ball.  Several got hung up on the cart, dragged downward toward the flames and smoke that obscured the bottom/front of the cabin.

Ken looked behind him creakily.

The other zombies.  The “uphill” ones.  The one Dorcas had kicked was already on its feet.  It looked like it had once worked for the airline: wearing a colorful outfit with a small tag on its breast that said, “Brandi.”

Brandi snarled silently.  Her fingers clenched.  Dorcas whipped around to face her, and Ken bet even odds that his farm girl could take that zombie.

But that didn’t matter.  There were still another ten or more behind Brandi.

Something popped.  It sounded like a soda can opening, if that soda can was the size of a swimming pool.

“Got it,” said Buck.

“Get over here!” shouted Aaron.

Ken looked.  Buck had pulled the seats a bit higher.  Not much, maybe only a foot or so.

Enough?

He looked back at Dorcas.  She was still staring at Brandi.

“Go,” said Dorcas.  “I got this bitch.”

27

Christopher pulled Ken away, and the last thing he saw of Dorcas, the older woman was kicking for all she was worth, swinging what looked like a fire extinguisher – maybe a piece of red luggage, Ken’s vision wasn’t so great right now – at an oncoming monster.

Laughing.

It wasn’t hysterical laughter.  Not the laughter of the cursed or the condemned.  It was the sound of someone who has not resigned to death, but determined to live.

If only for a moment.

Then he was away, yanked in a jumble of smoke and fire and tumbling images.  He saw Maggie, pulled along as well.  Saw Lizzy hanging from her chest, still empty-seeming, devoid of whatever strangeness had taken hold of her and pronounced Ken and the rest of the survivors to be “renegades.”

He saw himself, tumbling toward darkness.  Descending into a black that reminded him of the elevator shaft he had climbed down with Hope strapped to his chest.  Only this was worse, because he wasn’t climbing, he had no power of his own.  And the darkness was below a layer of smoke and fire and vaguely-seen demon things.

So this was… what?  The basement below the worst parts of Hell?

Ken saw a face in the darkness.  Aaron.

“Pass ‘im to me.”

Ken was moved into place, shoved over, and handed to Aaron, who was standing in the darkness under Hell.

Ken tried to help the hands that moved him into place.  But he was limp and loose as Liz or Hope.  A helpless observer.

He was pulled into the pit by Aaron’s strong hand.  Placed quickly but carefully on something hard and boxy.

“The girl,” said Aaron.  In the bit of light that filtered from above, Ken could see that the cowboy wasn’t standing after all – he was squatting, almost kneeling in the low space beneath the passenger area of the cabin.  Aaron reached for something, pulling a small shape into the baggage compartment.  Hope.

A second later, Maggie followed, turning to allow herself to fit in while still strapped to Liz.

Christopher slipped in.  Aaron looked at the younger man.  “Dorcas?” he said.

Christopher jerked his chin upward, where the sounds of scuffling could be heard.  And laughter, Dorcas was still laughing.  Though the laughter was low, wheezing.  Tempered by pain.

Aaron’s eyes went cold.  Ken, remembering how Aaron had reacted just a moment ago when he thought Dorcas was bitten, was sure the man would leap out of the hole under the seats, would try to save Dorcas.

But apparently the cowboy recognized a difference between someone being brought down from behind… and knowingly sacrificing herself to save her friends.  He knew what she was doing, and respected it.  So he didn’t go crazy, didn’t jump back into the cabin.  He just reached his hand out and grabbed Buck’s blindly grasping fingers.

The big man barely made it through the fissure he had opened.  He grunted, then yelped, and Ken heard cloth tearing.  “Sonofa…,” said the gray man.  Not whining.  Not anymore.  That part of Buck seemed to be gone.  He was just in pain, like all of them.  But strong enough to still be alive, like all of them.

Above them, the last strains of life-laughter ceased.

There were thuds as things – silent things, things whose voices had been stolen along with their lives and their free will – pounded toward the hole.

“Find something to block ‘em,” said Aaron.  He pulled his head away from the hole, feeling around in the near-dark.

They didn’t have time.

The first dark shape slipped through.  Into their space.

Among them.

28

Ken could only lay there and watch.  He tried to sit up and couldn’t even manage that.  He felt his legs and hands trembling, felt sweat burst out along his forehead as he bent his will to force his broken body into motion.

Nothing happened.

In the movies the heroes came out of seven-year comas ready to fight, able to do marathon foot-chases and amazing scissor-kicks within hours of recovery.  The reality of major physical trauma, Ken found, was different.  Different even than his worst injuries practicing hapkido.  He’d always been able to muscle his way through the pain, to grin and bear it.

Now he couldn’t muscle his way through.  He couldn’t grin and bear it, because the bare muscle control required for grinning was well beyond him.

He had already been slumped against something loose and boxy, something that ground painfully at his bruised and abraded back.  But after only a second of trying to move, he practically melted into it.  He felt like his bones were on fire, melting and searing him from the inside.

Fever.  Infection.

He was a history teacher.  He knew that for most of human history, the killer wasn’t warfare.  It was a combination of starvation and infection.  He was about to fall into first-hand experience of a life without hospitals.

The sound of the thing snapping its teeth drew Ken’s frazzled thoughts into something resembling cohesion.  Worrying about infection was probably premature.

The thing had barely pushed into the hole.  It was crouched on the floor.  Now standing.  Then it would turn.  Turn and be on the survivors, crammed like the proverbial fish in this very dark, very frightening barrel.

Buck didn’t let it happen.  The big man roared and grabbed the thing by the hair.  The zombie’s head was yanked back, and at the same time Christopher grabbed something out of a mountain of debris.  It looked like a fireplace poker.

Why would anyone travel with a poker?

Christopher rammed the thing forward.  Ken saw it in a flash of firelight that seeped like liquid gold from the cabin above.  Not a poker, a ski pole.  Hardly the season for skiing, but some kids in the area trained for skiing year round, using skis with wheels on them and special ski poles with wickedly-pointed ends, suitable for gaining traction on asphalt roads.

The ski pole rammed through the zombie’s trunk, piercing it under its right arm and then going through the soft tissue and emerging between its left ribs.  The thing didn’t make a sound, but thrashed around even harder.  Buck kept one hand secured in the zombie’s hair, kept the thing’s gnashing teeth away from him, but now his other arm went around its chest.  Black-red dirtblood spewed in clots from the thing’s ruptured body.

“Over here!” shouted Aaron.  “Bring it here!”

Christopher and Buck maneuvered the zombie over to the cowboy, who was holding some sort of flat panel up to cover the hole they had all come through.  The way the panel was flapping and bouncing in his hands, it was clear that other things wanted in as well.

“Push it over here when I say.  Hard push,” said Aaron.

Christopher nodded.  Buck grunted.

Aaron took a breath.  “Now!”

Buck and Christopher lurched in a semi-coordinated motion.  The zombie fell forward as Aaron dropped the panel – a long, thin suitcase of some kind – and then Aaron spun around and grabbed the ski pole.  He kept the zombie’s momentum going, pushing the ski pole up and skewering the face of the next zombie trying to ram its way into the baggage hold.

The zombie above went crazy.  Tearing at its own arms and chest, black pebbles of congealed blood flying with dry tac-tac-tacs that sounded like hail to Ken.

Aaron used the moment to push the ski pole through a pair of structural pieces, effectively using the skewered zombie as a blockage.  The thing snapped silently at them, reached for them, but couldn’t get itself free.

Aaron turned around.  Firelight filtered through small holes above them and around the edges of the newly plugged hole just behind him.  Enough that Ken could see the cowboy’s eyes moving slowly around the group.

Ken, laying sprawled on a heap of luggage.  Useless.

Maggie, still holding Liz, crouching a few feet away from him.

Buck, moving to pick up the silent form of Hope.

Christopher, breathing hard as he looked around for some weapon, something useful.

That was it.

“Dorcas,” said Aaron.  Not a question.  A simple entreaty, a prayer of some kind, though Ken couldn’t tell if it was to God or to Dorcas herself or to some other party.  Perhaps Aaron didn’t know either.

Christopher’s movements stopped for a moment.  Everyone’s did.  Maggie and Buck, who hadn’t really known the old farm woman, even seemed to pause for a moment.

The cowboy blinked rapidly a few times.  His eyes remained dry, but he wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.  His bad hand, Ken noticed, though the cowboy didn’t seem to notice the pain it must have caused.  Or maybe he did.  Maybe he needed the pain right then.  Sometimes broken bones were easier.  Sometimes torn flesh was less cruel.

A noise made everyone refocus on the hole.

The zombie whose face Aaron had staved in was gone.  Others had taken its spot.  They were looking at the ski pole, at the body of their fellow pinned in place.  They all had faces that were slick with the black, rotten blood of the undead.  Maybe that was because of the crash, but Ken wanted to believe that it was Dorcas; that the older woman had given a good reckoning of herself.

And they stared at the stuck zombie.  Not confused, exactly.  Ken didn’t understand the look on their faces, but he didn’t like it.  They looked at each other.  Three, maybe four of them – he couldn’t tell for sure in the smoke and the dim light.

Then they looked at the one that was pinned.  And started to pull it apart.  Not angrily.  Not for revenge or spite.

It was just in the way.

And they needed to get inside.

29

“You got any more of them ski poles?” said Aaron.  His voice was perhaps a shade gruffer than usual.  Hard to tell.  But he was calm as always.  No trace of what might be going on in his mind.

That scared Ken, for some reason.  The idea that the zombies would destroy them was terrifying.  The idea that survival meant they would inevitably have to give up what remained of their humanity was almost as bad.

Christopher was tearing through stacks of luggage that had been tossed asunder by the crash.  Some of it had exploded, others looked pristine, at least in the near-dark.

Ken had an insane urge to ask Christopher to remember what kinds of luggage had best weathered the crash.

You know, just in case we all survive and fly to Hawaii.

That made him think of his honeymoon, and Maggie.  He looked at her – a bit proud he was managing to move his head on his own – and saw she was trying to help with the search for a weapon.

Above them, the zombies were yanking the pinned beast to pieces.  Pulling slick bits of flesh off its body with low, wet noises that reminded Ken of stepping on a snail after a rainstorm.  Crackle-krrrssssrip.

The zombie that was being pulled apart didn’t seem to notice it.  It grabbed at the survivors every time one of them wandered too close, and its teeth never stopped snapping.

“Nothing,” said Christopher.  “Just clothes and stuff.”  He was standing in piles of material, looking like he was preparing the world’s worst how-to video on panty raids.

“Nothing here,” said Buck.

“Nothing,” echoed Maggie.

“Come on, then,” said Aaron.  He looked at Christopher.  “You get Ken?”

Christopher nodded, glancing back at the hole.  “The creeps are coming in soon,” he said.  And Ken could see he was right: they had cleared more than half the hole.  The thing that had once been pinned was now falling apart.  Its legs had fallen – still moving – to the luggage.  Soft internal organs had tumbled out.  One of its arms torn off and thrown aside.

One of the zombies pulled off the skewered monster’s head.  Another started to push past it.

“Down we go,” said Aaron.

30

Christopher slung Ken over his shoulder, but the young man didn’t stand up.  None of them did – there was no room to do so.  The baggage area below the cabin was a tiny place, contrary to what Ken had been led to believe by many movies – likely the same ones that had taught him the crap about one’s ability to recover from massive physical injury and deliver devastating scissor-kicks.

So the survivors moved forward into darkness, bent nearly in half, each of them holding onto someone.  Aaron was the only one who didn’t have another human being in his care, and that allowed him to burrow through the tossed suitcases.

Down.

Aaron tossed suitcase after suitcase over his shoulders, descending to one level of Samsonites and TravelPros and Tumis, then pulling that level out from under his own feet and passing it up to Buck, who threw it to Maggie, who tossed it to Christopher.

Christopher then tried his best to pile it behind him.  To make a wall that would seal them away from the undead creatures that were still coming.

Down, down, down. Like moles knowing safety only in darkness; in the depths.

It never went completely black.  The plane was still on fire somewhere above them, and Ken started sweating as the nearby flames grew hotter and hotter.  He wondered if they were close to a fuel source.  He remembered the explosion outside his school when an SUV exploded.  Remembered the heat burning his back and hair, and knew that would be nothing compared to an explosion of jet fuel.

He wondered if Dorcas was one of the things behind them.  If she had been turned.

Probably.

The things were in the baggage compartment now.  They still weren’t vocalizing, but Ken could hear them nonetheless.  Throwing luggage around, looking for their prey.

None of the survivors spoke.  Silent and purposeful as the monsters from which they fled.  They just kept moving down.  Kept pulling up the floor beneath their feet, turning it into a roof over their heads.

Ken wondered if he should pray.  He hadn’t prayed in a while.  He didn’t feel like it now.

What if there was no God?

Even worse, what if there was?  How would someone – even an omniscient being – explain all this?  The loss of the world, the loss of his strength, the loss of his son?

“Damn,” whispered Aaron.

“What?” said Buck.

“End of the line.”

31

Ken still couldn’t move, but a fluting trill seemed to sound in his fingers and toes, panic-stirrings of fear that had not merely weight and feeling, but sound.  He could hear his terror, and the sound was horrific.  Horrific…

… and strangely sweet.

He realized that he could give in to the fear.  No one would blame him if he folded.  He could just give up now.  Not because the things were growling their siren call, but because his world was over.  He could just wrap himself up in the comfort of terror and disappear in fright’s velvet folds.

He could do that.

He could give up.

He didn’t have to do this.

It was appealing.  The world had ended in less than ten minutes.  And now, only six or seven hours later, Ken had already seen two of the group’s bravest members – Dorcas and his son – killed.  Or worse.

What chance did he have?  What future could he look forward to?

Life, he realized in that instant, meant nothing without a hope for tomorrow.  All the past built to the present, and the only purpose for the present was to provide for the future.  His children were his hope.  One was dead.  The other two… changed.

Why should he keep fighting?

He realized he was trying to whisper something.  His lips moving silently, and even he wasn’t sure what he was saying in the widening abyss of his mind.  “Forgive me,” perhaps.  “Leave me.”

“Let me die.”

The others were tearing around the small burrow they had created.  Tossing suitcases and totes left and right.  Maggie looked strange in the near-darkness, a weirdly bulbous creature with Liz hanging from her.  Grunting as she moved things out of the way.

Other noises came from behind Ken.  He was laying where Christopher had put him –

(When did he put me down?)

– something sharp jabbing into his back.  Staring at nothing, at the nothing above him that was as dark as any black hole in the deepest parts of space.

Then the darkness shifted.

Buck grunted somewhere.

“You find anything?” said Aaron in a whisper.

“No.”

The darkness moved again.  Ken had thought it might be his injuries speaking, his loss of blood or the concussions or any of a million other things overriding his senses.  But now he was sure.  The sky of tightly-packed bags and suitcases had shifted.

Fingers poked through.

They were stained.  Smeared with soot and congealed blood.  One of them ended midway to the first knuckle.

The other suitcases moved some more.

One of the things had found them.  The moles had been trapped in their burrow.

32

No one else had noticed.  No one else had heard.

The fingers pushed aside a valise, but the soft bag didn’t move much, jammed up between a tote and a hardside Samsonite bag like Moe, Larry, and Curly wedged into a door.

The fingers – one truncated, all bloody – twitched as they searched for ingress to the burrow.

Ken watched.

I can let it happen.

No one else would know.  Not until too late.  It would be quick.  Probably more merciful than running, too.  What would running get them, after all?

He saw Derek’s face.  The boy throwing back his head and shrieking, blood erupting from the child’s skin as his pores hemorrhaged.  Painful, yes.

But quick.

The fingers looked longer now.  More of them, too.  Another hand?

Christopher made a noise. Not a eureka sound, more of a ”Maybe over here?” grunt.

The luggage shifted a bit more.  The Three Stooges were still wedged together, but Ken could see that wouldn’t last long.

“No, dammit.”  Christopher moved to a different spot.

Just let go.  Go to Derek.

Ken saw his son as he had been.  Beautiful, with blond hair that was so often sopping with sweat, his smile wide and slightly buck-toothed.

But his son wasn’t like that anymore.  He was dead.  Bitten and then fallen into flame.  He was dead.

He had to be.

And if dead then… what?

In Heaven?

One of the finger-tangles became a full-sized hand.  Pushing through.  Ken stared at it.  Wondering if there was a God, if there was a Heaven.

And realized that, right now, that didn’t matter.

He was still breathing.  His wife was still breathing.  His daughters were still alive.  Changed, maybe, but not dead.

Derek had died to save them.  And Ken wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t give in to self-pity and so destroy the entirety of what Derek’s life had built to.

The past builds to the present.  The present serves the future.  And all of us have a purpose.  Derek’s had been to save them.

Ken’s might not be so noble, but he wouldn’t cut off his son’s gift.

He drew in a breath.  It seemed to take all his strength.  Everything he had went into the conscious motion.  Staring at the hands that pushed through the suitcases.  Breathing in.  Opening his mouth.  He couldn’t scream.  Just a wheeze, barely more than a whisper.

“They’re here!”

33

Maggie did scream.  She saw the fingers, she must have.  Either that or the wall of bags that Christopher had made, rippling like it was possessed.

Only possession was simple.  Just ghosts.  A little holy water, a stern-eyed priest with a heart of gold and you were fine, right?

This was something far worse than mere demons.  Far more evil than anything the Devil might conjure forth.

Christopher stumbled toward the moving luggage.  It wasn’t far to go in the confined space, but it seemed to take forever for him to lurch up the slanting cargo hold.  He wedged his foot against some bent metal, then pressed his back into the bags the undead were pushing against.  His nose was swollen and crooked where Ken had punched him earlier after being hit with one too many shots of adrenaline.  His lips and chin and shirt were stained with blood.  He looked almost as bad as some of the things that were trying to get to them.

Only his eyes betrayed his full humanity.  The zombies – undead or alive – didn’t have the capacity for the kind of fear Ken saw in Christopher’s gaze.

“Find a way out,” said Christopher.  He grunted and grit his teeth as something bore down on him from behind.  Luggage started to fall down into the hollow space around the survivors like a slow-motion avalanche.

Christopher threw his arms out.  Trying to provide as much coverage as possible.

One of his arms went near the questing hands that had already broken through.  The fingers grabbed his arm.  Clawed and raked at him.  Christopher cried out as the hands pulled and pushed and scratched.  Ken heard tearing as the young man’s shirtsleeve ripped.

Blood started dripping off Christopher’s arm.  But he didn’t move away.  Just let the things dig into the meat of his body as though he was not only willing but absolutely determined to serve as the hors d’oeuvre in the things’ upcoming feast.

Ken heard the others moving frantically.  Maggie and Aaron and Buck tossing suitcases left and right, all stealth discarded in favor of speed as they searched for a way out.

Ken couldn’t move.  He just watched Christopher.  Picked apart a single cell at a time.  He remembered the things pulling apart the zombie that Aaron had pinned in their way.  Wondered how long it would take Christopher to suffer the same fate.  And saw in the other man’s eyes that he was wondering the same thing.

But there was more, too.  There was determination.  Christopher wasn’t going to move.  He would remain there until he died, until blood loss forced him to fall.

Another person sacrificing a future for people he had never really gotten to know.  Like Dorcas.

And just as with Dorcas, Ken could do nothing.  Nothing but watch.

Then he felt hands grabbing him.  Yanking him.

He wanted to scream.  Knowing the things must have found another way in.  But he had exhausted the last bit of his energy calling out to warn the others.

He had nothing left.  No voice.  No strength.

He saw Christopher’s eyes.  Open wide and knowing what was coming.  Seeing the future clearly.

And not unhappy.

34

The fingers wrapped around Ken’s stomach, his arm.

He waited for the bite.

It didn’t come.

Instead, the fingers tightened around him and then pulled him away from the things he had been laying on.  He saw that the thing that had jabbed into his back had been a guitar case.

For some reason that seemed terribly important.

Then the hands spun him around and he was facing Buck.  The gray-faced older man was panting with the effort of pulling Ken’s dead weight.  His eyes flicked over Ken’s shoulders.

“Go,” said Christopher, and Ken could no longer hear the guy but could hear the strain in his voice.  How many of the things was he holding back?  How long could he hold out?

Buck seemed to have the same questions on his mind.  The big man hesitated, then began to put Ken down.

“Don’t!” Christopher half-shouted.

“I can hold them longer,” said Buck.

Christopher laughed.  At least, Ken thought it was a laugh.  It was an explosion of air, as though Christopher had started laughing and gotten gut-punched mid-chuckle.  “Now you tell me.”  Ken heard the young man grunt again.  “No way to change places, Bucky.”

“It’s just Buck.”

Another grunt.  “I know.  But you look like a Bucky.”  Sounds of shifting, and a bag fell on Ken.  “Get going, man.”

Buck hesitated.  Then nodded.  He started pulling Ken downward, farther into the burrow the survivors had created.  He paused a moment.

“Don’t,” said Christopher.  “Just go.”  Another grunt, and this one sounded weaker.  The sound of someone whose will was strong, but whose body was going to give out soon.  “Take care of yourself, Bucky.”

Christopher laughed.  A real laugh, not a punch-to-the-kidneys laugh.

It was the laugh that followed Ken into the darkness as Buck pulled him away from the things.  Down into black.  Into nothing.  But away from the monsters.

Away from a friend.

35

The next moments were nothing but confusion for Ken.  Pain had wrapped thick cotton around his senses, making it difficult to parse out what was happening.  There was darkness.  Faraway sounds of flame.  Movement.

Buck pulled him down – Ken thought it was down – then over something that jabbed hard at his ribs as he was dragged over it.

“Where are you?” said Buck.

“Here!”  Both Maggie and Aaron answered in unison.  Ken heard thudding.

Buck altered course.  Pulling Ken with him.

Behind them, from the dark place they had just abandoned, Christopher screamed.  Just once.  A short, sharp shriek that knifed through the darkness.

Buck moved faster.  Dragging Ken over, then down.  A sudden drop and he felt himself hit something hard and with a smell he remembered from somewhere.  Smelled like… like the time he and Maggie had a blowout on the way home from a camping trip.  Before Derek came along, just the two of them and they were so poor back then.  Poor but happy.  Ken changed the tire but they didn’t get moving.  They got a blanket out of the car and went into the woods and made love.

The thing under Ken was a tire.  Big.

Landing gear.

Ken felt a flicker of hope.  Landing gear had to be lowered.  So maybe there was a way out of this.  A way to escape the things behind them.

Buck flipped him over.  Propped him up.  Ken found himself staring at Hope.  She was slumped, still unconscious or comatose or whatever it was.

Was she even Hope anymore?

He didn’t know.  He hoped so.

“Leave me.”

Ken was amazed he had managed to say the words, but glad.  It made no sense for Buck to be hauling him along like this.  No sense for the big man and the others to risk the group to save dead weight, someone who was shutting down.

Dying.

Ken couldn’t see Buck’s face in the dark.  Couldn’t see much of anything.  But he heard the big older man hiss angrily.  “Don’t ever say that again,” he said.  “Kids need their parents.”

The big shape in the darkness moved.  Stopped.  “Don’t ever say that again,” it repeated.

Buck left.  The thudding that had been coming from the same direction Maggie’s and Aaron’s voices had come from increased.  Like Buck was helping bang on something.

Behind, in the cargo hold, there was a huge, cluttered pounding.  Not just one or two bags this time.  Lots of them, all falling at once.

Christopher must have given out.

Go with God, man.

Still the thuds ahead.  And behind, the sounds of hands and feet.  Crawling.  The undead did not speak, but their limbs made noise as they moved impossibly in the dark.

He looked at Hope again.

Her eyes were open.  Or maybe he only imagined it.  Maybe he only imagined the glitter in the darkness, the momentary flicker of light reflecting from eyes that shone like those of a coyote in the wild.

Then something grabbed Hope.  Lifted her away.

Ken was alone.

Alone in the dark, with only his thoughts and the sounds of the scuttling undead for company.

36

A moment later Ken was grabbed again.  This time he managed to convince himself not to panic internally.  Even though he could hear the things coming to him.  Even though he knew they were close.

He just let himself relax.  Let himself go with whatever was happening.

Not like he could do much more, regardless.  He managed to keep his eyes open, but didn’t have much more juice than that.

He heard huffing and puffing.  That calmed his nerves a bit.  It had to be Buck.  Maybe Aaron, but probably Buck.  Certainly not one of the undead things behind him… as far as he could tell, they didn’t breathe.

He wondered if he was changing into one of them.  Maybe it wasn’t just his injuries that were getting to him.

He’d been bitten, after all.

And as soon as he thought that it seemed like his arm caught fire.  The half-circle where the teeth had broken his flesh burned like a brand.  He would have screamed if he could have, if he’d had strength to do so.

But there was no strength.  Just exhaustion.  Pain.

Ken’s head bounced off something.  Not luggage or the huge wheel of the plane.  Something hard.

He didn’t make a sound.  Just listened to his heartbeat crashing in his ears.  Listened to Buck panting as the big man pulled him… where?

No sooner did Ken ask the question than his forward motion ceased.  He couldn’t see anything.  But he could hear the sounds of the undead as they crawled close behind, searching in death-silence for their prey.

Close.

The meaty sound of bloody flesh on metal.

Would Christopher be among them?  Changed from friend to enemy and taking his place at the front of the undead?

Buck started pulling Ken again.  Over, then Ken dropped.

But not before he saw two of the undead coming at him.

37

Ken dropped, and expected the fall would be a short one.  A few inches into some depression in the plane’s tortured structure.  Instead, he fell what felt like several feet.  He couldn’t do anything to stop the fall, didn’t even have the strength to throw out his arms in the instinctive reaction born in every human.

He was careening through space, and helpless to stop it.  Helpless to even try.  Locked into himself, into a mind that had only pain and terror as its companions.

Then something caught him.  Hands – too many to just be Buck.

Ken felt himself slung up.  Still a ragdoll, a bit of nothing masquerading as a man.

He saw Aaron.  Maggie.  They had caught him.

He saw Hope, propped against a broken piece of pavement and –

Pavement?

A thud announced the arrival of someone else.  New, larger hands grabbed him.  Ken felt his arm slung over a beefy shoulder and Buck said, “Let’s get moving.”

“What about the other one?” said Maggie.  “The young guy?”

Ken saw Aaron pick up Hope.  She still lolled.  But Ken was less interested in that than in the fact that she was outside.

They were outside the plane.

They had made it.

“We should get going,” said Buck.  His tone made it clear what had happened to “the young guy.”

Maggie made a strange hitching sound.  Almost a sob.  Ken wondered why she would be so upset about losing Christopher when she hadn’t even known him long enough to remember his name.

Was it just the loss of a person?  Or more?  Had she sensed what an amazing young man he was, even in the few moments they had interacted?

Buck started moving.  Ken found he could keep his head upright, though it hurt from the base of his spine to the top of his head when he did.  It would have been easier to let his head droop.

But he didn’t want to.  He had to see.

More than that, he had to keep his head up.  He couldn’t fight, couldn’t even run.  Chances were he was going to die soon.  But he could face his fate with his head held high.  He couldn’t fight off the hordes the way Dorcas had done, couldn’t use his body as a shield like Christopher had.  He couldn’t even get between a zombie and his loved ones the way Derek had.

But he could at least face his fate.

So he kept his head up.  Kept his eyes open.

The plane had smashed right through the ground, pounding the sidewalk and pavement into chunks that lay all around them.  Fires were everywhere, which was a good thing, because without them it would have been impossible to see anything.

Darkness had finally fallen.

It had been less than a day since the change had swept through the world.  Less than twelve hours, and almost everyone was dead.

“Hurry up,” said Aaron.  The cowboy was moving at a fair clip, followed closely by Maggie.

“Wait,” said Buck.  The big man wasn’t panting as hard as he had in the plane, but he was moving so slowly that Ken guessed he was almost out of energy.

“We don’t have time to mess around,” said Aaron.

“We’re not,” said Buck.  “I’m looking for something.”

He turned, drawing Ken with him.  Ken heard him say, “I know it’s around here somewhere….”

They turned back to the plane.

And saw the undead had found their exit.  A full dozen of them were loping toward them.  Not as fast as the zombies that were recently-changed humans, not by far.

But fast.  Too fast for a bunch of mangled survivors holding onto children and cripples to escape.

38

Aaron pitched Hope at Maggie.  Ken thought his daughter was going to fall, but Maggie caught her at the last second, juggling her so that she was wrapped around the equally-unconscious shape of her other daughter.

“What are you doing?” she said.  Her voice was harsh, grating.  Ken had always loved her voice.  From the first time he heard it, he thought it sounded like wind in the trees and a roaring fireplace and simmering stew and a million other things that all said home.  Now, though, terror had razed the home from her voice and left it desolate.  Ken would have cried if all his energy wasn’t devoted to the simple acts of keeping his eyes open and his head upright.

Aaron didn’t answer.  But Ken knew what he was doing.  Knew even before the cowboy wended between the remaining survivors and took up position between them and the zombies.

“Go,” he said.  No panic, no screaming.  Just a single word in a voice that was used to being obeyed.

Maggie turned away automatically, one child cinched to her stomach and the other clutched to her chest.  Her chest heaved as though she was sobbing, but Ken saw no tears on her soot-stained face.

Buck did not turn.  He kept casting his eyes around.  Looking for something.

Aaron glared at the gray man.  Buck ignored him.  Then got a look on his face that Ken thought was terribly out of place.  Excitement.  Happiness, even.

“There,” said Buck.

Ken didn’t see what the man had seen.  He didn’t care, either.  He was watching Aaron.  The cowboy/rodeo clown/whatever-he-really-was was tough.  Tough and more dangerous than anyone Ken had ever met.

Tough… but he had to be tired.

Dangerous… but he only had full use of one hand.

And neither of those things mattered, because there was no way he could stand against a dozen undead things.

The first of them was five feet away from the cowboy.

Maggie was hobbling away with their children.  She threw a look over her shoulder, shock rippling her features.  “Come on,” she said.

Buck darted toward her.  But not to follow.  He grabbed her.  Stopped her.

She screamed.

Using his free hand, Buck pulled her back.  Back toward the danger.  Toward the zombies.

The first of them reached Aaron.

39

“Let me go!  Let me go, let me go!”  Maggie was screaming and kicking, but she couldn’t do much more than that without either dropping Hope or losing her balance.  So Buck just yanked her backwards, her feet dragging intermittently as she raised one foot to kick, then dropped it quickly before she keeled over.

“Shut up,” he snapped.

“Don’t tell me to –“

Buck shook her.  Hard.  Ken could feel the jerk through the big man’s trunk, and it jerked his mouth hard enough he bit his tongue.  Blood flowed into his mouth.  Not a thing he could do about it, though.  He could barely keep his eyes open.

And it was getting harder to keep his head upright.

Sounds behind them indicated that Aaron was fighting.  Trying to buy them time to run.  Time Buck was determined not to let them use.

Was the big man trying to make them commit some strange sort of suicide?

He’s lost it.  Lost his world, lost his mom.  Decided to take us with him.

Aaron grunted.  Not in pain.  Not yet.  Something crashed into what sounded like a board, accompanied by the noise of rending wood.  Ken figured the undead couldn’t vomit acid like their “living” cousins – at least, they hadn’t yet done so – but they were still fast and strong.

And they wanted to kill the survivors.

Buck kept dragging Maggie back.  She tried to speak again, and he shook her again.  “Shut up,” he grunted.  Then yanked her close to him and said, “Look up.”

She did.  Gasped.

Ken looked up as well, though it took him longer.

They’d been in the plane for no more than thirty minutes.  But like everything that had happened since the universe flung itself off its axis, time had taken on an insane quality.  Ken had almost forgotten that they had entered the plane for a reason.

Running.

Fleeing from two hundred thousand zombies – the kind that had converted from living humans – that had followed them into the Wells Fargo Center.  Had coated its walls like a living oil slick.  An infestation.

And those zombies, the living zombies, were still looking for the survivors.

No, that’s wrong.  They’re not looking.  They’ve found us.

40

As soon as Ken saw this, he also realized why Buck had pulled Maggie back.  The plane had fallen into the street, had jammed into the pavement and asphalt.  There were pieces of metal and plastic everywhere, butting right up to the building across the street.  The body of the plane itself effectively created a blind alley from which Maggie had been trying to escape.

But escape to what?

Nothing good: the side of the One Capital Center building they had entered the plane from was completely coated with zombies from the third floor up.  So was the building across the street.  Ken couldn’t see any glass or masonry.  Just bodies interlocked, clinging impossibly to sheer sides of buildings.  Some were broken and bleeding black ichor, others appeared nearly whole.

But they were everywhere.  And they continued on to the edges of both buildings, curling around the building faces.  Maggie had been running right to more of the things, and the only reason she hadn’t seen them was the combination of smoke in the artificial alley and the fact that they were still about fifty feet overhead.

But Ken knew height wouldn’t matter much.  They would toss themselves down at the survivors.  He had seen it happen before.  And there was no way they could resist and onslaught of thousands of the things in this tight space.

Aaron was still fighting.  At least, Ken assumed he was.  Not screaming, at any rate.  Grunting, though the sounds he was making were getting more and more ragged.  Desperate-sounding even in their near-silence.

There was nowhere to go.

Why aren’t they jumping?

His mind tossed the question at him before he realized it, like a surprise throw to first base, coming so fast it catches not only the runner but the baseman by surprise.  It took a half-second to process, and in that half-second Maggie noticed the same thing.

“They’re not moving,” she said.

Buck looked up.  He grunted, a sound that was half confusion and half relief.

The things were everywhere.  Ken and the others were theirs for the killing.

But Maggie was right: they weren’t moving.  Just hanging there.  Not even watching.  It was like the zombies – all but the undead ones that had followed from the plane – had shut down for the time being, like machines that had lost their power source.

“What the hell is happening?” Buck said.

Aaron screamed.  Everyone turned.

Aaron had positioned himself between a broken chunk of concrete the size of a car and a section of wing, trying to create a bottleneck.  Two zombies lay on the ground in front of him, twitching, slowly getting to their feet.

A third tackled Aaron.  The cowboy went down.  Trying to keep the undead thing’s teeth away as it silently bore down on him.

Aaron had only one good hand.

The undead thing had two.

And another of the undead grabbed Aaron’s cowboy boots and began chewing at them.  Worrying them like a pit bull attacking a meal.

A fourth dove onto Aaron’s stomach.  Ken saw that the cowboy’s shirt had ridden up, exposing a thin slice of flesh.

The thing opened its mouth.  It seemed to smile.

Aaron looked back at the other survivors.  “Run, you idiots,” he said.

Ken knew that was the man’s goodbye.

41

A flurry of thoughts went through Ken’s mind.

Where would they go, with the hundreds of thousands of zombies everywhere around them?

Buck should drop Ken and run – there was no chance for Maggie and the others if they were dragging him behind them.

Ken couldn’t do anything.  He couldn’t even tell Buck to let go of him.  He was just fighting to stay awake.  Fighting to watch.  As though knowing what happened to his family and to himself would be some kind of mercy.

What a joke.

All those thoughts flashed through Ken’s brain with the speed and violence of an electric shock.

Then he heard the roar.  Loud, terrifying.

But it was not the roar that had come to define his world in the last few hours.  Not the sound of the zombie horde, growling their siren song of despair.  No, this was a sound that belonged even less to this part of the world.

Still, it was a sound that Ken had heard.  One that he knew.

A white and black blur bulleted into the alley.  It passed Maggie and Buck, seeming not to notice them, rocketing at the things that were now coating the still-screaming Aaron.

The roar intensified.  It split.  Ken realized that he was hearing – and now seeing – not one creature, but two.  Creatures as out of place in downtown Boise as the zombies were.  Animals who walked the frozen steppes of Russia, the Himalayan mountains of Tibet.  But Ken knew them.

He had seen the creatures dozens of times.

They were snow leopards.

42

“What in God’s name is happening?”

No one answered Buck’s question, which sounded outraged more than surprised.  Like he had reached his limit on things he was prepared to deal with and was now going to start complaining to whoever was in charge.

Ken stared, of course.  It was all he could do.  Maggie was silent as well.

The cats tore into the mass of bodies that had obscured Aaron from view.  They growled and screeched, occasionally hissing as they moved.  They weren’t as big as lions or tigers – Ken knew that the male was about one hundred and twenty pounds, the female perhaps ninety – but what there was of them was bone, muscle, claw, and tooth.

“Are those from the zoo?” Maggie said in a breathless whisper.

Ken couldn’t answer to anyone but himself.  But he was sure she was right.  The snow leopards had been given to the Boise Zoo as cubs, and Ken had taken the family to see them time and again.  They must have escaped their enclosures somehow.

Their cats’ paws, so soft-looking when Ken had seen them with the kids, now showed the claws sheathed in their pads.  They batted the zombies away from Aaron, the male sending half-dried blood dribbling in dirty clots as it eviscerated one zombie with a powerful swipe of its forepaw, the female grabbing another’s head in her jaws and crushing it with a powerful snap.

The zombie the female had mangled went mad, of course.  Black-red gore squashed out of the snow leopard’s mouth, staining her muzzle and at the same time the zombie freed itself.

Aaron was pulling himself away from the melee.  Shock deepened the wrinkles of his face, his eyes open so wide the whites were visible all the way around the irises.  His jaw hung nearly to his chest as he crabwalked away from where the snow leopards fought off the eight zombies that were still unbroken enough to stand.

“What… what… what…?” he kept saying.  All the way back to the other survivors.

“Are you bitten?” said Buck.  He said it almost as an afterthought.  His eyes were still glued to the snow leopards.

“No.”  Aaron remained on his butt.  Staring.  One of the undead lurched past the cats, tried to get to the survivors.  The male snow leopard took it down, slamming into it from behind, then severing its spine with a powerful bite to the base of the skull.  The zombie twitched.  The cat kept biting, burrowing into and through its trunk.

“We should… go….”  Maggie’s voice had a dreamlike quality, as though she wasn’t sure if she was awake or not.

Ken wasn’t sure either.  He didn’t think he was dreaming, but maybe he was insane.  That would make sense, wouldn’t it?  All this was just stress, just the lunatic dreams of a madman.

He wished it.  But knew it wasn’t so.

Buck nodded.  He leaned down and lifted Aaron up.  “Yeah,” he said.  His voice sounded like Maggie’s: distant and lost.  Hoping someone would pinch him and say it was all right, none of it was real and it was time to wake up.

Ken remembered Derek coming to his and Maggie’s room in the night, shivering in his underwear, terrified of a bad dream.  Curled up between them in the bed and Ken whispering that it was all right, that the bad dreams were just dreams and the monsters weren’t real.

But he had been wrong.  So wrong.  The monsters were real.  They killed his son, not in his bed, but in broad daylight.

Ken watched the female snow leopard savage another undead zombie that was trying to get past it.

“Does it seem like…?” said Buck.

Aaron nodded.  “Like they’re fighting on our side or something.  Yeah.”

Then, as one, the undead fell.  The ones who had already fallen – the ones on the street who were twitching and injured, but still trying to move toward Ken and the survivors – ceased their motion.

“What just happened?” said Buck.

The snow leopards continued tearing into the suddenly-still corpses for a moment.  No longer the serene white and black cats Ken remembered seeing so often at the zoo, but rather black and crimson, like warriors that had painted themselves in preparation for coming conflict.

Ken felt himself tense, if only mentally, as the cats looked at the survivors.  But neither of the snow leopards made a move toward them.

The male looked up.

So did Aaron.  “Oh, dammit.”

The female didn’t look up.  She seemed to be looking straight at Maggie.

Ken couldn’t look up to see what the male snow leopard was staring at; what Aaron had cursed.  He was out of gas.  He felt hot, flushed all over.  Probably infection, maybe total systemic shutdown.  Either way, he didn’t have the energy to raise his head beyond a level plane.

But he could look at Maggie.  And realized the female cat wasn’t watching his wife.  The cat was staring at Hope and Liz.  At his daughters.

Both of them were awake.  Eyes rolled back.  Panting.

Smiling.

And Ken knew what Aaron had cursed about.  Knew it even before he heard the movement above, before he heard the first wet clonk of a body shattering against broken concrete.

The zombies – the dangerous, fast, living ones – were moving again.

43

Ken had been in several hailstorms, only one of which was dangerous.  He and Maggie had been out sledding during Christmas break before they got married.  Fully in love, ready to start a life together, and neither noticed how far they had gotten from their car, or how dark it was getting.

The first hail fell and they ran for the car.  But the snow was thick.  The car seemed to have moved away from them.

The hail came down in golf ball-sized stones that were hard enough to crack limbs from the nearby trees.  One hit Ken in the shoulder and he thought for certain he’d broken his collarbone.

They got to the car and found the front windshield with three long splits running its length.  They didn’t dare to drive until the storm passed.  Just huddled and hoped that the hail wouldn’t shatter the safety glass completely.

It was terrifying.  The only good part had been the fact that Maggie didn’t get touched.  That… and the fact that she insisted on kissing the spot he had been hit, “to make it better.”  So on the whole it turned out all right in retrospect.

But the sound of hail falling, of things tumbling from the sky with enough velocity and force to shatter bone, had remained in his dreams for a long time.

And it was nothing compared to the sound of bodies letting go of the walls of the buildings above.  The noise of a fleshy tidal wave as they sloughed away from the concrete and plummeted to earth.

Buck was already pulling them toward the building across the street.  And that was madness, because the zombies that had let go were already standing.  Lurching up on legs that were broken, the bones sticking straight out of their sheared flesh.  Pushing up on arms that had so many breaks they looked almost like the segmented tails of scorpions.

Many of the things – more than before – had the scaly growths on their bodies.  A lot of them covered the things’ eyes, though Ken knew that they would be able to zero in on the survivors just the same.

The things that had fallen were moving slowly.  Picking themselves up and shifting as though trying to figure out how to adjust for the broken parts of their bodies.

Ken noted one of the zombies.  It had broken legs, two limbs that jutted out in forty-five degree angles from its hips, then jerked back inward at mid-femur.  Shattered bones, there was no doubt.

But as Ken watched, the thing’s legs straightened.  He thought he could hear crackles.  The thing leaned over and vomited the same yellow goo that they had been using to build walls and seal in Ken’s family in the Wells Fargo Center all over its legs.

A cast?  Some kind of healing solution?

Ken didn’t know.  Whatever it was, the thing seemed to move faster with each step.

They all did.

The broken creatures were healing.

Ken looked down the road.  The tidal wave of zombies had collected there, especially.  A clot of broken, shattered, deadly once-humanity that completely cut off the survivors from any escape.

They were ringed in.

Some of the zombies were vomiting on themselves.  Worse, some of them were puking on others, like medics seeing to the wounded.  Working together to be in top condition to eradicate the enemy.  Another evolutionary step in an enemy that was already beyond dangerous and yet kept finding new ways to become even more terrible.

Many of the fallen zombies had shattered so badly they could move only feebly.

But most of the things were already walking or crawling or slithering toward the survivors.

44

Ken was moving toward the things.  Moving toward them, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

Because he had no strength.  Buck was holding him up completely.  And toward them was where Buck was going.

“Get over here!” snapped the big man.  He sounded different.  It wasn’t just that the petulance and self-entitled whine was gone, either.  He sounded… stronger.

And to Ken’s surprise, both Maggie and Aaron moved to follow him.  Buck tossed Ken into Aaron’s arms, then knelt and started pushing a piece of crumbling concrete to the side.

“What are you doing?” said Maggie.

“This is why I wanted to come down here in the first place,” said Buck.  Ken had forgotten that.  Had forgotten that it was Buck who had been the first one to advocate going into the plane.

He knew.  Knew about something down here.

The muscles in the back of the big man’s neck bulged.  He exhaled in a steady stream.  The concrete started to rasp against whatever was under it.  Moving an inch at a time.

Aaron put Ken down.  Moved to help Buck.

Ken could see up.  The zombies streaming down from the sides of the buildings, moving lower and then dropping.  Lit by the still-burning plane.

Above them, dimly visible through clouds of smoke… stars.  The sky had taken no notice of humanity’s demise.

The grinding noise stopped.  “What’s that?” said Aaron.

Buck shifted and started moving whatever had been under the concrete.  This time the noise was metallic.  “Storm drain access.”  More noise.

The zombies started growling.

Give up.

Give in.

Ken heard his daughters start to laugh.  Then scream.  He didn’t try to look at them.  Didn’t want to see.

“Get in,” said Buck.  “Hurry.”

Ken felt himself dragged.  Then stop, then dragged again, pulled into a hole.

Down again.  Down the elevator shaft, down the plane, down into the ground.

Where will we go when we can’t go down anymore?

The growling took on a different tone as he dropped into the darkness.  Not just the call to despair: there was rage, too.  And something else.  Something even darker.  Something he dared not think about, for fear it would drive him mad, or just kill him outright.

Ken was in Aaron’s arms.  Maggie stood beside the cowboy, holding their children –

(Are they our children?  Or something else?)

– protectively, both of them ankle-deep in running water.

Ken realized he must be standing in the water, too.  But he couldn’t feel it.  Couldn’t feel anything below his thighs.  Everything was just cold.

Buck dropped down into the tunnel.  It was barely tall enough to let him stand.  He reached up to grab the metal grid that still lay partially over the entrance.

And a hand grabbed his.

45

Buck screamed.  So did Maggie.  Aaron twitched, and Ken could feel the sudden indecision in the cowboy: hang onto Ken, or help Buck?

Buck started batting at the hand, still screaming.

The hand started hitting him back, flailing at Buck like the two were engaged in the most over-the-top slap-fight ever.  Ken thought that was odd.  The zombies were more of the claw-at-you/pull-you-to-pieces school of fighting.

This kind of thing – what Ken’s high school students would have called a series of bitch-slaps – were not their style.

“Stop it.  Stop it, dammit!”

Buck kept screaming.  Kept slapping, even when the hand disappeared.  Even when the feet popped into the hole.

Even when Christopher dropped down among them.

“Christopher!” Aaron screamed, and dragged Ken across the sluicing water in a huge, leaping step in order to engulf the young man in a one-armed hug.  He let go and Ken caught a glimpse of Christopher’s grin.  Then Buck hugged him.  An even bigger hug.

“How did you –“  Aaron looked on the verge of tears.  He swallowed audibly.  “They were coming in.”

Christopher shrugged.  “I held ‘em off.  Tried to fight them when they got through.  But they didn’t seem like they cared about hurting me.  Just wanted past me.”  He felt at his right arm for a moment, and Ken saw that his shirt sleeve was a mass of tears, the flesh of his arm shredded and rent as well.  Then Christopher shrugged.  “They just forgot I was there.”

“So Dorcas….”  The hope in Aaron’s voice was apparent.

Christopher’s smile disappeared.  He shook his head.  “No.”

“But they left you.”

“I went around the side of the plane.  She was there.  She was… not her anymore.”  He put a hand on Aaron.

Aaron puckered his lips, then nodded.  “It’s what she wanted.”  He looked away, looking up and down the storm drain tunnel.  “We should –“  He cut off suddenly.  Looked back at Christopher.  “What were you doing on the side of the plane?”

Christopher’s mouth rounded into a geometrically perfect circle of surprise.  He bolted toward the opening he had just come through.  Reached up.

Something thumped. An explosion.

Then louder.  Closer.

Ken couldn’t feel the water below him.  But he felt the ground leap up below them all.  It sent him rocketing into the ceiling.  Or maybe it was the ceiling that was punching its way down, slamming into the survivors.

Ken thought he saw something slip through the storm drain opening.

Zombie.

Then his head collided with something hard.

The darkness cocooned him.  Enfolded him.

Took him away.

46

Ken woke up and didn’t know how long he’d been asleep.

He couldn’t see anything.  His eyes were open – he was fairly certain of it – but all was dark.

Still underground.  The storm tunnel.

His back was wet.  He thought it was probably blood.

I’m bleeding out.  This is it.

Then he realized that the fluid was flowing too fast to be coming from him.  He was shivering, too.  Wet, cold.  He might not bleed out after all, but he couldn’t move.  So he’d either drown if the water level rose any higher or just die of hypothermia.

How long does it take to freeze to death?

He tried to remember.  Not that it would do much good, since he had no control over his body.

Still, his mind dug into memory.  It is the nature of human beings to assert control, even where the control is only over their own minds.  Even where the control offers no real hope.  Even where the control is only an illusion.

The world was ending, Ken was dying, and he focused everything he had left on remembering what hypothermia would do.

The hapkido studio he’d gone to for years invited first responders in from time to time to talk about emergency procedures – first aid, what to do in case of a fire, things like that.  The master teacher believed self-defense was more than kicking and punching, it was learning how to put out a grease fire, knowing where the closest police stations were located.

One of the people had been a paramedic who talked briefly about what to do if caught outside in the snow.

And just like that, Ken’s mind clicked to that moment.  “Hypothermia takes a while to set in,” said the paramedic, a kid who looked like he was barely out of high school, complete with acne scars and the wiry body of a still-developing young man.  But he spoke with ease and confidence.  “The military has done studies showing people can be outside in freezing temperatures wearing next to nothing and be all right as long as they keep moving.”

The man looked at the group, grinning a wide, good-natured grin.  Ken realized the paramedic was probably dead now.

“Of course, that’s if you’re outside.  You fall into cold water, or you’re injured, chances go down.  A lot.  So don’t do that.”

The class laughed.

Ken didn’t laugh.  Not then, not now.  He shivered.  The black around him seemed to grow heavier.  He didn’t think the water was rising, but he didn’t know for sure: he realized he couldn’t feel it any more.  He was just numb.

Then a wave of heat swept over him.  He was still cold, still freezing, but he felt hot as well.

A part of him wondered how that was possible.

Another part of him knew he was sick.  Infected from his wounds, from the water, from the dirt and grime.

Dying.

He tried to call for help in the darkness.  Couldn’t.

No one was there.

After everything that had happened, all he had gone through, he wasn’t even going to be able to die with his family.

Were they even alive?  Had the explosion –

(What happened?  What blew up?  It was big, bigger than when the SUV blew up near the high school, that’s for sure.)

– killed his wife?  His daughters?  What about Aaron and Christopher and Buck?  Had Dorcas made it?  Derek?

Dorcas and Derek are gone.  Changed.

He shivered again.  His tongue felt swollen.

Cold and hot and cold and hot and cold and hot….

Something moved in the darkness.  A splash, barely audible over the sound of Ken’s own shivering.  He realized he was almost thrashing in the tunnel, a half-beached whale on a concrete shore.

The splashing grew closer.

Ken hoped it was his family.  Maggie or one of the other survivors.  But he knew better.  There was something alien about the way the thing was approaching.  Something inhuman.  Predatory.

He tried to scream again.

The scream resounded only in his mind.

47

The darkness grew cloying, heavy.  It had its own scent, its own life.  It pressed on Ken’s chest, pushing down on him with such force that it grew hard to draw air.  The zombies had stolen his son, the change had stolen his world, and now the darkness itself had come to rob him of his last breath.

And the thing in the dark, the monster that prowled unseen… drew closer.

The weight on Ken’s chest grew, and he realized it was terror.

Why now?  Why so afraid?

He didn’t understand.  He had been on the run since the world changed, since what he was starting to think of as the Change.  Never a moment without danger, without fear.  He had seen his family tormented, seen his son turned and then fall a hundred feet into an inferno.

And he was more afraid now than he had ever been.

Why now?

Was it the fever?  The injuries?

The dark?

The water slipped and sloshed around him.  He felt the monster in the dark, questing, searching.  He remembered the instant before the explosion, the glimpse of something slipping in through the tunnel’s entry point.

One of them.  It had to be.

Why am I so afraid?

Because you’re alone.

He knew it was true.  People are designed to be together.  Even as they quarreled over rights to their own space, even as they fought genocidal wars over everything from minerals to metaphysics, the first thing any conqueror did was to go out among the populace.  To become one with them.  Because every person craved companionship.  Because every human, no matter how holy or how corrupt, feared dying alone.

I miss my family.

The thing in the darkness was right over Ken.  He could feel it there.  And he was glad that Maggie and the girls were… wherever they were.  Glad, but he also wished they were here.  Even if that meant they would suffer his fate, there was a small piece of him that wanted someone to hold his hand at the end.

No.  I’m glad they’re gone.

The thing bowed down.

Ken felt teeth dig into his shoulder.  He had time for one more thing.  One more moment before he would be gone.  Not time for running in a sick, broken body.  Not time for screaming with a mouth that refused to follow his commands.  He would go out alone, with only his thoughts for company.

He did not wish for others to die to be with him.

He wished them safety.  Peace.  Life.

I love you, Mags.

48

Ken opened his eyes.

He saw nothing.

Am I dead?

No.  He couldn’t be.  Heaven wouldn’t be dark like this.

Hell?

No.  He didn’t think so.

He hurt all over, but that in itself told him he was alive.  Shivering, but no longer numb.  He felt as though he was on fire: a cold flame that seared him the way dry ice would have done.

He wasn’t wet anymore.  He heard water nearby, but he wasn’t laying in it.

He heard something rumble.  Felt something warm beside him.  Soft and vaguely comforting.  Whatever it was moved.

Ken fell asleep.

49

“What the –“

“Don’t get too close.”

“What’s it doing to him?”

“Don’t know.”

“Someone do something.”

“Like what?”

The voices came into the darkness.  A light flashed across Ken’s face.  Then disappeared.  The voices faded.

50

Something was pushing into his mouth.

Ken heard the words, echoing through half-collapsed synaptic corridors: “What’s it doing to him?”  Heard the words and though the words were only in his mind he transposed them over this moment and knew that something new was happening.  The things were doing something to him.

The thing pried his teeth apart.

Ken tried to shake his head.  He was still shivering, and all he managed to do was shiver a bit harder.  Weak.

The thing pushed at him in the darkness.  Tentacular feelers pressing into his mouth, feeling his tongue, probing into him.

He gagged.  Bit down.

Something screamed.

The tentacles yanked on him.  Jerked his face left and right.  He felt the digits go down his throat.  Deep.  Deep.

They left something there.  Some foreign object.

Don’t swallow it.  Don’t swallow.  Don’t….

He passed out.

51

He woke, he slept.  He woke, he slept.

Occasionally there were flashes of light, but mostly it was dark, black as pure and deep as any oceanic abyss.

Things moved around him.  Pressed at him.  Forced their way into his mouth, into his throat.

He woke, he slept.

He tried to cry but could make no sound.

He woke, he slept.

Wondering what was being done to him.  What he was changing into.

He woke, he slept.

And then only slept.

52

When Ken opened his eyes again, he could see.  Not much, but enough.  He was still in the darkness.  Still underground.

A zombie was leaning over him.  Its face caked by gore and dirt, its mouth hanging open.  Bending closer.

Ken’s panicked brain sent a message to his body, and to his surprise his broken body actually listened, balling up a fist and sending it smashing into the dark spot where the zombie’s nose should be.

The thing rocked back, splashing into the streaming water behind it.  It landed on its butt, one hand going down behind it for support and balance.  The other hand went to its face, clapped over the spot where Ken had just socked it.

“Owww!”  It glared at him.  “You broge by dose.”  The monster felt its face gingerly.  Glared some more.  “Again.”

Ken blinked rapidly.  He was confused.  The zombie was talking?

He tried to sit up.  Found he could do it.  He realized he wasn’t shivering, either.

Splashing sounds drew his attention.  He looked toward the noise and saw a pair of figures approaching.  One so large he took up most of the tunnel, the other short and husky but moving with the fluid grace of a predator.

“Buck?  Aaron?”  Ken’s discomposure increased.

A moment later the things – which had been mere shadows on shadow only a second ago – drew close enough that Ken could see their features.  It was the cowboy and the older man.  Both of them grinned at him, then turned curious faces to the still-sprawled figure in the center of the tunnel.

“What happened to you?” said Aaron.

Ken looked at the zombie in the stream.  Only it wasn’t a zombie.  It was Christopher, face bloody and dirty and looking thinner than Ken had remembered.  His cheek had been slashed open by something.

The explosion.

Christopher was trying to stop the blood rocketing out of his nose.  “He hit me.  Again.”

Aaron laughed.

“It’s not funny.”

Aaron laughed harder.  Buck joined in a moment later.  Christopher looked at them both with irritation and shook his head.  He gave up trying to catch the blood and just let it drip onto his already grossly stained shirt, snorting every few seconds to clear a clot.

“Not funny.”

Ken laughed now.

“Ken?”

Ken turned.  Another figure was in the tunnel.

He smiled.  “Mags.”

She flew into his arms.

He held her. “I love you, Mags,” he said.

And this time it wasn’t a goodbye.

53

The others had moved off.  They took the light with them, leaving Ken alone with Maggie in the dark.  But that was all right.  Dark was okay, was tolerable if she was there.

Not just near, but truly with him.

“You okay?” he asked.

She made a noise that sounded like something caught in a bear trap halfway between a laugh and a sob.  “Are you?”

He shrugged.  Realized she couldn’t see that and said, “I don’t know.  What’s going on?  Where are the kids?  I mean, where are…?”  His voice fell away, molding itself to the blackness around them.  He felt stupid.  The last thing he knew, Maggie wasn’t even speaking to him because of what had happened to Derek.  And here he was, asking about “the kids.”

He realized his muscles had all tightened, as though preparing for a blow.  So when he felt something touch his chest he twitched before his body realized it wasn’t a punch, it was a caress.  His wife’s hand on his chest, like it had on so many nights after they made love or lay in bed just talking about the kids or life or nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” said Maggie.  “I know none of this was you.  I know Derek… you didn’t….”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Her hand clenched a bit.  “I just said that.”  She sounded tired.  Irritated.  She didn’t move her hand away, though.  That was something.  She was still his wife, determined to stay with him.  No matter how much he irritated her, no matter how they grated on one another.

That was marriage.  It wasn’t “being in love.”  It was a determination to stay in love, even through the times when love felt like distant memory or unattainable goal.  “Happily ever after” wasn’t a fairy tale, it was just the name you gave to a life already-lived with a person you loved enough to decide to stay with them even through the days when you didn’t love them at all.

Ken put his hand on Maggie’s.  Not hard, but tenderly.  Asking forgiveness with his touch as well as his words.  “No, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said hurriedly.  “I meant….”  He swallowed.  So often in life people contented themselves with saying something acceptable, or something merely adequate.  He wanted to do better here.  He wanted to say something right.  Something good.  Something that would matter to Maggie and pay honor to his son.

“Derek died to protect you,” he finally said.  “And if I’d tried to stop him he never would have forgiven me.”  Ken shrugged again, and didn’t care that the darkness cloaked his motion.  Maggie would feel the movement.  And she would know what he was trying to tell her.  “He would have done the same thing if it had been me.  Or one of the girls.  He was always like that.”  He fell silent for a moment before adding, “He was born to be a hero.”

Maggie’s hand moved away from Ken’s chest.  He felt empty again.  Had she decided not to forgive him after all?

Then the hand found his arm.  It ran down his bicep.  Touched his forearm.  Fingers interlaced with his.

She leaned her head on his shoulder, and for the first time since the world fell Ken felt like he had not merely located his wife, but truly found her.

54

“Can you stand?”

Ken thought about the question.  He wasn’t shivering as he had been, and he felt better than before.  A long way from whole, but on the mend.  Still weak, though.

“I don’t know.”  He tried shifting his legs.  They felt like rubber-coated noodles.  “How are the girls?”

“That’s why I want you to stand.”

“You can’t just tell me?”

Ken heard the grin in Maggie’s voice.  “You wouldn’t believe me.”

The smile did it.  The idea that something was right – or if not right, then at least “not wrong” enough to warrant a smile – helped him find a reserve of strength.

Maggie slid under his arm.  She froze.  “Is this your bad arm?  The one you had to cut your fingers?”

“No.”  Ken eased himself up.  Leaning on his wife for support.  He suddenly remembered a teacher he’d had in Sunday School years ago, a lesson about God creating Eve from Adam’s rib because that meant they were supposed to walk side by side and lean on one another for support.

Ken didn’t know if Genesis had envisioned a zombie attack, but the symbolism worked here.

He realized something as he wobbled to his feet.  “How’d you know about me doing that?”

“Aaron told me.  Interesting guy.”

“He is.” Ken leaned against the cool concrete wall.  “He tell you anything about himself?”

“That he used to be a rodeo clown.”

Ken snorted.  “So nothing new.”

“Not a thing.  Interesting, but not exactly forthcoming.”

“How’s he handling Dorcas?”

Maggie was quiet a moment.  “His lady?”

Ken was startled that Maggie would need clarification.  But when would she have really gotten a chance to know Dorcas’ name?  She had only seen her for a few minutes before Dorcas died.

Only she didn’t die, did she?  Nothing so lucky.  Nothing so clean.

And then there was the question itself.  Would Aaron think of Dorcas as his lady?  The two had only known each other a few hours.  But still, there had been something between them.  Ken didn’t know exactly what it had been.  But something important.  “Yeah, the one we lost in the airplane,” he finally said.

“He won’t talk about her,” she said.  “Christopher asked, and Aaron told him he didn’t feel like talking about it.”

“He said that?”

“The exact wording involved a face full of knuckles, but that was the idea.”

Ken almost laughed, then realized something: Maggie had no trouble with Christopher and Aaron.  Dorcas’ name had been easily misplaced, but not the others’.  That meant….

“How long have we been down here?” he said.

“Not sure.  At least a few days.”

That rocked him.  And at the same time Ken realized something that had filtered in only subconsciously until now.  His nose wrinkled.  “What’s the smell?”

“That’s you, my dearest husband.”  Maggie took a step, leading him in the darkness.  He heard one of her feet splash through the stream in the middle of the tunnel.  “You’ve been out a couple days, but your body’s been pooping and peeing up a storm.”

“Oh, geez.”  He tried to push away from her, embarrassed and sickened at what he must look like.  Now that he knew what it was, the smell was overwhelming.

Maggie’s grip tightened around his midsection.  “Don’t be stupid.  You’ll fall.”

“I must be horrific.”

“Yes, you are.  But that’s a separate matter, and it predated the end of the world.”  She kept splashing forward, and he realized she must be using the stream as a guide in the darkness.  Her hand went out from time to time as well, likely letting go of him in order to trace the wall of the tunnel.  “I washed you off as best I could, but we’re a bit limited down here.”

“I’m so sorry.”  He cringed mentally at the thought of his wife cleaning his bodily wastes.

“Don’t be stupid.  I’ve done it a million times with the babies, and I just pretended you were a giant baby with a hairy butt.”  She laughed quietly.  “More or less situation normal.”

He laughed as well.  “So how am I not dead?”  Even as he said that, his back twitched, sending a shock of pain down the back of his left leg.  He twisted, almost falling.  Maggie steadied him, holding most of his weight until he got his feet under him again.

Not at one hundred percent, I guess.  Not even close.

“You had an infection,” Maggie said when he regained his balance.  “At least, Aaron thinks you did and he seems to know a lot about emergency first aid.  Buck had found a bunch of antibiotics in people’s coats and purses when we were looking for the EpiPens for you earlier.  He shoved ‘em in his pocket and we used them to keep you alive.”

Ken remembered the monsters shoving things in his throat.  Not tentacles trying to plant eggs in his body, but the survivors trying to force-feed him pills, maybe food.  “Lucky no one got hurt.”

That drew another laugh.  “Actually, you decked Christopher a few times.  No one else, just him.  You must be secretly jealous of his good lucks or something.”

“So you noticed.”

“I’m only human.”

It was getting lighter in the tunnel.  He could see a glimmer ahead and to the right.  Could hear voices, too.

“What about the bite?” he said.  He looked at his arm and could make out the crescent, scabbed over and starting to scar.  “Why didn’t I turn?”

“Aaron has some ideas,” she said.

“And?”

“And he wanted to wait until you woke up before sharing them.”

“Why wait?”

She was quiet for a moment, then spoke hesitantly.  “I imagine because his ideas depended a bit on what ended up happening with you.”

The light was in a side tunnel that branched off from the main one.  There was a slight lip to step up, so the water that streamed down the main tunnel didn’t enter the lateral line.

Ken reached the T-intersection.

He turned the corner.  His mouth dropped open.

Maggie laughed.  “I told you you wouldn’t believe it.”

55

Buck was sitting cross-legged on the ground, back against the cement wall of the side tunnel.

And on his lap: Hope.

She was dirty, her face grimed with dust and soot and a thousand other things.  Streaks showed in the gunk where someone – probably Maggie – had tried to clean her off.  That had proved to be a lost cause.

Still, through the multiple layers of dirt Ken could see his daughter’s face.  Her eyes.  And it was Hope again.  Smiling.

“Daddy!” she shouted.  But she didn’t move from Buck’s lap.  She looked happy there, and the big man looked pleased at her decision to remain with him.  Buck hadn’t struck Ken as a fatherly type, but he wondered now how much of that was because of the man and how much of that had been the effect of his mother.

How much of our lives are determined by the nets cast by others? he wondered.  How many of us died in the Change… and how many were set free?

Aaron was sitting against the opposite wall, a hand in his mouth as he took a pill.  He dry-swallowed it with a grimace.

“We’re all taking the antibiotics Buck found,” said Aaron, as though Ken had challenged his movements.  “We’ve all probably got loads of infected wounds, and better safe than sorry.”

Christopher was taking a pill as well.  His other hand held a small, battered-looking flashlight with a weak beam: the source of the illumination that Ken and Maggie had followed to the tunnel.

And Liz….

The toddler was curled up, completely naked, asleep and snoring lightly, half on the hard concrete tunnel floor, half on something else.  Her fingers held loosely to soft hairs, her head propped up on a moving pillow.

Looking at his sleeping baby, Ken knew what had dragged him out of the water.  What had lain with him and kept him warm in the dark.  What had saved him.

The male snow leopard glanced at him.  It licked its lips, a pink tongue lapping once over massive fangs, then turned to look at Liz as though to verify she hadn’t wandered from her spot against his rumbling chest.  Apparently satisfied, it returned its head to rest on the large paws that seemed to splay halfway across the tunnel.

“Dad?” said Hope.  Ken diverted a tiny piece of his attention from the big cat to his older daughter.  She wore a huge smile.  “Can we keep him?  Can we keep Sally?”

56

Ken was a teacher.  A high school teacher.  And even in a genuinely nice place like Boise, that meant he’d brushed up against all manner of insanity.  Teenage pregnancy, drugs.  Girls beaten by boyfriends who they insisted “really loved them.”  But he always felt like he could help.  Could at least offer some advice, even if it wasn’t taken.

However, when faced by a request that his daughter be allowed to keep a very obviously male predatory cat she’d inexplicably decided to name Sally, he found that words failed him.

Aaron chuckled.  Christopher sounded as though he tried to do the same, but it came out a sort of mangled snort that made a chunk of half-dried blood explode from one of his nostrils.  He grimaced.

Buck did the most surprising thing.  He wrapped his big arms around Hope in a huge bear hug.  “Of course we can keep him, honey.”  Then he stared at Ken with eyes like bullets wrapped in velvet.  “Right?”

“Uhhh….”  Ken nodded.  Mostly because he felt like something needed to happen and when confused his body tended to default to a nod.  That was the great to a happy marriage: when in doubt, agree.  So as a well-trained good husband his body was falling back on its established pattern.

Hope squealed and clapped.  The snow leopard – Sally – looked at the girl with an expression that seemed decidedly stern, as though reminding her that there was a sleeping baby in the area.

Hope clapped small hands over her mouth.  “Sorry, Sally.”  She looked around the group.  “We have to be quiet.”

“Right,” said Buck.  Another hug to Hope.  “We’ll be quiet, Hope.”

Ken looked at everyone as well.  Not to urge them to silence, but almost feeling like he was in one of those strangely real dreams we all find ourselves trapped in from time to time.  And unsure whether we want to wake up screaming… or let the dream continue forever.

He looked at Christopher and Aaron, shoulder to shoulder against one wall.  Legs out like they were resting against a tree in a forest, shooting the breeze on a campout.

Then Buck and Hope, sitting together like a girl curled up with her favorite and long-absent uncle.

And let’s not forget Liz’s new babysitter, Sally.

Ken looked at his wife.  She was watching the group with a strange expression.  It reminded him of last Christmas.  The family had been together: Derek and Hope in their chairs around the table, Liz in the high-chair she was just starting to grow out of.  Maggie stared at them all and got this look in her eyes, like she was seeing them all for the first time.  “My family,” she said.

And that was the right thing to say.

People said adequate things all the time.  Not many right ones.

Ken looked at the group in the tunnel.  The survivors.

The family.

57

Christopher held up the flashlight and gave it a small jiggle.  Light and shadow danced a perfectly synchronized jitterbug on the walls.

“I’m gonna turn this off.  Save some batter-trees.”  He wiggled his eyebrows at Hope and she giggled as though sharing a private joke.

Christopher flicked the switch on the flashlight.  Darkness fell around the group again.

Ken felt his way to the nearest wall and slid down.  He felt shaky.  Weak.  The sight of his children had invigorated him, the sight of the snow leopard had shocked his system into a momentary overdrive.  But both effects were wearing off now.

He just felt tired.  Tired and achy.  His back and left leg hurt most of all, even more than the stubs of his left pinky and ring finger, but all his half-healed scrapes and sprains were throbbing.  Dull palpitations that joined into one pulsing pound that reverberated up and down his frame.  Better than the lancing pain he’d been having, but still far from comfortable.

“How long have we been here?” he asked as he sank down, trying to ignore the stench that wafted up as his shredded pants shifted, the crinkling noises that his clothes made.

“We’ve been here for seven poops,” said Hope in a bright whisper.

“Hope,” Maggie said in a warning tone.

Hope giggled.  Ken was struck again by the strangeness of this moment.  Not just at the fact that he was hearing his daughter laugh in a glorified sewer under the crumbled remains of civilization, but that she was giggling at all.

He saw her as she had been in the elevator: reaching eagerly for the zombies that tried to kill them.  Cooing as they tried to destroy the survivors.

Her eyes rolling back.  Laughing as death loomed.

And now… she was fine?

What’s going on with her?

Ken didn’t know.  But he suspected it wasn’t over.  Perhaps this was a lull, but it wasn’t the end of the storm.

“We’re not sure how long we’ve been here,” said Maggie.  “We were afraid to move you, so we couldn’t leave.  Just tried to feed you and give you water when you seemed up to it, and kept watch.”

“No one could leave?”  Ken was flabbergasted.  “Didn’t anyone try to, I don’t know, explore or find a way out or anything?”

“Don’t need to explore,” said Buck.  “I know exactly where we are, and where to get out.  Assuming it’s still there since our arsonist-in-training blew up in the universe.”

“Big assumption,” said Christopher.  “And it wasn’t the universe, it was just a jet.  Part of a jet.  And I saved us, by the way, so you’re welcome.  Again.”

Hope giggled.

Ken was starting to feel disoriented.  The survivors’ voices were coming at him from everywhere in the darkness.  It was like having a conversation with a convocation of ghosts.

“Well, it’s what we’ve got, so it’s what we’ll use,” said Buck.  Ken noted he wasn’t nearly as nice-and-lovey sounding with Christopher as he was with Hope.

“Clucky, be nice,” said Hope.  Apparently Ken wasn’t the only one who registered the edge in the big man’s voice.

“Sorry, Chicken,” said Buck.  Hope squealed as though tickled.

Ken’s disorientation increased.  Clucky?  Chicken?  Christopher and Hope had silly code words for flashlight parts?  Hope and Buck had pet names?

He felt like he had left a familiar room, only to return and find every piece of furniture shifted a few inches to the right.  Everything was still there, but the configuration was just wrong enough to be jarring.

“Anyway,” said Buck, “I know where we are.  But the way out’s a bit of a walk.  And we decided to stick together.  Until you got better, or….”

Maggie’s arm circled Ken’s.  She squeezed him.  “Until you got better,” she said firmly.

“But how?” said Ken.  “You said… three days?”

Aaron laughed.  A low, rolling chortle that danced around the tunnel.  Ken smiled.

“Probably,” said Aaron.  “Probably about that.  You’re a pretty regular guy.”

Ken felt sure the others would be able to see by the glow of his blush.  “Gross.”

That drew another chuckle from Aaron.

Ken felt a sudden stab of jealousy.  He could only imagine what the first hours after the explosion had been like: terror, frantic, feeble searching for each other in the darkness.  But now… now there was rest.  Peace, however momentary.  A drawing together of the group.  He was grateful, but a bit of him felt piqued that he had missed so much of whatever bonding had drawn such smiles to their faces.

“Anyway,” Aaron continued, “Buck assured us the water in the tunnel’d be pretty clean, and as for food….”

“Yeah?”

Ken felt Maggie’s arm on his.  Shaking.

Panic grabbed him.  He tensed, ready to run, to scream and fight and flee.

Then realized he wasn’t feeling her terror.  Wasn’t feeling a seizure, grabbing her preparatory to her becoming a zombie.  It was something else.  Something he had all but forgotten in the past hours –

(No, days, Ken, it’s been days….)

– of danger and pain.

Maggie was laughing.  Laughing her hardest laugh, which meant she was all but silent.  He couldn’t see her in this black inkwell, but he had seen it often enough to know what she looked like now: mouth open wide, gasping for breath that would not come, shaking as her body struggled to cope with overwhelming paroxysms of near-hysterical laughter.

She finally inhaled.  Got enough control over her body to actually make a noise, a single, thin “Heeeee” that seemed to melt into silence as fast as it came.

He loved that laugh.  Stupidest laugh in the universe, and he’d told her so.  But he told her so with a smile, because every time she laughed like that it meant she was truly happy.  That something wonderful had happened in her mind.

He loved her perhaps most of all when he heard that sound.

She did it again.  A rarity.  And a sign of how very funny she thought something was.  “Heeeee.”  The whispery laugh danced into the darkness.

“What’s so funny?” Ken finally said.

58

“You hungry?” said Christopher a moment later.

Ken was.  He hadn’t realized it until this moment, but he was famished.  His stomach rumbled audibly.

“Either the creeps found a way in, or that’s a yes,” said Christopher.  “I thought you would be.  We fed you as much as we could, but you got all bitey sometimes, so….”  Maggie’s silent laugh got even more energetic.  “I’ll go get you something,” said Christopher.

The flashlight flickered on.  Christopher pushed up against the wall, then stepped gingerly past the snow leopard, walking down the side tunnel.  It curved sharply to the right only a few feet past the big cat, and soon Christopher was gone.  The light fluttered in the tunnel behind him, growing dim but never quite disappearing.

Ken looked at Buck.  “So… Clucky?”

Buck’s face, which had been smiling down at Hope, now darkened faster than a thunderhead about to dump a Noachian downpour on an unprepared populace.  “That’s what Hope calls me,” he said.  The tone made it clear that only Hope called him that.

“You knew about this place?” said Ken, partly to shift the subject away from the pet names issue, partly because he was curious how Buck knew what was down here.

Buck nodded.  “You guys found us up in that lawyer’s office.  Me and my mom?”

Ken nodded.

“We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the city.  I am – was, I guess I should say – a contractor for county.  My mom owned the business, took over after my dad died.”  He was silent a moment, pensive.  Then he looked around, taking in the surroundings.  “I did a lot of work down here.”

“You get hurt or something?”

Buck rolled his eyes.  “Nothing so interesting.  Just a contract dispute between the county and some of the contractors who’ve done work for them.  It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time with public works – one project goes to shi – uh, crap,” he amended, looking at Hope, who was watching him with what Ken could only describe as hero-worship in her eyes, “and everyone starts blaming everyone else.  Soon there are delays, then damages, and then everyone sues everyone else.  I was up there for a deposition.  But when I saw the plane going down, I knew there was a storm drain entrance we could get into nearby.  Figured we might be safe for a bit down here.”

“Good thinking,” said Ken.

“Clucky saved us,” said Hope.

Buck hugged the little girl tightly.

“He sure did,” said Christopher, reappearing around the bend.  “Clucky is awesome.”

Buck glared at the young man.  Christopher put on a face of such sincere innocence Ken had to laugh.  “Hey, man, I was agreeing with her.  You are a force to be reckoned with.  Clucky.”

“Christopher –“ Buck’s voice rumbled into the darkness.

Christopher laughed quietly.

Maggie sighed in a way that told Ken this was not a new discussion.  “Do I have to separate you two boys?” she said.

“What?” said Christopher.  His innocent face got even more innocent, if that were possible.  Before the Change, he had been the son of Idaho’s governor, and Ken figured he must have learned a thing or two about pretending virtue from his father.  The expression he was wearing would have made God Himself look a bit dicey in comparison.

Buck sighed.  Clearly trying to be the bigger person in the dispute.  He looked back at Hope.

Christopher laughed.  “Just hassling you, brother.”  He held out a hand to Ken.  “You said you were hungry, right?”

Ken looked at what Christopher held.

“Where the heck did you get those?”

59

Christopher was holding what first appeared to be a handful of candy.  But only a moment later Ken saw that they were energy bars, the kind of things a lot of his students crammed into their mouths before working out or instead of eating lunch.

It wasn’t just two or three, either.  Christopher’s hand could barely close around the brightly-wrapped sticks of processed carbs.

Ken had never liked the things.  Even the best of them generally tasted to him like someone mixed caulk with a dab or two of artificial flavor.  But now, looking at the things in Christopher’s hand, he felt his mouth go dry then fill with saliva an instant later.

He reached out, and Christopher stepped forward – again, gingerly stepping around the still-lolling form of Sally – to hand two of the bars to Ken.

Ken looked at them only a half-second before tearing them open and wolfing one down in two quick bites.

“Easy, son,” said Aaron.  “You don’t want to make yourself sick.  You’ve been eatin’ okay, all things considered, but still might be good to pace yourself.”

Ken tried to slow down.  Found he couldn’t.  He took another huge bite and then looked at Christopher in order to try and distract himself.  “Where’d they come from?” he said again.

Christopher jerked a bar-laden hand over his shoulder.  “Tunnel collapsed when the jet blew up.  Must’ve been a GNC or some kind of health store above the tunnel.  A bunch of shelves came down in the rubble.”  He grinned again.  “Energy bars and soy protein muscle builder and our trusty flashlight here.”  He hit a dramatic muscle pose, clearly for Hope’s benefit.  She giggled.  Sally licked his chops and snuffed as though he’d heard this joke one too many times.  “We may be hurt, but we can be well-lit and huge.”

Ken gawked.  Long enough that Christopher dropped his pose.  “It’s okay, man.  There’s plenty back there.  We’ve got plenty to live on for a while if we need to.”

“It’s not that,” Ken said.  “If the tunnel fell down over there, where else did it fall?”  He looked around at the survivors.  “What else fell in?”

60

Buck snorted, surprising Ken.  “There’s nothing to worry about.”  He jogged his chin in Christopher’s direction.  “Our pet arsonist over there dropped most of several buildings right over us.  The tunnel’s completely sealed in three directions, probably nothing but rubble above us for a hundred feet or so.”

“I apologized already,” said Christopher, and again Ken heard the tone of a person going over an old argument.  The sound of brothers rehashing an old dispute at a family reunion.  “How was I supposed to know the explosion would be that big?”

“I’m still impressed that he got a 737 to blow up in the first place,” Aaron said.  “It ain’t as easy as the movies make it look.”  He squinted.  “How’d you know there’d be enough fumes in the tanks to create explosive pressure, instead of just a flameout?”

“I figured the jet was probably on approach when it went down,” said Christopher.  “Otherwise there would have been a lot more fire damage around it.”

“Huh,” was all Aaron said.  But he looked impressed.

“Still, you –“ Buck began, in a tone that made it clear he was determined to drag the argument out.

Ken cut him off.  He felt weirdly like the father of two very large pre-teens.  “Let’s hold off on the argument, can we?”  He brought a low-simmering glare against Christopher, then Buck in turn.  And felt a bizarre desire to add, “Or I’ll turn this tunnel around and we’ll go home right now.”

Instead he said, “Three cave-ins?”

Buck nodded and in a more contrite tone he said, “Yeah.  Just rubble back where you were, around that corner,” nodding in the direction Christopher had gathered the energy bars, “and down one other side tunnel.”  He held out two big hands in front of Hope.  She started playing a quiet game of patty-cake with the big older man, which Ken thought rated an eleven on the Bizarro Scale.

“And the last direction?”

“That’s the way out.”  Buck said.  He looked up at Ken, peering over the top of Hope’s head.  He mouthed a pair of words that made Ken shiver.

“We hope.”

61

Silence held sway in the tunnel again.  Christopher clicked off the light.  There was nothing but darkness and the trickle of water a few feet away and the soft purring of the snow leopard’s breathing.

Ken took a bite of his second energy bar.  He managed to reign himself in this time, nibbling rather than inhaling the food.

He was going to ask about Sally.  Clearly the snow leopard had been integrated into the group on some level.  There was no way that Maggie would have let Liz sleep with the animal unless she was completely secure with the beast.

But how could that be?  Ken had seen the thing eviscerate several zombies, destroying them one bite and one crushing claw-swipe at a time.  There was no doubt the animal was fierce and had the capacity for destruction.

But….

… but when he attacked the zombies with the female snow leopard, neither of them went for Aaron.

… but he dragged Ken out of the water and probably kept him from dying of hypothermia before the others found him.

… but Liz was sleeping against his stomach, utterly at peace even though this was the girl who had trouble sleeping anywhere but her crib.

So many questions, and he sensed that many of the answers might mean the difference between life and death.

What was the snow leopard doing?

Why hadn’t anyone left him behind?

Why hadn’t he turned when he was bitten?

Ken opened his mouth to ask.

But before he could, before the questions did more than dance ever-so-softly across the surface of his mind, he started to shake.  Tremors sped from toe to crown, pulsing through him with the strength and speed of lightning strikes.  He dropped the piece of the energy bar that remained uneaten in his hand.  It hit the concrete floor with barely a whisper, just a murmur of plasticized aluminum as the wrapper rustled against the ground.

It was enough to alert Maggie, though.  Either that or she heard his rank clothing as it shuffled back and forth in a series of near-microscopic twitches, pushed by the spasming muscles underneath.

“Ken?” she said.

He didn’t answer.  He couldn’t.  He felt like his mouth had been filled with concrete, his jaw wired shut.  Every muscle that wasn’t jerking back and forth was locked into painful stasis.  Only his eyes felt like they were at all under his control, and they flitted heavenward, then back and forth as he sought something in the darkness.  Something elusive, something hidden.

“Honey?” said Maggie.  He still didn’t answer, not even when he felt her arm on his.  “Christopher, hit the light,” she said.

“It’s getting low,” he said.

“Turn it on.”

The light sparked to dim existence.  Hope said, “Daddy?” in a lost voice.

Ken didn’t look at her.  He was still staring upward, still looking back and forth along the line of the tunnel ceiling, still searching for something.

And even in the light, he couldn’t find it.

“Honey?”  He heard the panic creeping into Maggie’s voice.  She put a hand on each of his arms and shook him.  He knew she was trying to get him to look at her.

He didn’t.  He wouldn’t.  He couldn’t.

Tears spilled over his cheeks.

Then his eyes closed and he slumped.

62

Still dark.  Dark, and Ken was alone.  Then Matt Anders was standing over him.

“Come on, Mr. Strickland,” said the kid.  His voice scraped out at a volume so low that Ken had to strain to hear it.  Nothing new there: the kid always spoke that way.  Always quiet, never any trouble.

Teachers were supposed to be like parents.  They were supposed to like their students equally, to care for and pay attention to one exactly the same as to another.  But Ken had his favorites.  Maybe that made him a bad teacher.  Or perhaps it just made him human.

No matter what the case, Matt was a kid Ken liked.  So when the boy held out his hand Ken didn’t think twice about taking it.

“Where are we going?” he asked as he and Matt started walking down the tunnel.  Water slapped and sloshed around their feet.  The sound echoed around them and Ken felt like every step he took was one of many, like he was in the middle of an invisible mob, shuffling from side to side and waiting only for the word to be let loose.  To attack.  To destroy.

“It’s just up here,” said Matt.  He turned back and smiled.  His smile seemed lopsided.  The smile of a stroke victim.

“Where is it?” said Ken.  The smile scared him.

“Just up here.”  Matt disappeared around a sudden bend in the tunnel.  Ken followed, afraid of what he might see but even more afraid of being left alone.

Being alone was the ultimate terror now.  Alone meant you had been left for dead.  Meant you were worthless.  Meant you were good only as meat to divert the beasts.

Ken made the turn, and as he did he wondered where the light was coming from.  He could see Matt, could see the tunnel walls and floor and ceiling.

How?

“Shouldn’t it be dark?” he said to himself.  The words mumbled, fell out of his lips like dirt from the mouth of a corpse that has chewed its way up from the earth.

And, saying that, he nearly tripped over Matt.  The boy was on the tunnel floor.  Twitching and writhing.

Of course he is.  It’s that he’s dead.

And he suddenly realized that Matt was the boy who had changed under Ken’s hands.  The boy had gone into a seizure when the Change first swept through Ken’s universe.  Ken had held him down, had tried to help him… until Matt tried to kill him.

Then Ken threw him out a window.

As he realized that, remembered kicking one of his favorite students out a third-floor plate glass window, Matt changed.  His eyes rolled back.  Blood spurted from his unbroken skin.  Ken backed up with a scream, ready for the boy to come for him.

What’s going on?  What’s happening?

But Matt didn’t get up.  Instead, he suddenly threw his arms and legs wide.  Harsh cracks split the air and Matt’s limbs twisted in on themselves.  He didn’t scream.  Just moaned as his head seemed to deflate like a punctured basketball, blood flowing out the back in a widening pool.

His eyes rolled forward.  “You killed me,” he said.  His voice was normal.

Ken backed away.  Something bumped into him.  Something soft.  Warm.  He turned.

A man stood behind him, dressed in sweats and wearing a silver whistle around his neck.  The man’s face was impossible to look at, a concave mass of bone and cartilage and blood.  But Ken knew who it was, would have known in an instant even if he hadn’t heard the man’s voice issuing forth with impossible clarity from the gaping wound that was all that remained of his mouth.

“You killed me,” said Joe Picarelli, the gym coach at Ken’s school.

Ken shrieked and ran.  Turned away from the coach with his eyeless face and his gaping sore of a mouth.  Leapt over the still-crackling limbs of Matt Anders.

Three steps.

He stopped.

A horde of undead were crammed into the tunnel.  He recognized some, but not all.

A fat zombie he had skewered with a lug wrench.

A huge zombie, thickly muscled, half its skin perfectly white and the other half charred and black and peeling away from yellowed bone.  The thing that had caught and changed and killed Ken’s son.

The burnt monster reached behind itself.

And drew out a small form.

Ken stared at Derek.  His son’s face was greasy and loose, as though about to slide away from the underlying muscle.  The child’s eyes had the whites-only stare of the zombies.

“You killed us all,” said Derek.

Ken started to scream.

He knew it wasn’t real.

He knew it had to be a dream.

But he also knew he was trapped.  Caught in a dark place in his mind, and he wondered if he would ever be able to escape.

Derek giggled.  “Renegades,” said the boy.  Then screamed it.  “Renegades, renegades, renegaaaaaaadesssssss….”

Knowing something is a dream doesn’t mean you can wake up.  And knowing it is madness that beckons doesn’t mean you can resist the call.

Derek reached out.  Still saying “renegades” in hideously stretched-out syllables.

Ken, still screaming, closed his eyes in the dream.

And reached to embrace his dead son.

63

“I killed them.  I killed them all.”

Tears ran down Ken’s face, wetted his cheeks.  The words poured out of him like foul water from a broken pump.  He hadn’t let himself think of anything that had happened up until now.  Hadn’t had time.  But now, in the dark of the tunnel and the deeper dark of his memory, he replayed it all.  Every stab, every attack.  Every maiming that tore a bit of his own humanity away.

He knew part of this was the sickness, the infection that his body was still coping with.  Part of it.

But part of it was real.  Part of it was guilt, not just at taking a life, but at the sheer ferocity he had discovered in himself.

He was a history teacher.  He knew that for most of us, civilization is just a veneer.  But he had never dreamed how thinly gilded his own sense of goodness was.  How easy it had been to scratch off the layers of humanity and expose the animal rage that lay beneath.

“I killed them.”

Only gradually did Ken realize that the dream was gone.  Not fully – he thought he could still sense it, coiling darkly at the edges of his sight and mind – but withdrawn enough that he could see reality again.

Still in the tunnel.  In the tunnel, and no longer in the side branch where the kids had been.

A form moved.  “Ken?”

“Yeah.”  Speaking was an effort.  His throat was dry.

“You’re awake.”  The figure stood.  “We moved you because you kinda freaked out the kids.  And….  Well, be right back.”

Ken realized the figure was Christopher, that the young man had been keeping watch over him in the darkness.  But before he could speak, the other man had gone.  Ken was alone.

The water still streamed through the tunnel’s center.  Ken rolled over and drank from it, lapping it up like a dog.  It tasted smoky and dusty, but he kept drinking.  His body was so thirsty he would have drank deeply of the ocean, and smiled as it killed him.

“Renegadesssss.”  The word spoken to him – impossibly – by his toddler daughter, and then echoing in his dream.  He heard it again in his mind, and wondered how long it would be before he could ever sleep.  He had no wish to return to the nightmare he had just left.

“Ken?”  This time he knew the voice instantly.

“Mag –“  He coughed as his voice choked through a mouth that seemed stuffed with sawdust.  Tried again.  “Maggie.”

She dropped beside him, knees splashing into the water.  She held his face in her hands.

“Are you okay?”

“I killed them.”  The words were from his dream, and dreams weren’t reality.  But real or not, dreams could still be true.

He had tossed his own student out a window.  Had rammed what was basically the business end of a crowbar through another man’s face.  Had punched and kicked and all but chewed his way to his family.

He hadn’t even thought twice.

Some of what he had done could be chalked up to the simple fact that he was being attacked, that he had people trying to kill him basically non-stop for every second since the Change.

People?

No, not people.  They were….

What?  What were they?

But that only explained away so much.  The rest was simply that he had defaulted to animalistic response.  Kill or be killed.

He didn’t think he did anything wrong.  Ken wasn’t one of those pacifists who believed it was better to put defenseless children in front of a bullet-wielding maniac than it was to put guns in the hands of cops.  No, he had done the right thing.

But doing the right thing didn’t inure a person to the consequences.  To the fact that he had savaged people with an intent to destroy them.

He had been attacked.  And his solution had been to degenerate, to turn himself into something even more dangerous than the monsters around him.

“I killed them,” he whispered again.  The words were nearly silent.  He didn’t think Maggie heard them.

She put her arms around him, though.  Held him tight.

After a moment he put his hands around her as well.  Clinging to one another in the dark, just two people in a black place on a newly-changed world spinning through clouds of dust in space.  He shivered, and it wasn’t because the tunnel was cold.

He was holding to his wife, to the one person he understood, the one person who understood him.  And he felt so alone.

Would she love me if she knew?  If she had really seen, not just what I did, but how little I cared about it?

He had no answer for that.  He just pulled Maggie tighter to him, as if he could somehow press the doubts out of his soul.

They remained silent in the dark for a moment.  Then more splashing signaled the approach of someone else.

“Guys,” said Christopher.

“Not now,” said Maggie in a steely whisper.

Her tone didn’t seem to slow Christopher in the slightest.  “Sorry, but now.”

“What?” she said, and squeezed Ken in a way he knew well.  The way she did when they were relaxing, curled up with one another on the couch after a long day and one of the children called.  The way that said, Stay here, I’ll get this.  Relax.  I love you.

He felt like maybe he could get through this.  For a moment he felt hope.

And then it was dashed.

“You better come down here.”  Christopher turned and started splashing back down the tunnel.  “It’s Lizzy.”

64

“What is it?”  Ken struggled to his feet.  It was easier than he thought it would be.  Shaky at first, but Maggie got under his right arm – his left hand ached where his fingers were missing, though he could feel the stumps had scabbed and were starting to heal – and he only needed to lean on her for a second before he could stand on his own.  At least as far as the tunnel allowed.  He couldn’t quite stand fully upright without bumping his head on the low concrete ceiling.

“Is it more of the same?” said Maggie.

“No,” said Christopher, and then hurried away, splashing down the tunnel again.

“What do you mean, ‘more of the same’?” said Ken.  He moved as fast as he could, but didn’t really know how far they were from where Buck and Aaron and the kids were.

And Sally.  Don’t forget the kids’ new “pet.”

“We didn’t get a chance to tell you before you passed out again,” said Maggie.  “Hope’s been acting more or less normal.”  She hesitated.

“But Lizzy?”

“Not normal.”

Ken’s heart started fluttering, batting at his ribs with the glancing blows of a hummingbird’s wings.  “What’s been going on?”

“Nothing bad,” said Maggie, in a voice he knew was meant to reassure him but which failed miserably.  “Not overtly bad, at least.  Just… she’s not talking.  And she won’t leave the side of that animal.”

“Sally?”

Maggie choked out an angry laugh.  “I don’t know what’s going on with that thing, but it won’t leave her alone, and Lizzy starts screaming anytime someone tries to take her away from it.”  She sniffed in the dark, not the sound of tears but the sound of a woman under tremendous strain trying to keep her emotions in check.  “It’s like the damn cougar’s her mother.”

“Snow leopard,” said Ken.  He didn’t mean it as a rebuke or even as a correction.  It just popped out, and the second it did he felt the air freeze around him.  One of those stupid things you say to someone you love that has no importance to the real issue but can sidetrack the conversation in a second.

“Whatever,” said Maggie.  Her tone could have given frostbite to a polar bear.

“Sorry, I didn’t –“

“Forget it.”  She sighed.  “We’re all on edge.  Everyone wants to get out of here, we’re all tired of eating power bars and crapping in the side of the tunnel.  We’ve just been waiting for you to get well enough to go.”

Ken felt warm.  They could have left him.  It made sense for Maggie and the kids to stay, he guessed, though Heaven knew many families had splintered under less pressure than this.  But for Aaron and Christopher, even Buck, to stay….  It made him feel like maybe the world he knew was over, but this group carried the seeds of civilization with them.

Maybe the future was here, in this tunnel.

What if we’re all that’s left?  Can we rebuild a world if it’s only us against seven billion zombies?

He thrust that thought deep.  Pushed it away.

“Other than the weird leopard fixation and her not talking, anything else?” he said.  He was thinking about the strange words Liz had spoken.

“You are not family.  You are renegades.”

And then she had called out to the zombies, her body contorting as she screamed and gave away the survivors’ location.

Maggie must have been thinking about the same thing, because she said, “No, she’s not saying anything weird, nothing at all, not even the stuff she used to say.  We were worried for the first little while down here that those… things… might find a way in.  But it seems like we’re buried pretty deep, and Buck says there’s only one way out, really.”

“So what’s happening with Lizzy now?”

They were almost at the side tunnel.  Ken could see the light ahead.  He could hear a low noise.  He didn’t understand what it was at first, then placed it.

Weeping.

Ken and Maggie turned the corner.

65

Ken saw Hope first.  She was buried in Buck’s lap, curled into a ball so tight she nearly disappeared in the big man’s arms.  He was rocking her back and forth, patting her head with a big hand as she cried.  She was whispering something, the same words over and over, words that gradually resolved as Ken came closer.

“I don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it…,” and on and on in a never-ending chorus delivered with almost machinelike precision between sobs.

“What’s going on?” said Maggie.  The words came out harsh, almost accusatory.  The demand of a mother hen whose brood has been threatened.

“I don’t know,” said Aaron.  And to Ken’s surprise, the tough-as-jerky-made-of-old-nails cowboy sounded decidedly scared.  Not by what was happening, but by Maggie.  Apparently even spec-ops rodeo clowns knew not to cross pissed off mommies.  “She just started doing that a second ago.”

“What about…?”  Maggie’s voice faded away.

Ken saw it at the same time she did.  Liz was standing there.  Still naked, her toddler gut hanging out over her waist, staring intently skyward.

Ken’s heart, already racing, now shifted into overdrive.  Whatever held his children in thrall, it seemed to worsen in effect when they were looking up like that.

But this time was different.  She wasn’t panting, and her eyes were still open.  Still seeing.  They hadn’t rolled back in their sockets.  She was staring, not at nothing, but at something.

Ken looked at the point she was staring at.  Nothing was there.  Just solid concrete, the gray sky over their temporary human habitat.

He realized that the snow leopard was staring up as well.  Looking at the same exact spot as Liz.  That made the hairs on his arms – what few hadn’t been burnt or bludgeoned out of existence – stand up at full alert.  Fear pricked the muscles behind his ears, made his skin feel tight on his skull.

Slowly, Liz raised a hand.  Tiny, chubby.  She was barely learning to use a baby fork when the Change happened.

Now, one finger extended in an unmistakable gesture.  Pointing up, directly at the spot she and the leopard were staring at.

Hope stopped crying.  Her weeping choked off mid-sob, and she stopped saying “I don’t like it I don’t like it” over and over.  Silence reigned thick and heavy for a long second.

Then Hope stood.

“Chicken?” said Buck.

Hope ignored him.  She walked to Liz.  Put one hand on her sister, who remained frozen with one finger upraised.  The other hand buried itself deep in Sally’s fur.

Hope looked up as well.  Then spoke.

“They’re coming.  They found us.”

66

The chills that had been pricking at Ken’s skin exploded into a full-blown shudder.  It ran up and down his body as he realized that there was only one thing Hope could be talking about.

The zombies.  They had found the survivors.  Had found his family.

They weren’t safe here.  Not anymore.

He believed Hope’s words, completely and without reservation.  And that meant that whatever connection, whatever infection his daughters had suffered, was not cured.  In remission, at best.  And perhaps just gaining strength for some unknown purpose.

The shudder threatened to become panic-spasms.  Ken had to consciously calm his muscles.

“They’re getting closer,” said Hope.  She and Liz and Sally were still staring upward, peering at the same spot as before.

No.  Not the same spot.

Ken saw he wasn’t imagining it: his daughters and their strange nanny were now looking at a slightly different spot.  A few inches toward the back of the side tunnel.

“No, that’s impossible,” said Buck.  “We’re totally buried.”

“You sure?” said Ken.

“I’m telling you, there’s no way anything bigger than a cat could get in here.”

Sally chuffed at that.  But the animal’s gaze didn’t waver from whatever invisible object she was staring at.

The triple stare was further down the ceiling now.  Toward the area that they had been going to in order to get their food.

Ken felt his belly tighten.  “Buck,” he said.  “What do you mean that nothing bigger than a cat could get in?”

Buck turned a fear-bleached face toward Ken.  “I mean that there’s only one way out of this tunnel that I know of.  The rest of it is totally collapsed.  I checked it myself before we settled down here, and I saw no holes bigger than,” he held his big hands about six inches apart, “this in any of the rubble.”

The tightening in Ken’s stomach got that much worse.  He looked at Maggie.  “Stay with the girls,” he said.

“Where are you going?” she said.

He looked at the girls’ slowly-moving stares.  Tracking along the ceiling toward the turn of the side tunnel.

What was beyond the turn?

“Where are you going?” she repeated.

“Christopher,” he said.  “You up for some exploring?”

Christopher got to his feet.  He smiled, but the grin was tired, pulling the wound on his cheek into a tight slit that made him look like a pain-maddened Cheshire cat.  “Sure.”

Ken turned to Maggie.  “I’m going to see if any cats got in the house.”

67

Aaron grabbed Ken’s arm before he took a single step.

“I should go with Christopher,” said the cowboy.

Ken shook his head.  “I want you to stay with my family.  You and Buck can protect them.  Christopher is fast on his feet, so if there’s something back there,” he said, jerking his chin toward the darkness beyond the snow leopard, “he can get back here and warn everyone.”

“And you?” said Aaron.  “You ain’t looking too spry.”

Ken showed him the bite on his arm.  A mostly-healed half-circle of scabs.  “Maybe I’m immune,” he said.

“Yeah, I have a theory about that –“ began Aaron.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Ken.  He tried to bear down on the cowboy with his eyes.  “I really don’t.”

Aaron glanced at Maggie.  She was splitting her attention between Ken and their daughters.  Ken didn’t think she noticed the look Ken was sending the cowboy’s way.  Which was good, because he didn’t want her thinking about what he was trying to tell Aaron.

Don’t tell me.  Don’t tell me I might not be immune.  Because it doesn’t matter.  I’m either immune or I’m expendable.  I’m injured, I can’t move fast.  You take care of my family.

Aaron hadn’t told them the truth about his past – not all of it.  But Ken knew the man had to have been some kind of soldier, probably a special ops fighter like Delta Force, Green Beret, SEAL.

Aaron understood making choices.  Cutting losses.  He understood sacrifice.

“I didn’t like what Dorcas did,” whispered the cowboy, and Ken saw his eyes grow misty for a split-second before Aaron blinked and his steely gaze returned.  “So don’t you do that.”

Ken nodded.  “I promise,” he said.  He clapped Aaron on the shoulder, and knew he was lying, and that the cowboy knew it as well.

But some lies need to be said.  Because some lies make the world bearable.

“Be right back,” he said to Maggie.

He thought that might be a lie as well.

68

Christopher had the flashlight.  He offered it to Ken, but Ken shook his head and the younger man held the light even though Ken led the way into the darkness beyond the curve of the side tunnel.

“I miss the good old days, when all I had to worry about was whether my mom and dad were going to kill each other,” said Christopher.

Ken laughed.  He tried to stop it from happening, as if a vague sense of propriety warned him against joie de vivre when going into a place of possibly fatal danger.  The laugh forced its way through and he ended up snorting so hard he felt like his sinuses had turned inside out.

“Wow, that sounded painful,” said Christopher.

Ken tried to glare at him, but the younger man was smiling so good-naturedly it was impossible.  Ken felt envious of Christopher’s ability to find things to laugh about.  Even now, with his family gone, his wealth and the luxuries he had known just a memory, he was smiling.  Slashed face, broken nose, and still grinning away.

Ken wondered if that was why Christopher was still alive.  Not because of his survival skills, but because the world curved to accommodate happiness.  Because the universe exerted itself to protect the joyful among us.

Then I am well and deeply screwed.

After the turn, the tunnel went for about fifty feet, then folded into a cascading mass of rubble.  Christopher had shown himself on numerous occasions to be adept at blowing things up, but this had to take the cake.  It looked like whatever building had been above the tunnel here had toppled over and punched right through the concrete infrastructure.  There were bits of wallpapered drywall, pieces of rebar, some shelving.

And, of course, a pile of half-buried displays full of energy bars.  Enough to feed an army of Mr. Olympia contenders for a decade, it looked like.  No wonder everyone had stayed here once determining it seemed safe.  Or safe-ish.  No way in, according to Buck.

It looked like Buck had been right about that, too.  Ken couldn’t see any gaps wider than eight inches in the rubble.  Most of those closed off after a depth of only a few inches.  A few of them wormed into blackness, uncharted tunnels into the darkest of Wonderlands, but those were small enough that Ken couldn’t see any way for a zombie to get through.

“Looks like Buck was right,” he said.  He looked at Christopher.  “You see anything?”

Christopher weaved the flashlight around.  The beam flickered, bright enough to see but clearly down to its last hour or two of usefulness.  “No,” he said.  “Not unless it’s a zombie eel or something.”

Ken snorted.  He was about to turn back when he remembered climbing down the elevator shaft in the Wells Fargo Center.  The zombies had pressed through cracks in the walls of the shaft.  Cracks much too small to accommodate them.  They had flayed themselves alive, little more than blood and bone remaining, to get to the survivors.

Still… those cracks had been much bigger.  Not big enough for a full-sized person, but bigger than these tiny holes.

“Should we go back?” asked Christopher.  His voice had dropped to a whisper, as though he was having second thoughts about the tunnel’s security.

Ken wished he hadn’t asked.  He had been out of it for a few days, and some portion of him hoped that when he woke he wouldn’t be in charge anymore; that no one would ask him any questions or look to him for guidance.

But he had made the call about splitting up the group, and no one really questioned it.  Now Christopher was deferring to him, asking what their next move was.

It made Ken want to scream.

Christopher was still looking at him.  Still waiting.

Ken didn’t scream.  Instead he said, “Yeah.  Let’s go back.”

They both turned around.

“They’re coming.  They found us.”

Hope’s words blared in Ken’s mind.  He stopped.  Looked upward.  He tracked the direction his daughters had been looking.  Followed the line their eyes had been moving.

There was a hole right there in the rubble.  One of the snake-like gaps that just disappeared into nowhere.

“What is it?” Christopher asked.

“Nothing,” said Ken.  And that was true, wasn’t it?  It had to be nothing.  Because the hole was barely half a foot across.  Maybe eight inches, tops, about five feet above the tunnel floor.

Still….

He moved toward the void.

A trickle of concrete dust slid out of the cavity.

Like something had dislodged the debris.

Like something was coming out of the hole.

A moment later, something twitched into view.

69

Run.

It wasn’t a thought, it was a command.  An impulse all-but-impossible to resist.

But Ken’s feet didn’t move.

He leaned toward the hole.  Toward the thing – then things – that scraped out of the darkness.

Christopher seemed equally frozen.  “What…?” he began.  Then even his tongue froze.

The weak, flickering beam of Christopher’s light began to shake.  Almost delicately at first, barely a tremor.  Then the shaft of light – outlined by floating motes of dust dislodged by the thing pulling its way into the tunnel, inch by terrible inch – started to weave back and forth drunkenly as terror took control of Christopher’s limbs.

Ken looked through the flickering, strobing, twitching light.  Focused on the darkness of the hole and the things coming out of it.

At first he thought they were snakes, or perhaps some new kind of worms born in the Change.  Stubby things, wet and slick and eyeless, inching forward with painful movements, seeking the light.  One, then two.  Another.  Four, five.

It was the fifth one that forced him to accept the obvious, the thing that his mind had been trying to avoid admitting.

Not snakes.  Not snakes at all.

Fingers.

But how could that be?  The cracks were too small for the zombies to press in, there was no denying that.  Besides, the fingers themselves were too small, almost….

Ken abruptly felt what little food he had in his stomach rising into his throat.  He felt his esophageal muscles tighten, stemming the flood of gorge that wanted to erupt.

“What is that?  What are those?” said Christopher.  His voice wavered as much as his flashlight, and Ken could tell that he was fighting against the conclusion that Ken had already come to.

Ken didn’t answer.  He took a step back, bumping into Christopher.  He almost screamed.  Only the fact that he had locked his jaw, trying not to vomit in fear and disgust and a sense of sheer wrongness at this sight, kept him from shrieking at the contact.

He made a noise that sounded a bit like someone holding a small animal underwater, drowning it oh-so-carefully.  Oh-so-slowly.

“Hrk.”  It was almost enough for the puke to start spewing.  He swallowed again.

More fingers.  A hand.

No room.  No room for a zombie.

“What is it?” said Christopher again.  Ken felt the young man grab a handful of his shirt and start pulling him backward.

The thing in front of them pulled into view.  Not just fingers.  Hands.

No room for a zombie.

Arms, bloody and torn from its passage through dark tunnels too small for movement by any earthly creature.

No room.

One shoulder, bone poking through wet muscle partially sheared by sharp concrete edges and buried steel points.  The joint crackled loudly as it pushed through.

“What is it?” Christopher shrieked.

No room.  No room for a zombie.

No room for an adult zombie.

The thing pushed its head out.  Eyes concealed by armored scabs but that nevertheless oriented right on Ken and Christopher dully reflected the flashlight beam.

“The head’s the hardest part.”  The voice in Ken’s head belonged to Doctor Baird, the man who delivered Derek.  “Once the head’s out, it’s all over.  Now push, honey!”

The thing in the hole looked through blinded eyes at Ken.  It chirped, a high-pitched sound that made Ken’s teeth shake in their sockets.

Then it slipped forward, sliding over a trail of its own ichorous blood, emerging like Hell’s bastard version of a newborn from the darkness.  It fell head over feet, thudding down the rubble.

It was a child.  A child-thing no bigger than Hope, barely bigger than Lizzy.

It had broken its legs in the fall.  Ken could hear the crackles as they reset.

Then he heard something else.  The gentle sifting and soughing of dust over dirt, of silt sloughing off cement.

There were other holes, he realized.  Many of them no bigger than a cat.

Hope had been right.  The zombies had found them.

Another set of flayed fingers groped for the light.  Another.  More.

“Run,” said Ken.

Christopher pulled him backward, yanking him as if they could outrun the hungry trilling of the small things that fell into the tunnel behind them.  As if they could outrun the memory of what they had just seen, the nightmares that would last the rest of whatever lives they had left.

They heard footsteps behind them.  Small, light, obscene.

“Run!” Ken screamed.  Not for Christopher, but for the others.

He hoped that whatever exit Buck had planned was close.  And usable.

70

When Ken stumbled around the bend, back to where he could see the rest of the group, he was glad to see that they were on their feet.  He would have been happier if they’d already been moving, but at least they had taken his shout seriously.

“What did you see?” said Buck.  He was holding Hope in his arms, and Ken could see at a glance that the way he was holding her wasn’t just for porting her from one place to another.  The man had his body half-hunched around her small frame as if to provide a living suit of armor.

“They got in,” Christopher said breathlessly.

“How?” said Maggie.  She was holding Liz, the toddler still naked but back in her carrier on Maggie’s chest.

Ken noted that Liz had extended one hand toward Sally.  The snow leopard was standing just behind Maggie, as close as he could get to Ken’s wife in the cramped tunnel.

Other than that one hand, though, Liz was limp.  Her head fallen forward, her legs and her other arm dangling.

What’s with her and the cat?

A question for later.  He heard the scuttling of myriad small hands and feet on the concrete behind them.  Didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to see what the darkness might be hiding.

But he had to.  They all had to know.

Christopher spun as though hearing Ken’s thoughts.

Maggie screamed.

The walls and ceiling behind them were coated with bloody, moving things.  None of them had much in the way of distinguishing features, all of them seeming like jumbles of wet limbs stripped of skin.  They were climbing over each other, sticking to the ceilings and walls, their feet and hands making horrible suck-pop noises each time they shifted.

They were all small.  So small.  None bigger than Hope.  Most even tinier than that.

The light hit them and they growled.  The same growl as the rest of the hordes, but lighter.  Higher in pitch, but still pushing that same message into Ken’s head.

Give up.

Give in.

Maggie was still screaming.  Sally roared, the bellow of the big cat nearly deafening in the small space of the tunnel.

Aaron stepped past Ken.  He was holding something: a length of rebar that ended in series of barb-like frays, almost like a medieval halberd.  He pointed it at the things that clambered toward them.

“I’ll hold ‘em off,” he said.

Ken’s stomach roiled.  He felt disoriented, the terrible realities of what had been done to him and what he had done to others really setting in for the first time.

Still, he thought he could have fought off the hordes again.  If they needed to.

But these… they weren’t the hordes.  They were children.  They had been changed, they had lost themselves.

But any one of them could have been Hope.  Liz.

Derek.

Was his son one of the horrible skinned beasts rushing their way?

“No,” he said.  He grabbed Aaron’s shoulder with a shaking hand.  “We run.”

Aaron looked at him.  “I can buy you time.”

“We won’t need it.  We can outrun them.  We need to stick together.”  He pulled Aaron toward him.  “We can’t lose any more people.  We can’t.”

He looked behind him.  Buck was already moving, grabbing Maggie and pulling her into the main tunnel.  Sally followed them closely, and Ken knew that the snow leopard was tied somehow to his children.

More questions.  More questions and no answers.

Christopher ran past.  Gagging and sputtering.  Looking sick.  The light went with him.

“Come on,” said Ken.  “We can make it together.”

Aaron nodded curtly.  He grabbed Ken and started pulling him.  “I hope you’re right.”

Ken hoped so, too.

71

Give up.

Give in.

It wasn’t the same call after all, Ken realized after running only a few hundred feet in the dark storm drain.  The call was stronger.  Harder to resist.  The only time it abated was when Sally roared, which he did periodically as though to consciously combat the effect of the small things behind them.

Give up.

Give in.

Ken heard them, the wet/dry mixture of bones crackling and suction pulling and loosing as the things scuttled over the ceiling and walls.

Something splashed.  Another splash.

“They’re gettin’ closer,” said Aaron.  He sounded unconcerned, but Ken had finally figured out that the mere fact of this observation was a sign the cowboy was worried.

“Where we going?” huffed Ken.

“Buck said there’s a way out of the tunnel up ahead.”

“Where?”

“Couple hundred yards.”

A couple hundred yards.  A block or maybe two.  The kind of trip that comprised a pleasant stroll in normal times.  But in a tiny tunnel with a flashlight that was barely hanging onto life as your only illumination it got harder.  Add two children, injuries, a predatory cat threading between the group’s feet and it got tougher.

That was without the monsters.

Ken looked over his shoulder.  He didn’t see anything at first.  Just darkness, a wall covered in pitch that sprang into existence a few feet behind him.

Then he saw things glinting in the black.  The darkness turned from a wall into the emptiness of space, with perfectly paired stars twinkling along the outer rim of the galaxy.

More of the stars winked into existence.  Eyes that reflected the weak light in the tunnel, seemingly illuminated by hidden fires from within.

Ken remembered the glowing acid the things vomited.  The pinkish ooze that had apparently taken the place of brain matter.  Maybe their eyes really were glowing.  Certainly it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that had happened.

“Eyes front,” snapped Aaron.  Ken turned forward just in time to avoid hitting a lip in the floor of the tunnel.  He stumbled forward and only the cowboy’s strong grip kept him from going down face-first.

If that happened, he knew he wouldn’t get up.

“We’re almost there!” shouted Buck.  Ken could see him ahead.  A huge shape lit from behind by Christopher’s light.

Would they make it?  Ken hoped so.  He honestly didn’t know if he could raise a hand against the things behind him.  He knew they were just as changed as the adults had been; knew they presented just as much of a danger.

But knowing something wasn’t the same as believing it.  People know they shouldn’t drink and drive, they know they should eat right.  They know all manner of things that they don’t really believe – or at least don’t believe apply to them.  And they die because of those distinctions.

Ken didn’t want to find out if he could believe that it was worth attacking a once-child to save his family.  Didn’t want to discover anew the depths of his savagery.

Buck stopped suddenly.  The tunnel had ended, and at first Ken despaired, thinking it must have collapsed.

Then he saw the door built into the side.  Buck swung it open.

Daylight swam into the tunnel.  Ken could barely look at it.  He groaned as his eyes tried to adjust to long-absent brightness.  Tears streamed down his cheeks.

He kept pounding forward.

Collided with something soft.

It growled.  Sally.  Not moving.

Ken blinked.  Everything was a blur.  But he could see that Buck wasn’t out the door.

“Move!” he shouted.  He heard the chitter of the child-things, the infant-things, the things that had once laughed and played and now hungered for their blood.

“I can’t,” sobbed Buck.

Maggie started crying.

Ken shoved past them.

He saw out the door.

Looked right at the fifty full-sized zombies standing directly outside.

Liz started to scream.  A moment later, Hope joined in.  Not screams of terror, but ecstasy as they surrendered anew to whatever power held sway over them.

Ken looked at Maggie.  She couldn’t return his gaze.  Just held tight to their baby.

The chittering of the things in the tunnel came closer.

The zombies outside turned to gaze on them.

Then they parted.  Moving aside to let something pass through.

Ken’s blood chilled.  Then froze completely as a massive form passed between the dozens of other zombies.  Six and a half feet tall, skin of pure white on one side of its body, the other side charred.

It was the thing from his dream.  The muscled beast, half charred, half pristine, who had captured and bitten and turned his son.  Who had stolen Ken’s boy.

Beside the black and white creature walked another figure.  Ken registered who it was at the same time he heard Aaron curse.  The cowboy’s voice was strangled, halting.  Not just afraid, but… lost.

The figure was Dorcas.  Dark fluid pouring from a dozen wounds, black scabs covering one eye completely and circling the other like an army laying siege.  She growled.

Give up.

Give in.

One more figure moved to join the horde.  Lurching, walking on a body that had been impossibly broken and just as impossibly mended again.  But not completely.  Never completely.  The eyes rolled back, sightless but somehow still able to find prey, to track the last vestiges of humankind.

Light brown hair lay plastered against the forehead.  The skin was singed.  A face that should have been unlined but was peeling away in curls.

The air left Ken’s lungs in a gasp and felt like it was yanking part of his soul out along with it.

“Derek,” he whispered.

END OF BOOK THREE

THE SAGA WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK FOUR

THE COLONY: VELOCITY

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 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 The Colony: Descent, 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)

STRANGERS

DARKBOUND

THE HAUNTED

APPARITION

THE LOON

MR. GRAY (aka THE MERIDIANS)

RUN

HOOKED: A TRUE FAERIE TALE

RISING FEARS

Table of Contents

- 1. 1
- 2. 5
- 3. 7
- 4. 9
- 5. 11
- 6. 14
- 7. 17
- 8. 20
- 9. 23
- 10. 27
- 11. 31
- 12. 34
- 13. 37
- 14. 40
- 15. 43
- 16. 46
- 17. 49
- 18. 51
- 19. 54
- 20. 56
- 21. 58
- 22. 61
- 23. 64
- 24. 67
- 25. 70
- 26. 73
- 27. 76
- 28. 79
- 29. 83
- 30. 85
- 31. 87
- 32. 90
- 33. 92
- 34. 95
- 35. 97
- 36. 100
- 37. 102
- 38. 105
- 39. 107
- 40. 109
- 41. 112
- 42. 114
- 43. 118
- 44. 121
- 45. 124
- 46. 126
- 47. 129
- 48. 131
- 49. 132