Velocity
Author: Michaelbrent Collings
Date: 2014-02-22 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Zombies; Science Fiction
Description: You can either run fast...or die slow. *** Once there was a man. Once this man had a child. Once this child was bitten. Once this child came back. Ken Strickland has faced every parent's dream: a lost child, now returned. Ken has found every parent's nightmare: a lost child, returned as something else. Facing his son, the world is spinning, picking up speed, moving too fast. Reaching a terminal velocity that could kill them all. *** THE COLONY: VELOCITY is the fourth volume of an apocalyptic series by #1 bestselling novelist Michaelbrent Collings *** From the author: As with so many of my book

Copyright © 2014 by Michaelbrent Collings

All rights reserved.

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

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email: info@michaelbrentcollings.com

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

NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

CRIME SEEN

"[Crime Seen] will keep you guessing until the end…. 5/5. " – Horror Novel Reviews

"It's rare to find an ending to a novel that is clever, thought-provoking and surprising, yet here Collings nails all three…." – Ravenous Reads

"Crime Seen by Michaelbrent Collings is one of those rare books that deserves more than five stars." – Top of the Heap Reviews

"With an ending that, again, will keep you guessing until the last chapter, I would definitely recommend this book to others." – Horror Drive-In

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

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

"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

"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

"A spell-binding conclusion comes from out of nowhere that is hauntingly reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock. A certifiable bone chiller…." – horrornews.net

"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...

D’Aun, Laura, Victoria, and Miguel,
for letting me be the creepy guy in the corner,

and to Laura, FTAAE.

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

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24

25

26

27

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29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

1

Since it first acquired the ability to think, humanity has obsessed over a single question:

What happens next?

What happens after?

What happens when we die?

Ken stared at the answer. And, staring, wanted to scream. Not in victory, not in joy. He felt none of the ecstasy reported by seers and prophets through the ages, only a black madness that threatened to break over him like a tidal wave. To carry him off into depths so profound that he drown in them. And, drowning, would suffer forever. Because this wave brought death. And death had ceased to be a cipher and transformed to terror.

Ken stared at his dead son.

His dead son stared back. And growled.

No. It’s not him. It’s not Derek.

But it was. Even bent and broken from his hundred-foot fall off the side of a construction crane, even with one eye covered by scabrous growths, there was no denying that it was his boy. His brave, beautiful boy who had sacrificed himself so that his mother – and perhaps all of them – might live.

Derek –

(not Derek, not really, this is once-Derek, false-Derek, a Derek-of-lies, not my boy, oh, please, God, NOT MY BOY)

– snarled. The sound had weight. It hit Ken like a fist. Not the give up give in of the snarls he had heard thus far, the low psychic vibration that had accompanied the cries of the zombies.

This was a shriek in his mind. Not give up give in but GIVE UP GIVE IN.

And he wanted to. Dear God, he wanted to.

GIVE UP GIVE IN.

GIVE UP GIVE IN.

(daddy no)

Ken realized he had stepped out of the storm drain access tunnel. Into the too-bright sunlight, into the clutches of the fifty or so zombies waiting there.

Why aren’t they attacking us? he wondered.

He also realized that the other zombies, the tiny child-monsters that had pushed themselves through even tinier holes to get to them, had halted. They were swaying and snarling, but their cries were muted. Lower than they had been. He could hear them –

give up.

give in.

– but the sound wasn’t as forceful. It was almost… worshipful. Like they were in the presence of deity.

Beside Derek stood a six-foot-plus monster. A zombie with perfectly white skin on one side of its body, utterly unblemished. Its left side. Its right side was charred and blackened by a trip through flame. It was an injury that would have killed a normal human, but the monster didn’t register pain, didn’t seem to notice it at all.

It stepped toward the group.

Ken realized that no one else was moving. His wife was screaming in terror, Maggie’s cries almost as loud as those of his no-longer-son. Aaron and Christopher stood mute, though whether from shock or terror or some other emotion Ken could not say.

Buck held Ken’s little girl. Hope was crying out, ecstatic screams that rose and fell in counterpoint to those of Liz, Ken’s baby who hung naked from a baby sling strapped to Maggie’s stomach. The screams fell into low moans at times, and Ken shuddered. They sounded nearly sexual, and were nothing he wanted to hear from his little girls.

Sally…. Ken glanced around. The snow leopard that had saved them from a zombie attack was standing still. The cat’s fur spiked to attention, even its tail held erect. It looked like it was fighting something.

GIVE UP.

GIVE IN.

Derek stopped snarling.

GIVE U –

(run, daddy)

derek stepped forward. So did the half-burnt monster beside him, the unholy retainer at the right hand of a slight-figured god-child. At Derek’s left, Dorcas – good and kind Dorcas, Dorcas whose eyes had shone with selflessness and bravery and whose gaze now flared with hunger and need – stepped forward as well. Like an unholy godhead, a trinity that served darkness instead of light.

(daddy, please run, plea –)

It was only when the tiny voice in his mind cut off that Ken realized it had ever been there. And with the realization he was forced to question its appearance. A thing defined not by itself but by the shadows that surrounded it.

Had the voice been there?

Was it real?

Or did he merely wish it to be so?  Did he simply hope Derek was still in there?

Derek opened his mouth wide. Dark ichor welled out. His legs crackled, shifting as he stood.

The once-boy – once-child, once-bright star of their little family – shrieked, and the sound drove spikes into Ken’s mind.

GIVE UP.

GIVE IN.

DIE!

The other zombies ran forward as one. Inside the drain tunnel Ken heard the tiny scratches of child-things scrabbling forward.

Nowhere to run.

DIE!

2

They were all screaming.

Maggie, shouting in terror. Making noises he hadn’t even heard on the days and nights she gave birth to their children – two of those times completely without anesthetic.

Christopher, his cries waxing and waning so they sounded almost like laughter. But chilling. Terrifying.

Even Aaron screamed. Just a staccato yell, a pair of pistol pops to Christopher’s machine-gun cry. Still, it was more of an admission of fear than the cowboy-cum-rodeo-clown-cum-whatever-Aaron-actually-was usually made.

Buck screamed as well. Big man, high voice. He had sounded whiny when Ken first met him, but the sound he was making carried no trace of begging, no hint of complaint. It was pure terror, the kind that laced its way up your guts and then pulled tight and forced you to open your mouth and let it out because to keep it in would be to die.

The girls….

Hope and little Liz….

Hope was looking up. Staring at the sky. Mouth open. Breathing in time with…

… Liz. The toddler strapped to her mother’s chest. Her arms splayed out, fingers wide as though experiencing her first rain, her first snow. She was smiling.

Then laughing.

The laugh made Ken’s legs wobble. There was nothing of Liz in the laugh. Nothing of the little girl who ran to him and buried her face in the space between neck and shoulder and kissed him and giggled at the feel of his whispers. Nothing of Sesame Street and apple juice in sippies and mornings going in to little eyes staring over the top rail of the crib, eyes that lit up when you walked in because it was day and DADDY WAS HERE!

Liz was gone. Only –

(give up)

– hunger remained. Only hunger and –

(give in)

– hatred and –

(GIVE UP)

– NEED.

(GIVE IN.)

Sally was still. The leopard was male, had been adopted by and named so ridiculously by Hope. Ken suspected that the beast had adopted the girls as well. Certainly there was something about the animal that changed the effect the zombies had on his children. Lessened it.

But not now. The things’ call was too strong.

Derek was too strong. His son was in some strange but undeniable way the leader. His boy had come to kill him.

The zombies were rushing them.

Ken opened his arms. Just like little Liz. No agony, no ecstacy. Only welcoming. He was throwing himself to his boy. Even though his boy hated him, despised him, wanted only his death.

(daddy please run)

The voice was too small, or the growls of the beasts too loud. The urge to flight was lost in Ken’s mind.

The first of the zombies was only perhaps ten feet away.

The zombies in the tunnel behind them – small bodies wriggling through the flowing water in the storm drain, tiny hands and feet impossibly clinging to walls and ceilings – were reaching out.

Ken didn’t care.

He couldn’t.

He was giving up.

Giving in.

Gone.

3

The leading edge of the zombies reached out. Their hands – some whole and human-seeming, others bent bloody, still others covered in the waxy yellow substance that seemed to serve as both poultice and building material – reached for the survivors. Buck was closest to them. He would be taken first.

Ken wondered, briefly, whether they would turn him or just kill him.

He wondered what they would do to Hope, who was still in the big man’s arms.

The closest zombie was one of the whole creatures. A thing that had once been a boy with bright red hair and thick glasses that now hung askew from one ear, propped up on his nose in a way that looked impossible in the same way Escher drawings look impossible.

The redhead touched Buck.

Buck was still screaming.

All of them caught by the scream. By Derek.

Give UP.

Give IN.

Then the redhead’s hand was red. Red as something splashed it, and then an instant later it disappeared and Ken fell back into his own mind as the scream cut off.

He heard a series of thuds and thumps.

Yellow streaked past his vision. Yellow and black. Ken thought of bees, of the insects that first clustered around his class window, then the bees that tried to kill him and Dorcas –

(before she Changed)

– before dying en masse.

But… bees were small. Not bigger than an inch long. Certainly not twenty feet long. Thirty.

Something hissed, a sound Ken vaguely remembered from his past life, his life when he was a teacher and his biggest problem had been getting the kids to do homework, maybe discovering one of the seniors copping a feel off his girlfriend during passing period.

What is it?

Ken couldn’t focus. He kept thinking about Derek and bees and the laugh/scream/moans of his daughters.

And the thumps. The meat-smacks of bodies hitting something hard. The penny-smell of blood aerosolizing. Pink mist in the air.

He realized he couldn’t hear Liz or Hope anymore. Nor could he hear his son’s –

(no not Derek, not anymore, Derek’s gone)

– thoughts in his mind. He took a breath. Felt blood puff into his lungs.

Will that infect me?

The bee stopped moving. It stopped right in front of Ken, humming with a strangely rhythmic thud-chug-thud-chug that also touched memories of times before the world fell to its knees.

Ken stared at the bee’s black lines. Vaguely aware that the monstrous insect had slammed into the zombies, but that they were regrouping. Would come again.

The ones in the tunnel were still coming.

He didn’t move. Just looked at the stripes on the bee’s sides. Two black lines. The words Boise City Public School District sandwiched neatly between them.

There was another hydraulic hiss, this time smaller. The school bus had hugged up so tightly to the wall where the storm drain access door was that when bus door folded open Ken felt the wind of it on his face.

A voice punched out. Raspy and jagged as a saw with broken teeth, and there was something else beneath it. Something Ken couldn’t quite place….

“Get in,” said the driver. “Two seconds and I leave.”

The bus engine gunned, and Ken knew the owner of the voice was not bluffing.

4

Ken used to sing a song to Derek. Not always. Only when he was a baby, and then only when the baby was so colicky it seemed death was imminent. Not his death, not the baby’s. The parents’. Ken’s and Maggie’s. On those occasions, Ken picked up the little ball of writhing arms and legs and bunched him up so tight that movement was all but impossible and sang about wheels on the bus that spun around and around and around. He sang and sang, and sooner or later Derek always calmed.

The wheels on this bus were not spinning. They weren’t black, either. They were gray from dust, red from blood, brown from where the two came together to form a mud-blood-mess of dirt and death.

One of the wheels had a hand on it, holding tight to the lug nuts and the gaps in the heavy duty rim.

No arm, no body. Just a hand. Torn raggedly apart mid-forearm, stump crusted over with the waxy substance that built and healed.

The hand twitched. The pad of a finger ran over the edge of the rim, like it was questing for something. It probably was. Ken had been grabbed by a similarly disembodied hand a few days earlier; had seen a head with no body crying windless screams.

The zombies didn’t stop.

“Move! Ken, move!”

Aaron punctuated his shout with a yank. He’d been half-dragging Ken thus far, propping up Ken’s broken body with his own strength, even though he was far from untouched by the chaos himself.

Ken stepped into the bus.

He thought about the wheels on the bus.

He saw Derek. Not the baby Derek, not the child he rocked until sleep stole the pain. Not even the older Derek, who was a real person, on his way to becoming a real man.

Not even the Derek who had saved his mother by taking the bite meant for her.

No, this was the new Derek. Not the kind Derek-that-was but the broken (though rapidly unshattering as that yellow shit pushed out of his pores and coated his broken bones and flesh) and hungry Derek-of-now-and-forevermore. The boy was standing next to piles of zombies that had been plowed to the side by the massive weight of the bus.

The wheels on the bus.

Babies crying.

Derek’s lips pulled back from his teeth. Some of them had shattered away, probably when he fell from the crane. Not a gap-toothed grin the way kids had had before the world fell down in ashes –

(ashes we all fall down like he fell down

DIE

run daddy)

– around them, but with the serrated grin of a saw blade. Rusty, spattered with darkness that might be blood. Hungry.

Ken felt the clank of feet on metal. He realized they were his.

He was getting on the bus.

He wondered where the wheels on the bus would take him.

Derek ran toward the bus.

Beside him, the black/white monster and the creature that had once been Dorcas did the same.

Ken looked at the driver. According to the song the driver would tell him –

“MOVE YOUR ASS!”

5

Ken didn’t move. He just stared. A mental stopwatch clicked past the two seconds they’d been allotted, but the driver didn’t start the bus moving. Ken didn’t know if that was because they weren’t all on yet or because they were half on and the guy didn’t want to scrape anyone on the side of the wall beside which the bus had shuddered to a halt.

So he stared. Not long. Maybe a second.

Too long for what was going on outside. Not nearly long enough to understand what he was seeing.

“Holy shit, we’re being rescued by Darth Vader!” said Christopher. Ever the most emotionally-resilient of the group, he said it as a joke and his tone almost sold it as such. He could have been poking fun of a friend at a party. Though this would have been a very strange friend indeed, and a completely terrible party.

“Language!” snapped Maggie in a tone that made it clear she was speaking out of habit more than sincere remonstration. In the next instant she pushed onto the bus and said, “Holy fu –“ She managed to stop herself.

Buck rammed his way down the aisle with Hope in his arms. Ken’s oldest daughter was screaming, reaching for the side of the bus.

For Derek.

There was a gentle tap, just the tiniest shifting of the bus. The only sound of a snow leopard hopping on board.

“You’re shitting me,” said the driver.

“You should talk,” said Christopher.

They were all inside.

The folding doors extended. Closed.

5

The driver faced forward. It didn’t matter. Ken was still anchored to the spot by surprise. He had seen a lot of things on buses just like this: kids groping each other, kids chewing tobacco, kids getting into fistfights they apparently hoped would go unnoticed.

He had never seen someone dressed in blood-crusted full-body armor with the words “Boise Police” across the back, a pair of machetes strapped to his back, and a gasmask that looked like it had stepped through a wormhole from World War II.

“Siddown.”

That was how the driver said it: one quick word. Not “sit down” or even “sit the hell down” but rather the most efficient distillation of the words: “Siddown.”

It was still enough for Ken to hear what he had missed in the first moments after the seven-ton bee smashed right through the throng of zombies. Still enough for a small surprise to find its way through the madness.

Ken wondered if the others had heard it. Had noticed.

He turned to the back of the bus. Aaron was already gone, and Ken hadn’t even noticed. But the cowboy must have guided Ken to a support rail because that was what he was now holding onto. The vertical rod was bolted to a seat, welded to ceiling and floor.

Ken felt his grip twist across blood and fear-slick sweat as he caught a glimpse of what was outside, what was now behind them.

Derek, running over the crushed bodies – all of them still moving, still twitching, some of them struggling to stand on feet and legs that corkscrewed around to point behind them.

Dorcas, snarling and shrieking as she did the same. She and the black/white zombie were running a strange kind of interference for Derek, pushing the wounded out of the way. Not that Ken’s boy – his once-boy – noticed. He ran across the pavement, the dead, the blood, the innards with equal abandon.

And the tunnel. The access door.

Tiny fingers circled the jamb. Tiny hands appeared.

Tiny bodies came to light.

6

Ken hadn’t seen them yet.

He saw their fingers, saw their eyes glimmering behind him as they caught what light there was and threw it back at him. Saw eyes blinded by armored scabs, others reflective as those of a hyena come to tear at a carcass in the night.

But what he had seen had been too little to sink in. Or maybe it had been enough, but his mind had rejected it. Had refused to acknowledge what it was seeing.

Now, in the harsh light of day, under a sun as bright as this, he had no choice but to see, to believe.

Even if he didn’t understand.

The things that crawled out around the doorframe like roaches running out of a strangely vertical drain were tiny. Not just children like Ken had thought, but most of them babies. Toddlers at best. They had pushed into the tunnel, the tiniest of them looking barely big enough to have fought their way into this world in the first place.

Ken was struck with a horrific thought: what if they hadn’t? Half of humanity had changed in a period of ten minutes. What if one of the Changed had been pregnant?

What if one of the Changed had yet to leave the womb?

He shuddered.

Shuddered again as he saw what the tiny creatures did when they came into the light. They blinked, and he saw –

(It’s not possible, Ken, not possible

What of this is possible?)

– that most of them did not have scabbed-over eyes; rather, their eyes were enormous. Perhaps half the surface area of their faces. They were black and shiny as wet obsidian, though some of them had mottled crusts beginning to creep over the dark orbs: the scabs that were appearing on more and more of the creatures.

Some of the scabs seemed to be growing right out of the centers of the eyes. Not the skin surrounding the dark orbs, the scabs erupted like volcanic islands from the dark seas of the eyes themselves.

As he watched, the things blinked and cringed. He couldn’t see what they were cringing from, but then they scampered back into the tunnel, again seeming more roach-like than human.

The light. They couldn’t stand it.

He turned away. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about babies changing to something so deadly and bloodthirsty and alien and ugly.

What if that’s what’s happening to little Lizzy?

What if it’s something worse?

He had no answers to that. He looked at Maggie. She was sitting on one of the puke-green seats that were required fixtures in school buses worldwide, cradling Liz’s head. Liz’s eyes were closed.

Maggie met Ken’s eyes. “She’s asleep,” she said.

Ken noticed that Sally was laying in the aisle at Liz’s feet. He wondered what the he-leopard would do if he ever came to understand how misnamed he was.

Maybe he’d like it. The world’s first transgender cougar.

Though that couldn’t be. Ken knew from visiting the zoo with the kids that Sally and his mate were trying to breed. He wondered if Sally knew that his female was gone. Maybe dead, but certainly out of reach.

Sally raised his head and looked at Ken as if to say, “You have worse things to worry about than my love life.”

Ken had to admit this was true. But knowing he was hiding from reality in a series of half-inane thoughts didn’t mean he could come back. He had to escape from the skittering, chittering roach children outside, if only for a moment.

Buck was sitting across from Maggie. Like Liz, Hope was asleep or unconscious. Lolling in the big man’s arms. One of her hands trailed down to Sally’s fur, and Ken saw her fingers clench reflexively.

Sally purred. Put his head down.

Aaron and Christopher were in the back of the bus, rooting through something.

“It’s like Christmas,” whispered Christopher.

Aaron looked at the young man. “I worry about you, boy.”

Ken didn’t have the mental capacity to worry about what would excite Christopher. Once the son of Idaho’s governor, the kid had saved them all many times over, usually by finding a way to set something on fire or blow something up – be it something small like a firecracker or something slightly larger like a skyscraper or a passenger jet.

Movement beyond the two men caught Ken’s eye.

The zombies that had almost killed the survivors were still running after them. He couldn’t hear the things’ growl over the thrum of the school bus diesel engine. But he could feel it. Could sense it digging into his mind like a wedge into a split tree trunk, widening a rift to the point where….

What?

What would happen when he split wide open?

He didn’t know.

He saw Derek. He remembered holding his son on a long night when the child had a double ear infection. Little Derek, only three and weeping, asking Daddy to make it stop, make it stop. And Ken held him and rocked him in a dingey second- or third-hand glider chair he and Maggie bought from the Deseret Industries Thrift Store. Singing “Hush, Little Baby” over and over, praying silently to God to take his son’s pain away.

God answered eventually. The next morning they found blood in Derek’s ears and realized his eardrums had burst. No lasting ill effects, but scary as hell to parents who lived and died on their children’s smiles and tears.

“Hush little baby, don’t say a word….”

Ken realized he was singing under his breath. He looked at Maggie. She was looking at him. She was crying silently, twin tear-tracks painting platinum lines down her cheeks.

“… Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird….”

He fell silent. The boy-thing behind the bus wasn’t Derek. Not really. It was a liar, a deceiver. A devil come to steal the hope that remained to the survivors.

“… And if that mockingbird won’t sing….”

As if it heard the words, the Derek-thing shrieked. The sound made it through the harsh chug-thug-pant of the bus engine. Piercing the way only a small child’s scream could be. But grating and deep as well. Something under the child’s voice, a thing singularly alien and holding knowledge and evil beyond the grasp of any true child.

Ken felt dirty hearing it. He felt like washing his hands, scrubbing until the flesh bled then washing until the muscle and tendon was gone and only pure white bone remained.

And then washing some more.

Maggie cried out. Despair.

Hope and little Liz did not awake, but both girls moaned. That terrible moan of pleasure-pain. The moan of virtue offered up, of innocence stolen away.

The Derek-thing’s scream ended.

Ken couldn’t go to Maggie, couldn’t sit beside her or even touch her. Sally was in the way, and Ken sensed that the snow leopard’s presence was the only thing keeping the power of Derek’s screams from overwhelming –

(hurting changing stealing)

– his daughters.

Something whined. At first he thought it was another piece of the sound that the zombies were making. Then realized it was coming from the wrong direction. Coming from somewhere ahead of him.

He turned and saw their rescuer – the strangely-masked driver in the full-body armor – holding up a small box that was whining and shrieking.

The box screamed in time with Derek. Its pitch was different, but the thing spoke in syncopation with the thing that had once been his son.

“Who are you?” he said.

The driver put down the box.

Took off the mask.

Ken heard Christopher gasp behind him. “No frickin’ way,” said the kid.

7

Ken had heard the driver’s voice. Raspy, craggy. But there had been something else underneath the gruffness. Something that he had recognized and that kept him from being surprised when the mask came off and revealed long curls of red hair.

The driver was a woman. A bit on the chubby side, perhaps about forty pounds north of what the celeb magazines would have considered an appropriate candidate for beach attire.

Then again, the writers of those magazines were probably either dead or zombies.

The world may have ended, but at least our girls and women aren’t going to be subjected to impossible body image standards anymore.

“What are you staring at?” the driver snapped. Her voice was just as cracked without the gas mask, and now Ken could see why. There was a half-healed wound curling around the side of her throat where it looked like someone had tried to yank her jugular out and only partially failed. It looked like it had been a devastating wound, the kind of thing that would have necessitated major surgery and a long stay in the hospital before the Change.

Now… thick black thread, a hasty bit of sewing that passed for first-, second-, and last-aid. Maybe a few hours’ rest, and then back to the business of survival. Ken didn’t know who she was, but this girl was tough.

And, he realized, she wasn’t staring at him. Her eyes kept flicking to the mirror above her seat, the one that was positioned so the bus driver could keep an eye on the students at all times, but her gaze pushed beyond him, to….

Ken turned, following her gaze. He saw Christopher. Christopher’s mouth was agape. Still handsome as ever, managing to look more like he was on his way to a photo shoot than like someone on a one-way trip to the end of the world. But he was clearly dumbstruck by something. He was holding an axe in his hand, and Ken wondered where he had gotten that, but he wasn’t looking at it. No, he was looking back at Theresa.

And, abruptly, Ken realized that the kid looked exactly like Ken himself had once looked. Not youthful, it wasn’t that. No, it was the stunned look on the kid’s face, the look Ken had worn the first time he saw Maggie, walking into church in a blue blouse and a beige skirt.

Whenever he told the story Maggie would insist she hadn’t worn any such thing, but Ken knew she was wrong, because he could still remember the giant double-pump his heart did when she walked in (late, he remembered, always late to church). The prettiest girl he’d ever seen. And he knew somehow that, beyond beauty, he was seeing someone that would matter to him. Not love at first sight, perhaps, but definitely something more than hormones, more than simple lust.

He hadn’t thought of marriage in that first moment, but he had walked over to her after the services and done his best to strike up a conversation. Not usual for him – he wasn’t a ladies man by any stretch – but he had little choice. We are all rushing headlong at sometimes terrifying velocity toward our futures, and to try to avoid them is only to court disaster. And in this case he had no wish to avoid his future. Only to find out what part she would play in it.

Now, Christopher’s mouth moved up and down like a nutcracker in the midst of a nut shortage. Open, shut, open, shut.

The redhead at the front of the bus wasn’t amused. She frowned. “Are you an idiot or something?”

Christopher’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack. The dumbstruck look disappeared – or at least faded – from his face. “No,” he said. He looked like he wanted to say something wittier, but the single syllable was all he could manage.

Christopher held up the axe in his hand. It was black, with a curved blade that looked like the kind of thing Ken associated with medieval movies. The word “Cass” was scrawled across the haft in thick red letters. “Where’d you get this?”

“Took it off some Goth chick,” said the driver. “She was ranting about vampires.” She shrugged. “Got her stories wrong, that’s for sure.”

“You stole her weapons?” That was Buck. Ken had almost forgotten about him. The big man gaped at their driver.

She returned his gaze evenly. “No, I didn’t steal them. But when she got bitten and turned, I used them to cut her into little pieces. If it makes you feel better, you can imagine me asking if I could cut her arms and legs and head off, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top.”

The redhead looked like she might continue her sarcastic rant, but her eyes flicked down and forward and she screamed, “Hold on to something!”

Ken saw why.

He expected the redhead to brake.

She didn’t.

Is she insane?

8

“What are you –?“

“Slow down!”

“Don’t –“

The words came fast and loud. Ken couldn’t even tell who said what. He heard Maggie scream. Only Sally remained aloof from the conversation, the snow leopard silent as the redhead at the wheel stomped the accelerator.

School buses aren’t made for speed. The thing didn’t leap forward; didn’t even lurch. But Ken could feel the torque pushing him back, felt his hand tighten against the support bar he was holding. He dropped to the nearest seat, wondering if they had survived countless attacks by zombies – both living and dead – only to fall prey to a woman with a demolition derby death wish.

There were three cars in the road ahead of the bus. Stretched across the entire length of the road, end to end. A red Suburban, two smaller vehicles. They were touching bumpers, almost as if –

They were put there.

Ken realized what he was seeing in the instant before the bus hit.

A roadblock.

He thought for a fraction of an instant that it must have been some group of survivors that did it. But why? Ken had seen enough end-of-the-world movies to know that eventually everything went to Hell, and people started trying to kill/rape/eat each other (not necessarily in that order), but it seemed that three days was a bit fast to have devolved to that point. Especially since there were so few survivors. Any humans left would probably be concentrating one hundred percent on survival, no brain space left for traps for their unwary fellow humans.

Then he saw the zombies, a full dozen of them, loping away as the bus hit the front right bumper of the Suburban and the front left bumper of the dark blue sedan that had been shoved against it.

They tried to stop us. This was a trap.

The implications of that were terrifying. The things had been getting smarter, there was no denying it. When they first appeared they were truly mindless, simple creatures only capable of killing. Indeed, when the Change occurred, the zombies couldn’t even get through doors at first.

Then they could. And before too much longer they were tracking Ken and the other survivors.

And now… traps. Ambushes?

They weren’t just getting smarter, they were planning. A progression of intelligence that was exponential.

He felt something cold in his gut, pressing against his bowels, making him feel like vomiting and crapping his pants. The things already outnumbered them a thousand to one, already had every physical advantage. If they had intelligence as well, the human race was doomed.

That was the last thought he had before eight tons of school bus slammed right through the two cars. Ken saw a zombie that hadn’t left its position behind the cars plowed over, hitting the front grill of the school bus with a wet thud before disappearing below the chassis.

Something blew up below the bus. The vehicle jounced, skidded to the side. It tore through a set of parking meters set into the side of the road.

Pwing-pwing-pwing.

The redhead grunted as she struggled to bring the bus back under control. Ken could feel the thing fishtailing, juking like a fish that had been half-hooked and still had a chance of escape.

The bus took one huge sideways lurch, and Ken realized that the small explosion he had heard must have been a tire – maybe several tires – popping. This was a large bus, one tire at each front corner and two on each rear corner. Hopefully just one of the rear tires had popped, allowing the other to remain as a whole backup. But he couldn’t tell, and it would be almost too much to hope for given their luck so far.

The bus kept slewing to the side as though drunk on the disaster that lay all around them.

It hit a piece of debris in the middle of the road. Ken didn’t think it had been placed there purposefully, but purposeful or not it sent the vehicle into a new slide. The wheels on the right side of the bus felt like they lifted up for a too-long moment before slamming back to the road with a tooth-jarring thud.

“Geez, lady!” screamed Christopher. “What are you –“

“Shut up,” she growled.

Christopher did. A minor miracle itself, since Ken didn’t think death or destruction had managed to silence the young man before this.

The bus moved forward. Still veering to one side, favoring its blown wheel –

(or wheels please don’t be wheels just let us get a bit farther God I think I really think you owe us that)

– the way Ken favored his left leg due to a pinched nerve. He patted the seat absently.

We’ve both seen better days, haven’t we?

He looked at Maggie. She was white-faced, braced tightly into her own seat like she had found herself in a strange and particularly unpleasant carnival ride, but both she and Liz looked fine. As fine as the circumstances permitted. She nodded. Tried to smile.

He turned farther around so he could see Buck. The big man was looking at Hope, dangling silently in his arms. His big hands roved her body, not in a perverse way but in a way that clearly bespoke his concern and terror. Not for himself, but for her, worried that he would find evidence of broken bones or swelling that might indicate internal trauma. Buck didn’t look at Ken, but apparently sensed his attention because he pushed a big thumb into the air. “We’re okay,” he said. His too-high voice was pitched a bit higher than usual, fear strangling his vocal cords.

Ken glanced at Aaron and Christopher to make sure they were okay as well. Christopher was still holding the axe, and Aaron had an honest-to-god broadsword clutched in his one good hand. Ken wondered what kind of girl this “Cass” had been. Interesting, that’s for sure. And the world was the poorer for her loss.

Both Aaron and Christopher nodded, guy-speak for “We’re good.”

Ken nodded back. Turned to the driver.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The driver glanced at him in the mirror above her head. She couldn’t look at him long, still wending between cars and debris that littered the road; occasionally slamming right through smaller items. But she looked like she was about to answer.

Then the bus bounced.

And again.

And he heard something skitter. Not on top of the bus, not beside it.

Beneath it.

And he remembered the tiny bodies that had flowed out of the storm drain. The things that had fled from the light.

He thought of the zombies, loping away from the vehicles they had pushed together in ambush.

The noise below sounded like it could be large or small. Could be anything. A child-thing, an adult-thing.

But not human.

Something coughed below the bus.

“What now?” said Christopher.

The redhead was still looking at Ken.

She looked terrified.

So, Ken suspected, did he.

9

Ken wondered for a moment why the coughing sound should scare him so badly. There was no question that something was below them, below the bus, but it was more than that.

It was….

He didn’t have a chance to complete the thought.

There was a high-pitched whine. Something that reminded Ken of a dentist’s drill, only with the unpleasantness of that tool notched up times fifty. Then it stopped.

“What…?” said Christopher.

Sally was suddenly on his feet, the snow leopard standing with legs outstretched, almost braced against the seat supports on either side of the center aisle. The leopard’s fur was standing on end and its head was lowered to an attack position. Its teeth were bared.

Liz and Hope didn’t wake up. They didn’t even move when Sally got up. Just slept on.

The cough came again, and Ken placed it. He had heard it first while hanging from the side of the top three stories of a building. A zombie had made that sound, right before it vomited acid all over itself.

But that couldn’t be happening now, could it? Sure, the things had somehow gained an ability to cling to sheer vertical surfaces, but even that was very different from holding fast to the undercarriage of a school bus bouncing through a warzone of a neighborhood. And the zombies’ acid melted their own flesh. So if there was something down there, if it puked acid the stuff would just hurt it, not the bus.

The cough again.

And Ken realized he had heard it other times, too. Like in the elevator shaft, crawling down.

Then the whine came again.

The sound grew higher and higher. Then it changed in tone, sounding almost like….

“It’s sawing through!” Buck shouted the words and then rammed back, jamming himself against the wall, pushing as far away from the center of the aisle as possible.

Ken looked and saw the big man was right: what looked like a circular saw was biting through the steel floor of the bus.

A moment later Ken changed his mind. What the thing actually was he couldn’t say, but it was not a saw. It was moving so quickly that he couldn’t get a good look at it, but for some reason it brought to mind the Remington rotary-style electric razor Maggie had gotten for him a few years back. As a functional razor it had been something of a bust: Ken’s beard was so thick and coarse that he quickly discovered the three “precision” razors actually just yanked the hair out of his face as often as they cut it.

But he did enjoy looking at the thing. It was sleek and somehow felt cooler than the disposable Bic razors he typically used.

The high-pitched sound returned, louder now. Sparks began flying from the portion of the bus that the whatever-it-was was working on.

Ken realized – belatedly – that it was coming through only inches from Sally.

Only inches from his wife and Buck. From his daughters.

He stood. It was an effort. His body had been through a wringer: cuts up and down the length of his frame, sprains and twisted tendons, torqued bones, two fingers he had cut off himself when they had been crushed and caught and doing so was the only way to escape a horde, and the whole thing ravaged by infection.

He had even been bitten by one of the zombies.

Bitten, but not turned.

Not Changed.

How did that happen? Or not happen?

No time to think about it. He was still standing. Still pulling his sore body upward, when the floor section fell away.

He saw what was beneath.

And screamed.

10

It was one of the children. One of the things that had followed them through the storm drain tunnel, a thing that had once been an infant and was now so much more and so much less.

Ken got only a quick look at it as a four-foot-long section of the floor of the bus fell away. The steel plate – disconnected from the rest of the floor in a rough rectangle – hit the street below with a clang and a bouquet of sparks before disappearing behind the vehicle.

The thing that had done this disappeared as well. But not because it had fallen. It was clinging to the bottom of the bus, holding on with that impossible grip that Ken had seen time after time. There was nothing to hold onto below the bus, at least not the way the baby-thing was holding. The thing had its hands – the things that once could have been called hands – pressed against the bottom of the bus. Clinging tightly to metal stained and slicked with dirt and oil.

Its body was half-flayed. The things that had followed the survivors into the tunnel had done so by forcing themselves through holes and burrows in a debris field, most of which were too small for them. They had peeled themselves bare of skin and muscle to do so. And did not seem to notice in the least.

The things felt pain, Ken had seen them react with rage when hurt or attacked. But apparently they cared less about the agony than they did about the possible escape of prey.

He glanced at Hope and Liz. His daughters, comatose and limp. Buck and Maggie had both pushed against the outer walls of the bus, shrinking as far from the hole as they could. Each held a child like a treasure in their arms. A prize that was worth more than anything, even their own lives.

Sally hunched at the edge of the hole. Strangely silent, waiting.

Glass shattered, and Buck shouted in agony.

11

Ken moved before being fully aware what he was doing, or what it was he was reacting to. He only heard pain, only knew he had to help.

Buck was family, as much as Maggie, as much as the girls.

There was no room in this world for people that did not love one another. There were no enemies among humans. There were only family and the others, the Changed.

Buck had backed away, pushed his bulk into the space between two seat backs, his backside and legs up on one of the seats, one hand holding the seatback in front of him, the other holding Hope. The hand that held the seat was what saved him.

Two zombies had climbed up the side of the bus. They were holding – impossibly holding, their hands adhering to sheer glass and metal – to the side of the bus, and it was easy to see they had broken the window by Buck’s head. Buck must have jerked forward, out of range of their biting mouths, but they had grabbed his hair.

They were pulling him. He wouldn’t let go of Hope, wouldn’t let go of the seatback. But he was being jerked back a bit at a time. Ken heard something like tearing cloth. Blood dripped down the big man’s forehead and he realized that Buck was being scalped by the sheer muscle power of the things outside.

One of them coughed. Black acid drooled out of its mouth. It didn’t vomit on Buck, but the side of the bus started to melt away. They were making a door. Making a way in.

12

Ken got to the hole that the infant-monster had somehow created, then stopped. He didn’t want to jump over it. Not just because he might fall, but because he was worried about what might snatch him out of midair.

If the things could pull apart solid plates of steel, what else could they do?

He stood there, standing across from Sally, who still waited for something to appear so that he could bat it out of existence with a huge clawed paw.

Nothing came into view. Ken could hear skittering, chittering. But nothing came.

He had waited too long. Buck was screaming, and he finally let go of the seat in front of him. It was a purely instinctive move, Ken was sure. Hurt someone badly enough and they will forget about survival in favor of stopping pain. Die to quench agony.

Buck had reached that point, with the skin peeling off him right above his eyebrows, raw red glistening through to the porous yellow of bone. Screaming, shrieking, calling for God and Jesus and his dead mother.

He did not let go of Hope. Held her tight, held her safe.

The things leaned in through the widened gap they had created.

Pulled Buck toward them.

Maggie screamed as well.

More glass tinkled.

Ken saw another three zombies had pounded through the window next to his wife. Grabbed handfuls of her beautiful hair.

He froze. Not because of fear this time, but because he could not believe what was happening.

And the universe jerked sharply to the side.

13

Ken spun on the axis of a single toe, a deranged top spun by the hand of an angry child.

He heard screaming. Not Buck, not Maggie.

The redhead.

He turned a one-eighty, came to face front, and saw that their savior had her own attacker. A zombie was on the hood of the bus, reaching around the smashed driver’s side window to grab her jacket. It had hooked some mottled, scabbed fingers through her jacket and was drawing her toward the jagged edges of the glass that lined the window.

She spun the wheel, the movement sending the bus into a sharp sideways leap the twin of the one that had just sent Ken into his drunken rotation. He didn’t spin back around, though, because he fell sideways. Landed on his shoulder on the nearest seat. Pain pounded through the shoulder. Lanced through his left leg. His back.

The zombie on the hood of the bus fell sideways as well. The turn pushed it off the hood, so it was hanging off the side of the bus, hanging solely by its grip on the redhead’s vest.

She screamed in horror and disgust.

Turned the wheel sharply.

The bus slammed into a curb. Bounced up, the wheels leaving the ground before slamming back to earth so hard Ken’s teeth slammed against one another with an audible clack. He tasted blood in his mouth, felt teeth loosen in their sockets.

The zombie outside the bus growled.

The bus careened toward the storefront of a trio of businesses. What had once been a store selling board games like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride next to a Jamba Juice and a place selling charmingly kitschy odds and ends.

Now they were none of those things.

Now it was after the Change. They weren’t stores.

They were just one big boot, and their redheaded savior intended to wipe the filth off her bus with them.

The zombie shrieked again, then the bus hit.

14

For much of his adult life, the sound of glass breaking had been an oddly comforting one. When he and Maggie went to Kauai on their honeymoon they went to the touristy places designed to steal as much money as possible from starry-eyed folks who were so enamored of the view that they barely felt their wallets lightening.

Ken felt it, though. He was a teacher who had gone into deep hock for the wedding and the honeymoon. So when they window shopped they just looked. It was enough.

Until Ken made fun of a Christmas ornament – odd to see in June on a tropical island – and in doing so poked it and sent it crashing to the floor. It broke, right under a sign that said, “You BRAKE You BUY!” The fact that the sign was misspelled struck both him and Maggie as tremendously funny, and the laughter they enjoyed – not to mention the good-natured ribbing he got over the years – more than offset the criminal expense of the trinket.

When he heard glass breaking, he usually thought of that.

But not here. Not in the bus. Not when the glass meant Buck was having his head ripped off, that Maggie was being pulled out to her doom.

And certainly not when it meant the bus was going through the plate glass windows of three different businesses in quick succession.

Ken was still facing more or less forward. He saw the bus’s hood careen off the concrete surface between stores, then edge back into the store, driven by The Redhead’s manic turn of the wheel. The glass of the display window tore into a million pieces, the bus bounced again. She turned back into the next store.

The zombie was pulled to pieces by a combination of glass cutting it apart and impact pulping it.

The pieces – many still moving independently, already frothing yellow – thud-thump-clunked over the side of the bus. They hit the two zombies that were pulling at Buck. They barely noticed the hits, kept pulling at him.

The Redhead careened into the last store. The last two zombies disappeared, leaving behind only Buck’s screams and bloody forehead as reminders of their passage.

Ken looked at Maggie.

The zombie that had her leaned in. Mouth open.

15

Ken wanted to scream for her.

There was no one close enough to do anything. Buck was sobbing through blood. Holding tight to Hope like she was a comforting toy and he a huge child.

Christopher was down, he must have fallen during the intentional crash.

Aaron was on his hands and knees. Broadsword in good hand, but not in a position to use it and too far to hit the zombie.

Ken had no way to get to his wife.

The growl hit him. And he smiled in the instant it did. Because it wasn’t the usual one. Not give up give in but a feline shriek of rage.

Sally.

The snow leopard seemed to dance in the still-careening bus. He pounced away from the hole in the floor, jumping to the iron rod atop the nearest seat, balancing all four huge paws atop the metal that couldn’t have been more than an inch in diameter. A split second later he jumped to another bench back, then landed on the zombie’s arm and slashed it with one paw while his tremendous fangs bit down on the back of the zombie’s neck.

The zombie jerked. And went limp. All communications between what passed for a mind and the rest of its body instantly severed by the snow leopard’s crushing jaws.

The zombie slumped, falling half over Maggie. She gagged and said, “No, no, no-ung, nung, ung,” disgust turning her voice into a groan of horror.

Sally jumped back to the hole where he had been since it opened up below him.

And the zombie that the big cat had destroyed shuddered.

It grabbed Maggie.

Its mouth opened again.

16

Maggie’s moan-shouts of disgust turned instantly to the more direct and sharper scream of pain and terror as the thing grabbed a double-handful of her hair. Sally growled and hunched, his back curving into a deadly arc as he prepared to leap back to the thing that had been destroyed once and did not have the sense to remain silent in defeat.

The cat didn’t jump, though.

Something reached up from under the bus. Reached up through the hole in the floor, and a hooked nail slashed at Sally’s paw.

The big cat’s growl turned to a yelp of surprise and pain. The baby-thing’s hand disappeared, but it had done its job. It had done enough

It had given the zombie at the window time to bite Ken’s wife.

17

The thing was fast. Faster than anything that had been through the end of the world should be, and certainly faster than anything that had just had its cervical spine severed by the bite of an angry predator could be.

The inconceivable stood on the shoulders of the impossible, and together they dropped toward Maggie.

Sally was too slow. Buck was dealing with his own pain.

Everyone was too far. Too far, but Ken was too close. Too close because he was going to see his wife die – or worse – the same way he had seen his son. Worse, because his son had disappeared in smoke and flame. His wife would not disappear.

Would not. But did.

She disappeared behind a silvery stretch of steel. Ken had an instant to see the zombie doubled, mirrored upon itself as its reflection gaped. Then it fell away, seeming almost to drip out the side of the bus.

Ken looked at Aaron in shock. The cowboy was frozen in position, one knee so low it almost touched the plate deck of the floor, his mangled left hand behind him, right hand extended directly in front of his chin with pointer finger extended.

It took a moment to realize what had happened. To play things back in reverse and understand that the cowboy hadn’t been able to reach Ken’s wife anymore than had Ken himself. But he had something that could move faster than either: the sword. Too far to swing it, and in these close quarters he would have been just as likely to take off the head of a friend as that of a foe.

But he could throw it. And did.

He had used it like a javelin, throwing it point-first at the zombie, the blade passing so close over Maggie’s head that Ken could see wisps of her dark blond hair floating to the seat beside her.

If anyone else had done it, it would have seemed like an impossibility. It would have been a marvel.

With Aaron, it was just something he did. Who he was.

The zombie started twitching as it fell out of the bus, the pink ooze that marked a major head wound with these things spurting around the bright edge of the broadsword. It was still a danger, but now it was an indiscriminate one: it would kill anything it could, instead of just targeting people. Instead of just targeting Ken’s family and friends.

The zombie slid away like a fish being yanked on a string, but not before Maggie grabbed the hilt of the broadsword. She yanked it free, and the thing’s head split in two, the top half falling to the right in a spray of pink ooze while the bottom half fell with the rest of the zombie and slid for an impossible moment against the side of the bus before disappearing behind them.

Maggie flipped the broadsword in her hand, catching it almost lightly by the blade and then tossing it back to Aaron.

He snatched it out of the air. Nodded his thanks as though he owed her a boon for the return of the weapon, rather than her owing him for the return of her life.

Sally growled at the edge of the hole. The snow leopard’s back arched again, fur standing on end to such an extent that its streamlined body seemed to expand to twice its size.

The chittering, skittering noise of something below them bounced through the hole and off the metal poles and rods and walls and ceiling of the bus.

This wasn’t over.

18

The thing below appeared again. Ken got his first semi-decent look at it, and his knees almost went out from under him.

Like the rest of the creatures that had followed Ken and the others in the storm drains, it was a baby. Had been a baby. Its face was gone. Not the way that some of the creatures’ faces had changed to accommodate huge eyes and scaly growths.

No, its face was truly gone. There was nothing of the human left in its countenance. No eyes, no nose to speak of, though in the quick glimpse Ken had before the thing moved away again, he thought he could see a pair of nostrils. Even they were in the wrong locations, moved far to the side so that one hole was on each side of the thing’s face, just in front of the ears.

The jaws had enlarged and shifted, moving forward and changing. The teeth….

The thing appeared again. The teeth moved, and the sound that had been only a shriek now became the sum total of Ken’s auditory world.

The thing’s jaw had split into four or perhaps five pieces. Hard to tell, because all of them were vibrating so fast Ken could barely see. The thing’s teeth were at the end of the jawbones, and the skin had pulled away from all of it so that what was once inside was now an external feature.

The thing put its mouthparts to the underside of the floor and sparks flew, raining bright floral arrangements on its face.

It paid no heed. Just kept sawing at the floor. Chewing through steel.

Its plan wasn’t hard to figure out. It was going to cut the floor away a bit at a time. And the survivors would either fall to their deaths, fall to its reach, or be forced to stop the bus.

Ken looked out the back window.

He couldn’t see any trace of the horde, could see no sign of Derek.

But they were there. He knew it.

The thing below kept cutting.

It stopped for a moment. Coughed that ratcheting cough, then started cutting again, and now it seemed the grinding sound of its teeth was even louder, stronger.

19

Sally hunched behind the gaping hole in the center of the bus, back arched so high the cat was nearly bent in two. But he still didn’t make a sound. His muzzle drew back from his teeth and spittle fell in ropy strands to the metal floor.

Then another section of the floor fell away and the cat nearly fell away as well. The portion of the center aisle that he had been standing on plummeted to the asphalt below, bounced and clattered and tossed up another sparkling floral arrangement. Then the whole bus jounced as the steel sheet went under the back tires on the driver’s side. Another pop.

The bus started listing.

“Do something about that!” shouted the driver. Both her hands were on the wheel at the ten o’clock position, pulling hard to compensate for the fact that the massive vehicle was trying to veer into a building on the side of the street. But she didn’t slow down. If anything, Ken felt like they were going faster.

“You do something about that!” Christopher shouted back.

Sally roared as though not wanting to be left out of the argument.

Aaron shoved Christopher out of the way. He moved to the edge of the newly-widened hole, holding tight to the broadsword. Ken had a moment to wonder where exactly their driver/rescuer had gotten the school bus and a cache of medieval weaponry from before Aaron swung the sword.

Ken caught a glimpse of the thing under the bus. It scampered away, barely avoiding the edge of the sword.

It chittered.

The sound made Ken’s legs grow weak again, and made his stomach feel loose in his guts. It was a wholly inhuman noise, the vocalization of something far removed from homo sapiens. It was no longer a child, but a thing.

So why did it bother him so much that Aaron was stabbing at it? Trying not only to knock it away from the bus’ chassis but to stab it; to kill it?

The thing scampered around the underside of the bus, always there, always just out of reach. Ken caught sight of it a few times. What remained of its skin was wet and suppurating, pus leaking from it so thick and fast that it fell not in drops but in sheets. The thing looked like a grub; a maggot recently wriggled free of dying flesh and rotten meat.

A strange lump bunched around its hips. Ken didn’t see it clearly for a moment. Aaron’s sword kept getting in the way as he swung at the tiny demon whenever he caught a glimpse of it below his feet.

The saw-screech came again. Another section of the floor fell away. This time below Christopher. He barely danced out of the way before it dropped into the rushing sea of air and pavement below the bus.

“Hurry up!” he screamed.

“This ain’t like shooting fish in a barrel,” Aaron shouted back. “Not like I got a lot of practice at it.” He was moving back and forth between the two holes now, trying to find and kill the tiny monster below them.

Ken was worried he wouldn’t be able to. But only with part of his mind. The other part of him saw the thing again. Saw it and saw that strange bulge around the creature’s hips.

He realized what it was. Realized what was wrapped around the thing.

He felt fear bloom anew, panic flowering with blossoms that matched the sparks that burst into being whenever the thing cut through the floor, whenever metal fell to earth and was crushed.

“No,” he whispered. “Nonononononono….”

20

Aaron was still stabbing down, running back and forth between the two holes in the bus like he was playing the world’s strangest game of Whack-A-Mole.

Christopher held the axe, the one that said “Cass” in thick red letters. Screaming at Aaron to “get it kill it get it man get it kill it!”

Maggie and Buck still pressed on opposite sides of the bus, feet up on the seats they occupied so they sat sideways directly across from one another. They held their silent burdens tightly, so tightly Ken wondered how the little girls could breathe.

He wondered if his daughters needed to anymore. They were changing. Becoming….

What?

Sally roved restlessly, back still arched, now in the aisle, now perched atop the metal bars that ran along the tops of the seats. Ken often wondered about those bars, often thought that in a bus meant to ferry children from place to place they could have come up with something softer and safer than a bare iron bar right at the spot a kid’s face would hit in case of a front impact.

The driver, their mysterious savior with the raw voice, still struggled to keep the bus on the road while at the same time avoiding the debris field that had been left when the world fell apart.

The wheels on the bus kept turning.

Ken saw it all. Saw it, registered it in some peripheral portion of his mind.

But mostly he was watching through the holes. Looking at the thing. Replaying what he had just seen. Figuring out what it meant.

When Derek came home from the hospital two days after his birth, he was so small. And Ken and Maggie, first-time parents, still hadn’t learned how tough babies really were. He seemed so tender, so fragile. The soft spot at the top of his head where the skull bones still hadn’t fused occasionally pulsed, as though he was destined –

(to die to fall and die and then rise again but not as a man from heaven but a demon from Hell, oh Derek why couldn’t you just have died)

– to have thoughts that would change the world. But looking at that slight bounce, the drum beat of his life overlaid on the nearly unprotected surface of his brain, how could Ken and Maggie help but think he might break, might just shatter like finest crystal left from a long gone age?

Changing diapers was the worst at first. Derek had been circumcised, and it didn’t matter that the doctors said he’d heal up quickly and there wouldn’t be any lasting ill effects. Looking at him, seeing a piece of gauze over his crotch – a piece of gauze that was stained through with blood and Vaseline and then plastered down with liberal amounts of urine and fecal matter – Ken always shuddered. Wondered if his baby would be the first kid in recorded history to lose his wiener to poop-infection.

It got so he hated the mere sight of diapers.

Eventually he got over it. Eventually he even got to the point that he enjoyed changing diapers. Enjoyed the bonding it provided. Though he could have done without the time he learned the hard way that little boys could pee straight up and if you didn’t do some strategic pre-aiming a good deal of that pee was liable to go right in your mouth.

Still, for a while there the mere sight of a diaper was enough to put Ken into a strange version of a PTSD attack. Just seeing a picture of Elmo – who figured large on all Derek’s diapers – was enough to start him sweating.

That was probably why he saw what he did; and not only saw, but understood.

The child-thing, the baby-thing below the bus, the monster that was trying to pull the entire vehicle apart from the bottom up, had a strange bulge around its center. Flesh-colored, scabbed partially over the same way that the rest of its body was starting to scab. Sores wept dark fluid from part of the fleshy growth, while other parts of it seemed perfect and unblemished.

In fact, one part was so perfectly unmarked that Ken could see the design.

Could see Elmo, mouth open, big eyes wide and staring the way they always were. And the whole thing coated by a translucent film of flesh.

The child/infant/creature had Changed wearing a diaper. And whatever had caused the Change was causing the thing to integrate the material into itself. To make what was outside inside.

Ken looked at his arm. He saw a half-circle where he had been bitten by one of the things. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t Changed.

Why?

And if he had, would he now be slowly growing a gauzy membrane over his clothing?

And then…?

He didn’t know.

But the fact that the thing below them was integrating something as synthetic as a diaper was more disturbing than Ken cared to admit, even to himself.

As though to highlight the strangeness, another section of floor fell away. Aaron ran to the new hole and swung his sword.

It clanged off the metal edge of the floor. Something coughed. The sword started to smoke, and when Aaron brought it back it was sagging from the mid-point to the tip. The thing must have vomited that acid on it.

Ken remembered Derek, Derek in a diaper that rested on the outside and not on the inside, vomiting as a baby. Puking so hard from a stomach virus that Ken swore the kid had to be absolutely hollow. Just a baby-shell filled from toes to fontanelle with twenty pounds of puke.

That had been bad. Always bad when your children suffered. Always terrible.

This was worse.

Aaron dropped the sword with a curse. It disappeared below the bus.

“Let me,” said Christopher. He took position over the nearest hole, looking for all the world like a lumberjack who has decided to use his axe for ice-fishing.

A hand appeared. Tiny, curling around the denticulated edges the thing’s jaws had left in the floor.

The fingers were longer than they should have been. The nails were grotesquely hooked, and Ken knew somehow that this change – just as the change from lovely, kissable lips to organic chainsaw – had been wrought for the sole purpose of creating a killing machine out of something that had once been the pinnacle of innocence.

A plastic band, the kind issued upon admission to hospitals, circled the thing’s wrist. Just behind it, another strip of material circled the wrist. This one looked homemade, a lanyard or some other kind of bracelet a kid would make for his baby brother or sister.

Christopher reacted instantly at the sight of the thing’s hand and wrist, moving so fast it had to be an unconscious motion: no thought, only instinct.

He swung the axe.

The thing below squealed.

And at the same moment, someone screamed. A shriek of sudden terror and pain. No, more than simple pain. This was agony.

It wasn’t the thing below the bus. Not the infant-creature.

It was someone above.

Someone in the bus.

It was Christopher.

21

Christopher slumped. Ken thought the young man would have fallen right through the hole in the floor before him, but Aaron grabbed the neck of his shirt and yanked him backward. Aaron’s left hand had been crushed during a zombie attack – the fingers all broken or sprained, some so badly Ken wondered if they would ever completely heal – but his right was strong enough to haul the younger man back from the abyss. It was a struggle, though, and for a moment Ken was sure Christopher would pitch forward and disappear below the wheels of the bus –

(wheels of the bus or wheels on the bus? which is it and when does this song end?)

– as had the beast the young man just dispatched.

As soon as it became obvious that he wasn’t going to fall through the floor, Christopher turned to the cowboy. Aaron was a good five or six inches shorter, but Christopher folded into him like a little boy, sobbing. “Cass” fell from his hands, the axe clattering to the floor.

The blade was stained with blood and ichor.

All this happened in the space of a breath, an instant. And in the next moment Ken saw a small form flung out from beneath and behind the bus. The size of a beach ball, a bloody semi-sphere, the thing rolled for twenty or thirty feet and then came to a stop. Barely visible in the dust that coated the road behind the bus.

But barely was enough. Enough to see the quad-jaws, the still-twitching limbs.

It got up. Started a loping run after the bus, a run that was all the worse for the fact that it was being done by a body that under other circumstances barely would have learned to walk.

Fast though it was, the thing couldn’t possibly catch up to the bus. But it kept running. Like it wouldn’t give up –

(give in)

– until it had caught its prey.

Ken couldn’t look away, couldn’t tear his gaze from the aberration that was following the bus in a lopsided sprint.

It had no eyes to see their progress, but it followed them. There were other things with that sense of sight-unsight. Ken had seen them in an elevator shaft. But they were different. This was worse. An evolution that was a stage of magnitude beyond what they had already seen.

A large part of the thing’s shoulder was cleft, a wicked gash opened up by an axe coupled with Christopher’s near-inhuman reflexes. And as Ken watched the gash filled with yellow secretion and began to close.

They left it behind. Only rubble and debris and the bodies of the dead caught unaware and unready – as were they all – for the Change.

He stopped watching. Not only because there was nothing to see now, but because –

“Hold onto something!” screamed the driver.

Ken dropped to the nearest seat, spinning as he did, seeing….

22

… the front end of the bus folding like the world’s largest piece of origami. It was an experiment in modern art gone hideously awry. The yellow of the bus melded with the red of another vehicle – impossible to tell what make and model, though it looked like it might have been a sporty little coupe of some kind – to create a stunning piece of abstract art.

Ken’s mind vomited up a name for the new sculpture: The Bloody Bee. It sounded about right: the kind of thing you might find selling for a million dollars at some museum filled with pretentious crap that everyone pretended to understand even though no one had the foggiest idea what it meant – beyond contempt of artist  for audience. The emperor’s new clothes had found a new hold in the well-educated, the well-bred, the well-to-do. People searching for meaning where there was none, and missing the meaning that really surrounded them. Finding art in a dog turd shaped into a crucifix and missing it in the smile of a loved one.

Ken knew the interpretation of this particular creation, though. It was dark art, a pastiche drawn on a shifting canvass, but its meaning was clear.

It meant death.

The bus bounced. A strange sensation: not stopping exactly, but a stutter-step in its forward momentum, as though it had momentarily changed its mind about moving onward, then changed its mind again and resumed course.

Ken’s face bounced off the bar that ran along the top of the seat in front of his. He tasted blood in his mouth. Something hard, too. He spit. Something fell on the floor with a tap that sounded far too loud for what it was.

Lost a tooth. The Bloody Bee and The Tooth At My Feet.

His tongue pushed into the hole where his front tooth had been.

That’s gonna cost a million bucks to fix.

He realized that was a ridiculous thought. There were no more deductibles. No more insurance, no more dentists. Cosmetic dentistry had gone the way of the dodo and uninterrupted cable service and the primacy of the human race.

He would never sit in a badly-carpeted waiting room and listen to crappy music while reading a fishing magazine circa 1972 again. The thought made him suddenly and surprisingly sad.

Ken leaned over and picked the tooth up from the floor. People were shouting, Sally was growling. It all sounded muffled. He focused on the tooth.

Is the baby coming?

He heard the words in the voice of the doctor who had delivered Derek. But it wasn’t Derek whose arrival he was worried about. Not yet, at any rate. It was the thing whose body had integrated a diaper and whose face had become a saw capable of chewing through solid metal.

And still he reached for the tooth. Held it in front of his face. It was blurry – everything was – but it looked whole. Not cracked or broken, but an entire tooth that had been pounded out of his jaw from root to crown.

He shoved it back in his mouth. It wobbled but stayed in the socket.

Maybe it’ll grow back.

Maybe I can keep it.

Maybe monkeys will come out of my butt and shoot caramel apples out of their butts.

Someone grabbed Ken’s shoulder.

He looked over. The motion seemed to take a long time. Hours, if not days.

Buck was standing there, pulling him up one-handed while holding Hope in the crook of his other arm. She slept –

(the sleep of the dead the sleep of the undead)

– on his shoulder.

“We’re going!” Buck shouted. Ken knew he was shouting because he looked like he was shouting. But it sounded like a whisper. Everything sounded like a whisper.

Ken looked over the top of the seat in front of him. There was blood on the bar where he had bounced off it.

The driver, the redheaded savior, was standing at the front door of the bus. Half on, half off, her lead foot hanging out the door like she was trying to decide whether to jump out and leave the group to fend for themselves or not. She was talking into something. A radio?

She turned to the rest of the group and gestured to them to get moving, come on, we’re leaving, get moving.

Ken struggled to his feet.

His tongue felt the tooth.

Loose.

Wobbly.

He moved to the front of the bus.

Wondering what the new sound was.

The thrumming, thudding, pounding sound.

23

Ken felt someone else touch him. Maggie. She was smiling at him. Or trying to. Trying to look like everything was all right and they weren’t being chased by things that would give nightmares to the Devil himself.

“Come on, hon,” she said.

Ken nodded. Everything seemed thick, padded. Everything but the pain, which was a slick shard of glass slashing at his face, his neck, his back. When he stood the pain skipped on lightning feet down his left leg and he almost fell over. Buck’s arm tightened around his chest.

Ken saw Aaron holding onto Christopher, leading the kid out of the bus. Christopher was sobbing openly.

“What…?” began Ken. He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. Everyone knew Christopher well enough to figure out the end – ends – of the question.

What happened to him?

What made him cry like that?

What can make him stop?

Buck shrugged. “We’ll sort it out later.” The big man had sounded so whiny and entitled when the survivors first found him. Now he was assured, calm, and kind. Ken wondered if the big man had changed, or if the world they had plummeted into had simply stripped away the negative camouflage he had been wearing and lain bare the real man, the good man he truly was.

Aaron and Christopher got off the bus. The thing rocked on the bits of spring that remained functional in its shocks.

“Who’s on the horn?” said Aaron. Ken realized that their driver – he was starting to just think of her as The Redhead – had something to her ear. Not a cell, it couldn’t be that. Cell phones had been infected just as surely and horrifically as the population. To get on the phone was to listen to madness given voice, to succumb to anguish and literally die of despair.

No, The Redhead was talking on something else. But it looked like a phone. Sort of.  Ken finally realized what it was, and wasn’t too surprised he hadn’t figured it out earlier. He had barely seen it, and it was so surprising that his mind had blanked what few details his eyes had managed to capture.

It was a walkie-talkie. One that looked like it had been picked up from a Radio Shack or some hobby shop. Not military, but just a simple plastic case that probably housed a few transistors and a nine-volt battery.

Cell phones had become so ubiquitous it wasn’t unusual to see preteens that owned them, talking into their Nokias or iPhones while sipping Frappuccinos and feeling oh-so-grown-up before the first zit even marred their faces. Even police and paramedics used cells rather than their CBs half the time, so Ken couldn’t get too upset that he didn’t realize what The Redhead had in her hands the first time he saw it.

She said something. Ken saw Aaron bristle a bit, so he figured it was probably somewhere on the social niceties scale between “None of your business” and “Go suck it.” The Redhead hadn’t shown herself to be particularly cheerful or interested in refinement.

Ken allowed himself to be led off the bus. He saw Sally simply drop through one of the holes in the floor, emerging from under the side of the bus. The snow leopard still looked on guard, every single hair at attention. The cat approached Buck and Maggie as they helped Ken off the bus, licking first Liz’s trailing foot, then Hope’s. Satisfied, it stepped back.

But not far. And its hackles stayed high.

“How far are you?” said The Redhead into the walkie-talkie.

Ken thought he heard a voice, but it was small and faraway. He couldn’t make out what it said.

He looked behind the bus. Couldn’t see the thing that had clung to the undercarriage and nearly taken them out – had taken them out, now that he thought about it – but he suspected it was still coming toward them. Guided by some internal GPS, led by a sense impossible to define or understand.

The girls.

Ken looked at Hope and Liz. Silent. Still.

But were they asleep?

Or could they be busy behind closed eyes?

Calling for help?

Giving out locations?

He shuddered. He didn’t want to think about that, because that would mean his children – all of his children –were truly lost.

“Not good enough!” Ken looked back at The Redhead in time to see her stab at a button on her walkie-talkie and shove the device in a pocket. She looked at Christopher, who was still sobbing. “He gonna be able to move?”

“He’ll do what he needs to,” said Aaron. His voice sounded different than he had a few moments ago. Tighter. Ken wondered what the change was. Then realized this might be what the man sounded like when he was reporting to a superior. That Aaron was some kind of military or paramilitary was not in doubt. The only question was of the details.

Was The Redhead military as well?

Before Ken could ask, the sound came again. Thrumming, pounding.

… up…

… in…

… ive up…

… ive in…

give up

give in

Give up.

Give in.

The sounds grew stronger, both in his ears and in his mind, and with them came the realization that the survivors weren’t done running. Not by a long shot.

Another horde had found them.

24

A moment later Ken realized that his assessment had been wrong. It wasn’t a horde.

It was three hordes. Maybe four.

Not a mega-horde, nothing like the one that had coated every outer inch of the Wells Fargo building and climbed sheer walls to get to the survivors.

No, this was a number of smaller groups. Maybe a hundred each. One came from each end of the street, effectively trapping them. A few hundred feet and counting.

Aaron stepped toward the nearest building, a storefront that proclaimed No Activation Fee and LOW LOW Monthly Rates!

But before he took more than a few steps, the still-weeping Christopher holding tight to him, he looked up.

Ken followed his gaze.

More zombies clambered over the building’s roof. It was a four-story building, and they were scrambling over the top, climbing down the sheer face of the office structure. As soon as they were within thirty feet or so they would cast themselves down to earth. Broken bones would heal, torn flesh could be ignored.

All that mattered was the hunt. The prey.

A quick look to the other side of the road verified that more zombies skittered like roaches over the five-story building there. Climbing over and down.

Sally crouched, ready to pounce on the first zombie that came at the group, and Ken had no doubt the leopard would die for them – for the girls, in particular.

But he knew that even a predator like the big cat would quickly fall.

There was nowhere to go.

He looked at Aaron. The cowboy’s eyes were blank. Ken saw no plan there. Only death.

He looked at Maggie.

She held his hand.

It was not a hopeful gesture.

It was a goodbye.

25

The Redhead began running.

Not a surprise, Ken thought. Most people will run, even when running is a doomed course. Even when running means only that you will die tired.

What surprised him was that she ran east – toward the larger, closer horde.

They started growling, running faster. As though they were lovers meeting, coming together after a long absence.

Give up.

Give in.

He didn’t hear Derek in the growls, didn’t hear the peculiar strength of his once-son’s call. But he knew that The Redhead was doomed.

She turned her head without stopping. “Come on!”

“What?” shouted Maggie, not bothering to hide the shock from her voice. It was the sentiment they all felt.

To their left, the zombies clinging to the building were about to jump. Sally moved toward the base of the structure. Snarling. The zombies didn’t seem to care. They readied to leap.

Now The Redhead did stop, if only for a moment. She looked at a watch on her wrist, the kind that was coated in thick black rubber, probably shock-resistant, waterproof, and able to stop small grenades.

Then she looked up and said, “Come with me or die.”

Maggie looked at Ken. She had never been a wilting flower, the stereotypical deferential wife who asked for permission before doing things. But she was asking him now. So was Aaron, he realized, and Buck as well.

They were all waiting. Waiting on him.

Ken looked at The Redhead. She was already turning to run again.

He nodded.

Buck began running, pulling himself and Ken and Hope toward The Redhead.

Maggie ran beside them, hands clasped around the carrier that tied Liz to her.

Aaron yanked Christopher along.

They ran, for the first time, directly toward a horde.

26

Only a few steps into it, Ken realized that perhaps “run” wasn’t the best descriptor. Everyone in the original group of survivors was wounded: physically, mentally, emotionally, or a combination of the three.

The few – like Buck and Maggie – who were not healing from grievous physical injuries were carrying insensate children and had to balance speed with care. The rest hobbled along as best they could.

Only Sally was unharmed, and even he held back, threading lithely between everyone’s legs, holding a tight orbit around Ken’s daughters at all times.

The Redhead ran, then turned back, then ran again. It was as though she couldn’t decide whether to abandon them to an unkind fate, or save them for a worse one.

The gas mask she had been wearing hung around her neck now, jogging up and down and side to side like a macabre second face. It was strangely reminiscent of the thing that had attacked them in the bus, with its facial distortions and extending mandibulae.

Not a comforting thought: the monsters were, at their core, not inhuman, but from human. Something must have acted on the human race to make them all change like they had, but the fact remained that the basic building blocks of those changes had been present in humanity’s genetic brick and mortar. Torn down and rebuilt, but still the framework was ours, and the monsters were built in the image of their predecessors.

Ken looked at the gas mask and knew he was looking at a darkly distorted image of himself; and at an image of what he still might become. A monster, both less and more than what he now was.

The Redhead kept glancing behind them. Not looking at the horde that was there, but up. Like she was waiting for air support.

Ken realized he was hoping for just that. Call in the Air Force, send in the Marines!

But there was nothing. No chup-chup of Black Hawks with thousands of rounds per minute spitting out of side-mounted Vulcan cannons, no high-pitched whine of F-14s dropping napalm to incinerate the enemy.

Just the wind. The growl.

Then a worse sound: wet thuds and thumps. Noises he had heard before. The sounds of unkillable things hitting the ground from heights too great for their bodies to withstand, bones and flesh shattering… and then rising up and healing.

The zombies were behind, to the sides. Falling from above.

The ones in the small horde ahead were spreading out. Thinning and widening like the lips of a mouth opening to receive strangely suicidal prey. Ken was struck again by how they moved: not a collection of individuals, not even as a coordinated group. They moved like….

He struggled to understand. To find a word.

Cells.

Each zombie was as the single structural unit of a larger creature. The individual – but not autonomous – cell of a creature so huge it could not be seen from Ken’s perspective, any more than a whale could be comprehended from the perspective of a barnacle on its fin.

The thing’s maw gaped ahead of them.

They were at its outer edges.

The things fell toward them, closing around them.

The thing was hungry.

And it must feed.

27

The Redhead screamed.

Ken heard the sound and thought it was fear. Then his perception shifted and he thought she was screaming in pain. Then he realized he was hearing neither terror nor agony.

Instead, The Readhead’s scream was one of betrayal. Rage. Unadulterated wrath.

She had a gun in her hand, a shiny black creature that seemed to hunch on her fist, waiting to sting those who offended her sense of what should be and what should not. Her gloved fist tightened and the bullets shot out, punching through the foreheads of several zombies with thunder-cracks loud enough to set Ken’s head to pounding.

The zombies – three of them – immediately went mad. Their heads exploded and became lopsided half- and crescent-moons dripping with pink and black gel. They turned on their once-fellows, on each other, on themselves.

They went from cells in a body to cancers in the organism. Killing everything without discrimination.

The Redhead shouted again. No more bullets. She threw the gun into the center mass of the zombies that hungered for them.

She was going to die or be Changed, and Ken could tell that she would do so cursing them with her last breath.

He looked at Aaron. The cowboy had an admiring light in his eye. It was different than the look he had given Dorcas: no tenderness, none of the sense that he wanted to hold and protect her. She didn’t need protecting, and would probably attack anyone who tried. So Aaron’s look was the frank admiration of one warrior appraising – and approving of – another.

One of the zombie’s grabbed The Redhead’s left hand.

She fumbled with her right for one of the machetes strapped to her back. The machete was in a scabbard, secured with a snap that she flicked open in an eyeblink. But Ken could do the calculations, could tell that she didn’t have time to clear the weapon.

She was determined to go down fighting. But she wouldn’t – couldn’t – win this fight.

She wasn’t going to make it.

28

Fshhhhhh…

… ssssss...

… WHUMP.

The sound came from behind, then beside, then before.

It was a bizarre noise, one that was utterly alien, one Ken had never heard before in person but which was nevertheless burned into his mind as a thing of fear.

No, not mere fear. It was a thing of terror, with all the heavy-laden meaning that word brought in a world after the tallest buildings had been reduced in number by two.

In the instant the sound passed he heard it in his mind, replayed in countless news reports and video games and movies. Media that only had one common thread: death. Sometimes focused, often indiscriminate, always violent.

Ken was a history teacher both by trade and inclination: a man often more comfortable in the precipitous moments of the past than the banal passages of the present. One weapon had arguably changed the face of geopolitics more than any other in the last hundred years. Not the nuke, not the submarine. Nothing so grand.

It was small, it was easily ported. It cost not millions, but mere thousands.

The rocket-propelled grenade.

The RPG had taken shepherds and nomads and turned them into warriors; had given untrained women a cheap way to kill entire squads of trained men in tanks or attack choppers. The United States – the United States that was, that had been, before the Change – had supplied RPGs to the Afghan Mujahideen guerillas in such numbers that, in trying to keep up with rising demands for heavy armored vehicles the Soviet Union had bankrupted itself into ruin and collapse. An economic end to a cold war, ushered in by what was essentially a metal tube with an explosive at one end.

RPGs had been used in Angola, in Vietnam. Russian forces in Chechnya were terrorized by men firing them from rooftops and basements. US forces had to deal with them in Iraq.

And someone had brought one to this fight.

He heard a line from an old movie, perverted by the Change: “Isn’t that just like a human: to bring an RPG to a zombie fight.”

All this flashed through Ken’s mind in a moment. In the instant when the sound came to his ears, the instant when he saw the contrail that signaled the passage of the RPG’s explosive warhead.

The white line passed right by him. If he had been fast enough, he could have reached out and swiped through the superheated air with his hand. He felt the heat of it, felt a few more of his hairs singe and disappear.

The RPG hit the semi-circle of zombies that had crowded into the road ahead of them.

Exploded in a firestorm of heat and light.

29

“geddub”

“can’t geddub”

“godda geddub”

Everything sounded funny.

“baby?”

“babyzokay”

Ken put a shaking hand to his head. Touched his ear. Felt something wet. Probably blood, and he tried to bring his hand forward to verify that, but couldn’t seem to make his hand work.

“hope?”

“hopezokay”

“geddub”

“can’t geddub”

He realized that at least one of the mumbling, stumbling voices was his. That he was sitting in the middle of something wet –

(did I crap my pants? again?)

– and something was pulling on him. Yanking his arm and hand. He thought about ignoring it, but whatever it was –

“goway goway ‘n’leaveme”

– was pulling on his bad hand. The left. The hand he had slashed two fingers off of in order to escape a horde.

“theystillhere”

“still here geddub we gottago”

The hand hurt. Whoever was pulling it wasn’t stopping, and Ken finally realized that the only way to stop his hand hurting would be to geddub. To get up.

“geddub. Geddub. Get up.”

A final yank, and Ken managed to stand. His feet slipped on the wetness beneath him and he almost went down again. His vision finally cleared enough of the white fog that had surrounded it to see that he had been sitting not in his own waste but in what looked like a pile of entrails.

He looked at his own gut.

His shirt was torn. He had a new collection of scrapes.

But the viscera were not his.

He looked at the hand still holding his. It was big, almost too big for the sinewy arm to which it attached. Aaron.

“Come on.”

The cowboy gave him another yank. Ken lurched forward. He stumbled over a hand that was laying in the road, bereft of a body. He wondered for a moment if the hand belonged to any of his friends. Then the fingers snapped shut as he passed, trying to grab him, and he noticed the yellow gunk already seeping out of the stump and oozing from the pores. Answer enough. Not a friend.

He raised his eyes.

He had seen Hell. But that had been Hell from a human perspective. The end of the world. Earth brought to its knees in mere minutes.

This was a different sort of perdition: damnation for the already-damned; a deeper circle of Hell. The small horde that had been in front of the survivors had been hit squarely by the RPG, the payload shattering and splattering them like a puddle under a boot. Bits of the zombies were everywhere, pieces laying on the ground, parts on cars, shreds hanging from walls and streetlights.

The Redhead was struggling to stand. A disembodied hand clutched her upper arm, and blood welled around the fingers. She seemed to notice it for the first time and screamed in terror and revulsion. She swung her entire body in a tight arc. Slammed the stump against a nearby parking meter, once, twice, three and four times and Ken heard the crackle and then the crunch and then nothing as the bones inside the impossibly-gripping hand were pummeled to mush.

The hand fell away. She ground it under her heel.

She turned to the survivors. Zombies that had been blown to pieces were pulling themselves toward them on shattered arms and fingers. Yellow froth was hardening, sealing what remained of their organs inside.

“Come on,” she said. She looked behind them. Ken remembered that there had been more than one horde.

We can’t outrun them. No way.

As if to answer his thought, he heard the sound of another RPG. Felt the vibration of another payload delivered, another explosive ignition.

The Redhead did not react as he might have expected. Rather than triumph or relief, he thought he saw desperate grief shine in her eyes.

She turned away before he could be sure.

“Come on,” she said again. Her voice still grated around the devastating throat wound. But no amount of grit and gristle could hide the sob that choked her words. “We’re almost there."

Ken didn’t know if she was talking to the survivors alone, or to herself as well. Perhaps only to herself.

He looked for Maggie. His wife was standing. Covered in gore, looking as surprised as he felt to be alive.

He tried to smile but couldn’t. He was too tired, too confused.

Too curious.

We’re almost where?

30

By the time they made it through the line of carnage that had once been a solid wall of zombies, the survivors were all leaning on one another. All touching, everyone holding hands and arms and slumped into the center, bracing for the strength that they no longer had.

The only ones who walked under their own power were The Redhead, who took point, and Sally, who padded softly just ahead of Buck and Maggie – walking near the children as he always did.

The snow leopard had apparently been closer to the blast radius of the RPG than the rest of them. His right side was stained with blood and his right ear looked decidedly shorter than the left, ending in a ragged black stump that twitched every few seconds as though the cat were batting away a nonexistent fly with the equally nonexistent organ.

Ken was at the center, held up by Buck on one side and Maggie on the other. He had an arm around each, and could reach out and touch his girls’ hair if he wanted to.

He didn’t. He didn’t do it, and he didn’t want to do it. They were still asleep, still comatose through all the running and the violence and the explosions. He didn’t want to think about why. Didn’t want to think about what it would do to him if he felt their hair and they didn’t respond.

Worse, what if they did respond… and the responses were not those of his little girls, but simply two more cells of the zombie organism?

So he kept eyes mostly forward. Concentrated on putting foot after foot, step after step.

He heard sobbing. Christopher. Something had broken in the young man. Ken didn’t understand it, but the bus had destroyed the strong, carefree person they all knew. Aaron was all but carrying him along, and finally said, “Kid, you gotta get it together.”

“Did you see?” said Christopher.

“See what?”

“The baby. The baby,” was all Christopher could manage.

“We all saw it. And it wasn’t a baby.” Aaron sounded tired. Drawn. He had lost as much as any of them, had been hurt as badly. But he kept on going, never complained.

Ken wondered what the man’s secret was. Just training? Or was it more than that?

Who is he?

“She was wearing a red bracelet,” said Christopher.

“What?” Aaron almost stopped walking. Almost, but not quite. Ken was glad. That would have brought the whole group to a shuddering halt, and Ken thought they all might simply collapse in a spent pile if that happened. Worse, he didn’t know if they would have the strength to get up again.

“Her little bracelet,” said Christopher. “But it wasn’t white, it was red.” He said it again, his voice tearing out of him between sobs. “Red.”

Aaron looked at Ken, then at Buck and Maggie. All of them shrugged.

Maggie touched Christopher’s shoulder. Squeezed. She was going to say something, and Ken knew it would be the right thing. The thing that needed to be said, and that would heal. Or if not heal, at least soothe. Maggie had always had that talent.

Before she could, though, before she had the chance to work her magic with Christopher, The Redhead turned around. Tears shone on her cheeks and fury sparkled through glistening eyes.

“Can’t you shut him up?” she demanded.

For a second Ken thought Maggie was going to yell back at The Redhead. That was when he knew his wife had adopted Christopher, fully and completely. Maggie’s first instinct was to defend him like a momma bear with a cub, whether he was in the right or not. That more than anything meant that the young man was as much a part of their family as Liz or Hope.

Maybe more, depending on what’s happening….

Shut up, Ken. Don’t think that.

But Maggie managed to bite back her sharp retort. She shrugged. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

Aaron’s expression shifted. “He knew the baby,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Christopher sobbed again. It was a sound beyond agony. Beyond terror. It brought to mind one thing. One moment that Ken wished he could forget, one moment that he knew would hang before him in every instant of whatever life remained to him.

Falling. Falling and falling forever.

“We all knew people,” spat The Redhead. The tears were large in her eyes, diamonds of exquisite color and clarity that shimmered then shattered and fell down her cheeks along silvered streams.

Ken was lost in their descent. Lost in another fall.

The moment Derek let go of him.

The moment his boy fell to save his mother.

The moment his son was lost.

And he knew who the baby was.

Who it must be.

31

“The baby,” said Ken. “Yours?” He meant to say it with sympathy, with soothing tones that would show he understood. Instead they came out flat, toneless. The words of a man who had no sympathy to give, because every bit of pity was devoted in that moment to salving his own wounds.

Christopher’s sobs stopped almost immediately. He wiped his eyes, and his spine turned into a steel rod. He transformed to one of the supports in their shrinking bastion of humanity, rather than one of the burdens.

Ken wasn’t surprised. Even in a society as purportedly developed and professedly forward as the one they all came from, men were trained to push through what had happened to Christopher. What was still happening.

Women lost babies and it was a tragedy and they wept.

For the fathers it was a tragedy as well, but one that many felt they were expected to muscle over the same as they would any other sticky issue they confronted. That was how men dealt with things. They muscled on. They pushed through. Women pushed through as well, but they often allowed themselves to push through a wall of tears, like a waterfall they had to part around them, a veil of grief they had to cut through to find a valley of healing beyond.

Men, whether culturally or just because of the way they were wired, more often felt the need to hold back their anguish. No waterfall allowed; they built a dam at the top of their feelings, shut all the control gates and let their grief drown them in isolation.

It might not be the right way – Ken knew teachers at his old high school that would debate the rightness and wrongness of it until they passed out from oxygen deprivation – but it was reality. It seemed that most men swallowed their grief, tamped it down, and let it eat at them from the inside. It was what Christopher was doing now.

It was why, when Ken finally touched his shoulder, the younger man didn’t do anything. Didn’t lash out, didn’t push him away. Just stood a little straighter. Don’t worry about me, the motion said. I’ll deal. I’m a man. It’s what I do.

Maggie was a woman. She had to walk through that waterfall, and she expected others to do the same. So she wouldn’t let him drown quietly, and Ken loved that about her.

She reached for Christopher. He didn’t respond to her, either, but she didn’t take that the way a man would have. She didn’t understand it as “Leave me alone,” but rather as “Try to understand, try to be with me.”

“That’s why you were in town,” she said. “It wasn’t just so you could be part of a photo op with your parents.”

He nodded. The nod was so fast you would miss it if you blinked, an up-down that was more twitch than response. But Ken saw the motion as hopeful. Even such tiny movements kept you afloat when you swam through grief and despair.

“I made that red bracelet for her,” he said. His voice carried no emotion. No sadness, no fear. He sounded like he had already joined the ranks of the dead. “I put it on her myself.”

“The mother?” said Maggie.

“She was one of the reasons Mom and Dad always hated me.” Christopher grimaced. There was no joy in his face, only a reservoir of self-loathing so deep it likely had no bottom. “She was great when I met her. Wonderful. High school.” For a moment his face shone, memory past made vision present. “I loved her. I loved her so much.”

He stopped, his mouth working dryly. Maggie put her other hand on his shoulder. Little Liz was sandwiched between them and Ken more than half-expected the toddler to come awake and start screaming the way she always seemed to do when he and Maggie started fooling around.

But no. That was a thing from Before. A thing she would have done before she –

(started Changing started Becoming)

– had been caught up in this madness.

Maggie had stopped walking, and so had the rest of the row. They had to stop, they were all linked in a mass of arms and legs. One stopped, they all stopped. One fell, they all fell.

“I went to college and when I got back she was a junkie.” The grimace returned to Christopher’s face, if possible less cheerful than the first had been. “I didn’t know about her problems until after she was pregnant. I tried to get custody, but she was careful enough that I couldn’t prove the drug problems so the courts defaulted to her as the mother. And Dad didn’t want to create a stink that would hurt his reelection chances, so he helped her. Helped her keep my baby away from me.”

He beat a fist against his thigh, hard and fast. “She died a few days ago. OD’d. And they found the baby in the apartment, dehydrated and starving and holding onto her mom. They took her – Carina, that was her name, the baby’s name, Heather named her after her grandmother – to the hospital, that’s where she was, she was in the hospital, critical condition when….” What had been a babbling sentence, a fear- and guilt-ridden monologue drifted off. He waved, taking in the entirety of the ruined world in one gesture.

“I’m so sorry.” Maggie’s voice was low. Ken knew she was reliving her own loss. Was seeing her own son fall, and die, and then come back. The return of a dead child, which was every bereft parent’s dream, had been twisted into a nightmare by the Change.

Just like everything else.

Christopher shrugged. Trying to muscle through, to build up the walls of his dam, making the reservoir deep enough that it could hold the grief, could contain the guilt. Could let him drown until he was as dead as his baby. Only she wasn’t dead, was she? She was horribly alive.

“The hospital fell down,” he said. “One of those planes hit it and it fell down. It was St. Luke’s, over on Jefferson.”

He looked at them with a haunted gaze. “It fell down.”

Ken knew what the young man was saying. What he was asking for.

He also knew he was the only one who could give it.

He moved slowly to Christopher. He felt like he was approaching a wounded beast. In a way he was.

He took Christopher in his arms. His missing fingers throbbed, pounding a drumbeat from chest to arm to phantom fingers. Pain speared down his left leg, worse than the thrumming of burns and bruised muscles, worse even than his missing fingers. He took the pain and held it tight. Pain was life. The dead didn’t feel.

“You didn’t let her die,” he said. Ken could tell that to Christopher, and he was the only one who could. Because he knew what it was like to be a father and watch your child die, to be the protector and let your child fall from your arms and be helpless to stop it. “You didn’t let her die, and you couldn’t stop her from changing.”

Christopher collapsed against Ken. He sobbed again, and tears hot as blood fell against Ken’s neck.

Ken held him.

He heard a growl.

(… give up…

… give in…)

Far away. But coming closer.

Ken didn’t move. Not yet.

What was the point of surviving if the survivors were not permitted to live? To grieve for the dead and so demonstrate that they were still alive?

Aaron spoke, and any comfort that Ken might have felt in that moment bled out of him.

“This isn’t an accident,” said the cowboy. Everyone swiveled to stare at him. The older man took a breath, and wiped his face with his one good hand. The other, a starfish with twisted legs that he had tucked into the waist of his pants, twitched with nervous energy.

He looked at Ken. “Your boy came for us.”

Then at Christopher. “Your girl.”

He muttered something. Ken thought it was “Dorcas,” but couldn’t be sure.

Then Aaron looked at them all. “These aren’t random coincidences. They’re targeted attacks. Psychological warfare.” The cowboy looked shaken, weary and worn at the idea of what he was saying. “These things aren’t just trying to kill us or turn us, they want to break us first.”

32

“What do you mean?” said Buck. Ken thought the big man sounded much smaller than he was. Almost like a child, lost in an unfamiliar place without care of a parent.

Buck had lost his mother only a few days before.

What if she shows up, too?

Ken thrust the thought away. Tried to. It wouldn’t go far.

What if she’s in the horde coming now?

No, she’s dead. Aaron killed her to stop her from being Changed.

So? The dead are rising.

(the children are raising them)

No. She won’t come. She can’t. We can’t take it.

“I mean these things are smart,” said Aaron. “And they know us.”

Aaron looked like he was going to say more, but at that moment The Redhead broke in. “We can’t chat about this right now.”

She pointed at Maggie. At Liz. The little girls’ fingers were twitching. And at the same moment, Ken realized that the sounds of the horde – the far-off but still-too-close-for-comfort horde – had died.

“What –?”

Movement stole his voice. He looked down.

There were several bodies on the road. Several people who had been peeled apart and half-devoured, like appetizers when the main course suddenly rolls out earlier than expected.

He had barely noticed them – they were just part of the landscape, as normal now as a gray Toyota might have been a week ago.

Ken could smell death on the corpses, the stink of putrefaction seeping out of pores and oozing out of shattered stumps; leaking out of open mouths that allowed gas to escape from methane-bloated stomach cavities. A few of the bodies looked as though they had actually burst, ripped apart from neck to crotch.

All were dead.

All were well into decomposition.

And all were moving.

33

This had happened before. Stuck in a plane with nothing but the dead, and the dead had risen up to attack Ken and his friends. That was when they lost one more of their number. That was when Dorcas stayed behind to give them a few critical seconds to escape.

Christopher had done the same; an action that now seemed less insane generosity and more insane penitence. Whether he had a hand in his baby’s death or not, Christopher believed himself guilty. And while evil men confronted by true guilt will spend the rest of their days proclaiming their innocence to the tops of the mountains, so good men faced with guilt they did nothing to earn will accept a sin in solemn silence and seek out every opportunity to make it right.

And when they couldn’t fix the underlying cause of the guilt, as Christopher could not, they would all-too-often seek penitence and absolution in insane offerings of self-sacrifice. They did not offer riches or indulgences, but rather sold their own safety, gave their own futures as ransom for the blame they had never earned but carried nonetheless.

Ken hadn’t been there for the things Christopher had – or hadn’t – done to save his child. But looking at him now he had no doubt that if anyone was wronged, it was the young man. He had been lied to, betrayed by his own family when he most needed them. His daughter stolen away. Dead – he thought – in the collapse that followed the Change.

So Christopher had stayed behind, had been willing to pay the ultimate price. Torn apart at the hands of the things that had once been dead and now moved again.

Movies that Ken had seen featured two kinds of zombies: the ones that were alive, if only on a technical level, and the ones who were the reanimated flesh of the dead. The former were humans infected by virus or voodoo, made into killers by nature or as an effect of human meddling. The latter were things that were brought to life by forces outside of human understanding.

The movies had gotten it wrong. And right.

Zombies were living humans infected with some strange disease. They came after you, to bite you and make of you the very thing that you most feared: a part of the protean organism that flowed across the face of the earth, a thing with billions of cells that had each once been autonomous creatures.

Zombies were also the dead brought to life. As the things nearby demonstrated all too clearly.

A man who ended below the knees was sitting up, ruined face looking back and forth as he maneuvered into a mockery of normal mobility.

A woman who had been torn in two via a gash that ran from her right clavicle down to her left hip bone was rolling ineffectively, trying to use her head and her right arm as anchors to get into place. To stand, to move.

A man who had his throat torn away, pulled out so completely that the gray-white of his spine could be seen in the back of the mangled mess, was slowly getting to his feet.

They were all breathing – or at least all pushing air in and out of their mouths – in time.

“We’ve gotta get outta here,” said The Redhead. She pointed at Liz and Hope, who were also breathing in time with the zombies. “Before they call ‘em down on us.”

Here was where the movies had gotten it wrong: it wasn’t a choice between live and undead. Zombies were real, and there were both.

Live infected…

… and undead cursed to live again.

Ken wondered for a moment how it was that the stories had come to life, how it was that something so blatantly impossible had taken a firm grip on reality and thrust itself into that once-closed system.

He wondered how the stories had started in the first place. He remembered a line from the animated version of Pinocchio: “All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.”

Was this not the first time the zombies had taken form in their world?

He also wondered how his daughters had a part in it. How they apparently controlled a piece of it.

As if irritated to be the subject of his thoughts, Liz and Hope stopped breathing.

So did the undead. The ones that could move enough to do so turned to orient on Ken and the other survivors.

“Run,” whispered The Redhead.

Then she said it again. Frighteningly loud in the sudden stillness.

“RUN!”

34

The zombies that had their genesis in death were slower than those born of bite wounds. Not much, but some.

Still, they were fast. Faster than a group of exhausted, crippled survivors.

Ken looked at Hope. She bounced in Buck’s arms. Limp, loose… and somehow connected to the maimed things that pulled themselves closer, closer.

Is she doing this?

Does she know?

Is she one of them?

It was this last that was most frightening. What if his daughter was no longer his daughter? What if she was one of the zombies, albeit one that was wearing a better mask of flesh, a more lifelike camouflage than the others?

What would he do then?

What should he do?

What could he do?

Buck was whispering something, wheezing the words through gritted teeth as he ran, holding onto Hope with one arm, pulling Ken with the other. “No Hope no Hope no Hope no Hope no….”

Ken supposed he could have been declaring his lack of hope, lowercase “h,” but he thought the big man was asking the little girl to stop what she was doing. To let the mangled cadavers rising around them lay down and resume their long sleep.

Aaron was pulling Christopher along. A moment later The Redhead joined them, grabbing Christopher’s other arm and throwing it over her shoulder. She had one of her machetes in her free hand, and swung it at a zombie as she helped Christopher lean on her.

A hand fell to the ground. Pussing over with the yellow ooze. It lay twitching like an upended turtle. Not dead – or not any deader than the rest of the zombie. The creature whose hand she had lopped off barely paused before grabbing at The Redhead with his remaining hand.

She didn’t pause either. Reversed grip on her machete. Plunged it into his open mouth. The dead zombie made no sound – the dead ones looked like they were screaming, but they never vocalized, not ever – but the viscous pink sludge that apparently kept shelter in their skulls erupted from the wound. The zombie went crazy. It held up its hands to the sky as though praying to a god only it could see. Its feet danced a quick rat-ta-tap on the pavement, then it fell to earth and started beating its face against the blacktop.

More of the pink goo splashed. Even more. The crunch-crack-thock of meat and bone shearing away made Ken’s stomach twist. Maggie gagged, a hrrrrk sound that didn’t help his own intestinal distress much. He tasted acid at the back of his throat.

Another zombie shuffled on two legs that ended unevenly above the ankles. It moved past the one that was beating its own head to a nub on the blacktop. The headless one reached out and attacked its fellow. The two fell into a melee as violent as any Ken had yet seen.

He looked away.

The other undead creatures were closing.

Five or so behind.

Another half dozen ahead.

Six more turning a corner nearby.

They were all too fast.

“What now?” said Aaron. Ken didn’t know why the cowboy – or anyone else – kept asking him that question.

He suddenly wanted to lay down and die. It wasn’t the sound of the zombies, either. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of going on like this forever.

He’d lost his son, and it looked like he was losing his daughters as well.

Just sit down and let it happen, man.

The ten-plus zombies ahead were not going to be easy to get by.

“What now?” Aaron repeated.

Sally growled, as though adding his own two cents to the moment. Adding encouragement, but also requiring answers.

Ken didn’t know what to say.

Just sit down.

Just let it happen.

The thoughts were not, sadly, the product of the psychic attack that had been coming faster and harder since the Change. They were his. He recognized his own inner voice, though the words were new. He had never thought of himself as a quitter, and was dismayed to find how comfortable the thoughts were now. They fit as tightly and comfortably as old shoes, friends long-buried in the detritus of his mind but made familiar and all-too-friendly by the present circumstances.

And the reason for his despair was obvious. It wasn’t the imminent doom of yet another horde. Nor was it the fact that even the dead were apparently a threat as long as his daughters were present.

No, it was his daughters themselves. It was the fact that he had lost Derek; had invested the rest of his hopes for the future in the little girls that hung limp beside him. And more and more he was realizing – was being forced to realize – that he might be hoping for something impossible.

What good to hope for your children if they have been taken, whether their bodies remain or not?

Then a flash of memory came. Not long memory, not a memory of before the Change, a time that was already receding into ghostly unreality. This was a time only a few short hours before.

He remembered Hope saying, “We’ve been here for seven poops!”

He remembered Liz curled up and asleep against the snow leopard. Her chubby fist bound up in the thick fur of the cat, like any baby with the world’s largest plush toy.

The moment saved him. The memories threw up a shield of truth that warded off the despair that had invaded his mind. Maybe only for a day or even a moment. But he picked up the pace again.

So maybe the girls were a part of this.

But this – whatever it was – wasn’t all they were.

They were still his daughters. His little girls. He had to believe that. To believe otherwise would be to give up give in die die die.

Ken refused.

He forced himself to stand a bit taller. To bear more of his own weight instead of leaning on others. The rest of the survivors looked to him. He didn’t know why – Aaron would have been a more logical choice to lead, and even Buck seemed to have become a strong person bent on saving the girls.

But the others looked to him.

He wouldn’t be the first to fall.

35

The thing about resolve is that it doesn’t matter until it is tested. Until it buts up against the challenge that defines it, it has no intrinsic worth and is merely false hope.

Ken felt that reality acutely as he limped forward with the rest of his friends and family – one and the same, really.

Doom was behind, death ahead. And it was literal death: embodied in the moving forms of people that had risen up from rot and walking on bones and flesh that had ceased metabolizing days ago.

Liz’s hand twitched. Sally was there, the big cat growling deep in his throat as he walked beside Maggie. It looked like Maggie would have to fall, have to trip over the cat. But Sally was always just out of the way, always just beyond tripping range.

Ken realized that, all abreast and synchronized as they were, the survivors were almost walking like the zombies. Moving as one, each aware of the other and coordinating their movements to mesh with the others’.

There was something to that. Something important.

Liz’s limp hand drifted across Sally’s back.

One of the things behind them stumbled. Coincidence? Ken didn’t know, and he didn’t have any way to find out. Not now.

Not with a tight knot of undead ahead, stretching out into an uneven line that seemed random until you looked and saw they were within arm’s reach of one another. Nothing could get through without being grabbed. Probably by two or more of the things.

The Redhead reached into her pocket and withdrew her walkie-talkie.  She flicked a switch. Murmured, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.”

The return voice was too low to hear. Ken hoped whoever was on the other end of the radio had good news, but The Redhead’s expression clouded.

Not good news.

No such thing as good news anymore.

36

Ken felt himself drawn to one side. Aaron was pulling the group toward a storefront whose window had been broken out. A mannequin wearing a gray dress and a blood-spattered scarf leaned through the window like a drunk who had simply passed out after a particularly intense bender. Aaron’s intent was obvious: get inside, try to find a way through, to escape through the back.

Failing that, it was as good a place for a last stand as any.

The group stumbled with him for a few steps, then Ken felt a competing pull. Not toward the store, but forward again. Toward the zombies that stood before them.

“What are you doin’?” snapped Aaron.

The Redhead answered. “My best to save your ass, cowboy.”

Aaron growled, as though he didn’t like being called a cowboy. Or maybe he didn’t mind it, but didn’t think she had earned the privilege. “You gonna run us straight toward –“

The things hissed. It was the first sound that Ken had heard the undead zombies make. Not a vocalization in the strictest sense, but a sound that brought to mind the rattle of a cornered diamondback.

At the same time, he heard a louder noise. The sound of an engine. A diesel thrum that was louder than he would have expected to hear on Boise’s streets even before the Change. It wasn’t just the loudness of it, either, it was the choppiness of it. It had the rickety crick-crack of an engine that was used not for mileage but for hauling. Something built for more than its ability to get from point A to point B.

The rhythmic clock-tock-crick-crack of the diesel engine got louder. Closer.

The zombies remained silent. But also got closer.

Ken wondered which one would reach them first.

37

The engine arrived. And with it, thirty-foot blades with edges keen enough to slice a ream of paper cleanly in two.

Another curiosity of Boise, but one that Ken had always loved: it was the urban extension of a strictly agrarian community. As such, the buildings and businesses were placed around and among acres of open farmland. It wasn’t unusual for a dentist to have fifty acres of corn as his only neighboring business, or for a Wal-Mart to back up to a working ranch, the smell of livestock drifting over to greet people as they exited with inexpensive items that were “Made in America” even if they were assembled somewhere in Thailand.

Boise was a city of contradictions. Hungering to be taken seriously as a urban center, but unwilling to give up its roots as a farming community. It had a hockey team, an amphitheater for concerts. It also had a large number of kids who took a week or two off school every year to help with the crops.

It had Best Buy for electronics beside Cabella’s where you could buy all your hunting gear.

It had new megaplex theaters alongside old-fashioned places that still showed black and white films.

It had streets where you could see people driving to work in a Lexus or a Honda tricked out to impress, or a Ford or a Jeep tricked out to work.

And, apparently, you could also see people driving John Deere tractor combine harvesters down the middle of the roads.

38

At nearly twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide at its widest point, the great green beast was almost as much of a monster as the things in front of Ken and the other survivors.

Almost.

And, in some ways, more so.

It hove into view, managing to look both ponderous and slow and at the same time faster than Ken would have believed. Bright green, the only swatches of color the yellow John Deere symbol on sides and front and a red fire extinguisher clamped to the side of the huge cab.

John wasn’t a farmer any more than he was a hunter. But you couldn’t grow up in a place like Boise without at least knowing a few basics. So he knew that this was a combine harvester that could be used to harvest a variety of grains. He also knew that the long thing on the front that looked like a bingo cage lined with Ginsu knives was the thresher, and it epitomized “things you don’t want to walk in front of.”

The driver was barely visible through the glare that splashed sunlight across the front of the cab. Even at this distance Ken could tell he was huge, a body built like that of a pro wrestler crammed on the bench seat of the thresher. It looked likely that he had never actually gotten into the machine, but rather had been born on the seat and grown to giant manhood right there; that was the only way Ken could fathom him getting inside.

He was also dressed like The Redhead, with what looked like body armor and a gas mask swinging from his tree-trunk of a neck. His skin was black. Not the light brown of so many people that Ken and his friends referred to as “black” or even “African American” if they were still a few years behind the ever-shifting curve of PC designations, but so deep and dark it was almost the color of night.

He was smiling. It was not the carefree smile that Christopher so often wore – or had worn before he attacked his own child in this strangest of wars. No, it was the tight grin of a man about to kill. A smile that Ken had never really seen – not even on Aaron, who kept his emotions under tightest control – but which he recognized instantly. And which he feared.

The huge man was driving the thresher right at the zombies that separated him from the survivors.

The John Deere suddenly leapt forward.

The undead between Ken and the huge harvester finally seemed to take note of the new threat.

They turned to see what had crept up behind them.

They hissed that diamondback-rattler hiss.

39

The blades hit the first of the undead.

Then metal and flesh met.

Metal won.

Metal continued through to bone.

This was a tougher contest, but again metal proved victorious.

Blood flew in high arcs, a splash of red that painted the side of the green and yellow cab. Ken thought almost idly that the thing looked ready for Christmas.

The horde ahead was gone in under two seconds. Not cut down, not blown to pieces the way the RPG had done.

Just gone.

They disappeared into the whirling cyclone blades of the thresher. Some simply flung into the air as mist, others were blended to a pulp and carried along a conveyor to a cylinder that had been angled out so the paste spewed onto the street instead of into the grain bin behind the cab.

In moments all that was left of the undead was grume and a few tiny things that twitched and foamed yellow. Too small to worry about, too tiny to be threats.

The thresher pulled past the kill zone, huge tires riding over the red patch that had once been things that, in turn, had once been people.

The black man reached a massive arm over and pushed open the cab door. The door was mostly clear plastic or some kind of acrylic, and the man threw it open with such force that it warped, bouncing off the cab before he caught it again in a hand the size of a hubcap.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed. His voice was deeper than he was big, rumbling like tectonic plates about to quake. “Get IN.”

He nodded.

Ken looked over his shoulder and realized that in the sheer shock of the thresher’s appearance, he had forgotten that the undead in front weren’t the only ones.

There were still the ones behind.

The ones that hadn’t stopped chasing them.

The ones that were now only feet away.

40

The row of people slumped toward the thresher.

Ken pushed Maggie ahead. Pushed Buck. Neither resisted. They held the girls, the things that seemed to be at once the most important, fragile, and dangerous part of the group.

Hissing followed them. He wondered if this meant the undead things were changing the way the… infected ones had been doing. The thought terrified him.

If the dead could not only rise up, but learn and change and evolve, what hope for humanity?

He didn’t look back.

Sally fell suddenly behind them. The snow leopard roared, the bellow of a big cat that had marked its prey. Something hissed, then there were low sounds of struggle.

Sally leapt back into view. More blood poured from the wound on his side. He had lost an eye.

He didn’t seem to mind. He ran to Maggie and licked little Liz’s limp foot. He let Hope’s trailing hand fall across his back, then danced back silently to tangle with the undead behind.

More growling, a roar. Hissing.

Maggie was at the idling thresher. She put her hands on the guardrails that ran up either side of the steep ladder-stairs that led to the cab. Pulled herself in. The black man smiled tensely at her, as though even in the midst of a calamity certain niceties must be observed. Ken almost expected him to say, “This is your captain speaking.”

Next was Buck. Maggie shuffled over to give him space on the bench.

And that was it. The cab was full.

No room for anyone else.

The hissing increased.

Sally leapt forward and somehow managed to navigate the ladder.

“The hell is that?” shrieked the driver.

Ken heard Buck and Maggie start to explain, heard bits of “He’s with us,” and “He’s all right” before the huge bear-man – so big he dwarfed even Buck’s six-foot-plus frame – waved them to silence.

He looked over Ken’s head. Then at The Redhead.

“Move, Theresa, move!” he screamed. And there was genuine terror in his gaze.

Terror, but Ken wondered where they were supposed to move to.

41

The Redhead – hard to think about her as a Theresa – jumped onto the thresher, then clambered across the side of the cab as nimbly as Christopher might have done. She gestured to Aaron. “Get him inside!” She pointed at Christopher.

Aaron eyed the cab. “Where should I put him?”

“Anywhere you can fit him!”

Christopher threw off the cowboy’s arm almost angrily. He bounded up the ladder, slammed the cab door shut, and then climbed across the blood-slick outside of the vehicle until he was next to Theresa. He eyed her as though daring her to say something.

She looked almost admiringly at him. Nodded. Admitting his right to be there, Ken thought.

Ken was next. Aaron propelled him halfway up the ladder. Then the cowboy barely made it onto the bottom rung before the thresher leaped forward.

The blades churned again.

They were pointed the wrong direction, but Ken knew that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t an attack, it was an escape.

The things were still coming.

One of them put a hand on Aaron’s work boot. Aaron hooked his left arm – his bad arm – through the handrail. He spun and kicked. The undead thing’s head exploded in red and pink. The thing danced mindless madness, instant and infinite insanity gripping it. It didn’t let go of Aaron, though, and the cowboy was losing his grip.

Ken jumped down a step and aimed his own kick. He wasn’t as expert as Aaron, but all the years of martial arts held him in good stead and he got a good front kick in. Right over Aaron’s shoulder, straight into the thing’s own shoulder. It spun the undead around, tearing it free of Aaron. The monster, the dead thing, was nearly headless, but it somehow sensed it was near to other moving creatures, because it grabbed one of its once-sisters and began tearing huge chunks of flesh from the other undead.

The dead woman it was attacking didn’t even acknowledge it. She kept trying for the thresher as it slowly moved forward. The vehicle had been moving quickly when Ken first saw it, but apparently there had been a bit of momentum involved in its velocity. To get up speed it had to have time.

Not like the zombies. They ran fast from the Change. They killed quickly from the get-go.

The dead woman finally went down when the one Aaron and Ken had kicked ripped the back off her neck. It must have interrupted all signals from head to body because she fell and was still. Her fingers twitched.

Then feet.

She would rise again. Soon.

Ken looked for the next undead.

He kicked at one that was reaching for them. He connected, knocking the thing back. It went to one knee and the driver swerved at the same time. He was undoubtedly trying to miss something in the road, but it was almost a choreographed move. The huge tires of the thresher ground the zombie beneath them. It didn’t rise again. Ken couldn’t even see where it had been: just one more stain on a road filthy from the destruction of the past days.

Aaron was fighting off the things, good hand and both feet a blur. Efficient motions meant not to subdue or still, but to cripple and kill. The moves of a trained soldier.

Or assassin.

Ken glanced at Christopher and Theresa. The redheaded woman was holding to a horizontal bracket on the side of the thresher’s cab. She was holding herself up out of reach of the undead, but every so often she would drop down and land a pair of heavy black boots in a forehead or face. Sometimes it triggered that jittering madness, other times not.

She smiled regardless. Ken remembered the diamond tears she had wept. Wondered what had happened when the RPGs flew. What she had lost.

Christopher was lower than Theresa. He wasn’t using his feet to kick at pursuers. Feet were more powerful, and safer to use than anything else.

But Christopher had abandoned safety some time ago. He must have dropped the medieval style axe at some point, and now he was simply punching the zombies. Wild swings as he shrieked wordless screams of pain that nearly turned to pleasure each time his knuckles connected with a face, a body. He was crying in his rapturous rage. Ken wondered if he was attacking the things that had changed his baby, or if he saw himself in the things, and was murdering the father that had left a baby behind.

Never mind that it wasn’t true in the slightest. It was the lie that good parents saw when they lost a child. The what if that haunted them. That would haunt Ken.

It happened. Christopher’s recklessness caught him. One of the undead grabbed his arm. Pulled it toward him.

Christopher almost fell off the side of the thresher. He would have been killed outright if that had happened.

But he managed to hold on.

Pulling away from the mouth.

Always the mouth.

Always the terror of Change. Fear of loss that even a man torn to nothing by grief could understand.

42

Ken looked automatically to Aaron. The cowboy was busy. Pummeling his own attacker, his arm still threaded through the handrail, still trying to stay on the still-crawling thresher while stopping the undead –

(are there more of them there are where are they coming from how long will they come how long can we hold off how long can we hold out?)

– from climbing on and taking them all down. Theresa was still doing her homicidal Tarzan move.

No one could help.

Ken ran up the stairs. Using both hands for speed, even though gripping with his three-fingered left was agony.

He jumped to the thin strip of metal by the cabin.

The driver looked at him. A look that said, “We can’t stop, you can’t come in.”

Ken shook his head. He didn’t want in.

43

Christopher was screaming. Not the homicidal scream of a man born to the edge of madness. It was fear. Not fear of pain or death, but fear of something worse. This was damnation, pure and simple: condemnation to a mindless life of wandering and serving. No choice, no self. Just existence, and heeding the call to rise and destroy.

Ken tried to blank out the cries, or at least to blank out the terror that they carried. The fear that tried to force itself into his own mind.

One of his martial arts instructors, a barrel-chested Persian with scarred knuckles and a smile broader than a crescent moon, had always quoted Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, a seminal book on sword fighting written in the 1600s.

“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined through calm,” Master Arman would say. The words would come as a whisper, usually during the last pushup after a grueling sparring session. Musashi’s wisdom moving through the centuries to remind Ken to focus not on the struggle to survive what – at the time – had seemed like the hardest thing he would do, but rather to focus on the calm that underlay the struggle.

He wondered what had happened to Master Arman. If his old teacher had survived the Change. He hoped so.

“Be determined through calm.” The swordsman’s words.

He took what he wanted from the side of the cab.

Christopher was still screaming.

Ken felt the calm that he had always sought, the calm that had always eluded him. Not the feeling that everything would work out the way he hoped, but the sudden realization that, live or die, he was trying. That, live or die, everything would turn out the way it should; the way it must.

Determined through calm.

Musashi had been a ronin. A samurai whose lord had fallen.

Ken had no master. His world had fallen, and all that was left were his friends.

Through calm.

His family.

Calm.

He plucked the cherry red fire extinguisher off the side of the cab. It was held in place by a clamp designed to be stiff enough that the extinguisher wouldn’t come off during the normal jouncing of the machine’s operation.

In Ken’s –

(calm)

– hands it fell open like the arms of a long-lost friend.

Christopher was still shrieking.

Ken eschewed the handle or the shell. He pulled the hose assembly, throwing the red canister over his shoulder like some strange scuba gear.

Then dancing down. Dancing like a swordsman. Like the calm Musashi in his Five Rings, moving from prologue to epilogue. Inevitable start to inescapable end.

He used his bad hand to grab a bracket similar to the one Theresa was still using. Then he stepped on Christopher’s shoulder. The younger man screamed again, terrified anew at what was happening. But Ken could not help that.

He was calm.

This was how it had to be.

He used his foot to push Christopher back against the side of the thresher, then used the same thrust he had generated to lean forward. The momentum thus created traveled through his foot, his leg, his torso. Velocity increased as it traveled up his arm, then through the hose of the fire extinguisher.

The canister snaked out, then the forward momentum ended like the crack of a whip, turning forward to down in a tight arc.

The head of the zombie that had been pulling Christopher toward it disappeared in a spray of blood and bone. The thing danced. But Ken barely noticed the dance as he pushed it away. It was not Musashi’s dance, so he did not care.

It was not calm, so it did not deserve notice.

The fire extinguisher exploded as well, the impact separating tubing and handle and canister. It disappeared into the frenzy.

Ken let it go. He had no need for it.

The thresher lunged forward as the driver shifted gears.

The undead were suddenly left behind.

And all was silent.

All was…

… calm.

44

It didn’t last.

Nothing good could last, at least not now, not so soon after the change.

Perhaps not ever again.

Ken felt the calm that had captured him suddenly release him. He felt the pain in his back, his leg. The agony sprouting from absent fingers and sending tortured tendrils grinding their way through his left hand and arm.

He vomited on Christopher’s head.

It wasn’t much, just a thin gruel of storm water and the power bars that Ken had managed to choke down while lying in a semi-comatose state and then awake for far too short a time in the underground areas of Boise.

Still, it was enough to wring a shriek out of the younger man.

“Are you kidding me?” Christopher glared up, then averted his eyes in time to barely avoid getting a faceful of round two. More warm vomitus trailed around his ears and down the back of his shirt. He looked up, squinting to make sure he wasn’t going to get hit a third time, then unleashed a stream of invectives so enraged and inventive that Ken almost smiled.

Sometimes the universe sends us gifts.

Sometimes the gift is a calm to get us through an impossible moment.

Sometimes it is a faceful of puke, and the incredibly hilarious sight of a once-too-handsome-to-be-believed friend trying haplessly to clean himself off one-handed while clinging to a giant tractor that trundles through a dead city.

Christopher was still screaming, still raging.

The redheaded Theresa started laughing with Ken. Wheezing “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh” over and over, a phrase that seemed so innocent and out of place beside Christopher’s raging epithets that it just made Ken laugh all the more.

Another laugh joined theirs. Aaron, the old cowboy hanging off the side of the ladder, the arm threaded through the handrail and one foot on the ladder the only things keeping him on the vehicle. He was laughing so hard that he was crying, tears rolling down his weathered cheeks like streams cutting their way through long-dry beds.

They had all lost people. Had all found them in horrible ways. Ken sensed that Theresa, too, had been touched by the loss that was felt so keenly and quickly now.

Of course she has. It’s the World After. Everyone alive has lost someone. The lucky ones haven’t found them again.

The thought just made Ken laugh all the harder.

A moment later, Christopher laughed as well.

Hooting like maniacs, they rode the thresher through Boise.

45

The laughter petered out.

Aaron fell silent first, and Ken saw steel come back into the cowboy’s eyes. He began scanning: left, right, left right. Up, down. Left, right, left, right. Up, down. His eyes moved methodically and without ceasing. The other side of the thresher was a huge blind spot for the time being, but at least on this side nothing would get past the wary eye of the older man.

Ken looked around as well.

He saw nothing.

But he heard a cry. One of terror, one of fear.

And his heart almost jumped out of his body for happiness.

He climbed as quickly as he could toward the cabin. The grace and agility that had been endowed upon him like some Heavenly gift were gone, so it seemed to take forever. Forever in which he could bask in the sound.

It was Lizzie.

The sound of his daughter, crying. Not the sound of a tiny demon shrieking for help, not the sound of panting, of gasping, of –

(give up give in)

– growling that demanded despair. It was just the sound of a little girl hungry and tired and afraid.

It was music.

Ken pulled himself to the cabin and was almost hit by the door as it opened. It would have been a sort of cosmic irony, to survive all that he had only to get whacked in the face by the cab door and so thrown off and probably crushed to death by the blood-inked wheels of the thresher.

He threw himself back, barely missing the acrylic door.

“Ken!”

It was Maggie. She didn’t sound panicked. She was happy, he could hear the smile in her voice.

He clambered in the cab. Not all the way – there wasn’t room – but he poked his head in.

The toddler stopped crying when he did, and for a wonderful moment he thought it was because she had seen him. Then she giggled and he realized she was being licked rapidly on the nose by Sally. The snow leopard looked like he was grinning, and his huge pink tongue was lapping at Liz like she was a cool drink of water after a too-long thirst.

Ken felt like he had come home. He would often walk into the house – was it even there anymore? – and hear Liz laughing. Running up, not to him but to his briefcase or his papers or some other thing he carried that had caught her eye. And that was all right; that was the way it should be, in a way. He was her father, and if he was doing his job she shouldn’t feel like he was a rare treat, but rather a permanent and comforting fixture in her life. Not an amusement, but a security blanket with strong arms to wrap around her.

She didn’t laugh at him, she laughed at Sally. A hand batted out and punched the snow leopard, hitting him right on his truncated ear. Ken’s heart lurched again, this time in fear that that the snow leopard would revert to its wild roots and attack the little girl.

Sally didn’t seem to register what had to be a painful punch. He just kept licking, lapping, and Lizzy kept laughing.

Maggie looked at him, smiling. She didn’t say “She’s back, our baby is here again.” She didn’t have to. Ken saw it in her eyes, and it was as loud and clear as if she had written it in hundred-foot letters in the sky.

Buck looked morose. He was staring at Hope, waiting for her to wake. She slept on. Moaned once, but did not move her body. Still locked in whatever coma or fugue commanded her body during the attack.

Ken touched Buck’s shoulder. He thought it strange that he, the parent, should be comforting a comparative stranger about the continuing insensibility of his own daughter. But he also knew Buck wasn’t really a stranger. Not anymore. They had all shed blood for one another. They were all family, and that was right, and Buck was worried about this girl in his arms the same way he would worry about a sister, niece, mother, daughter. She was his and he was hers.

That was right, too.

The thresher lurched.

Ken worried for a moment about what new horror that portended.

Then he realized that the driver had downshifted. Slowing down.

“We walk from here,” he said. “Or most likely run.”

46

Ken saw why the driver stopped: there was another roadblock. A city bus had overturned and spun halfway through a building. It sprawled halfway across the street, blocking too much of it for the thresher to pass.

Everyone got out quickly. Sally first, leaping down to the asphalt, landing silently. He favored his left front paw, but did not whine or whimper. Just looked around like an advance scout.

The rest of the survivors piled out. The driver and Theresa came last.

Theresa hugged the driver, and Ken could tell that whatever he and the others had been through, these two had had similar experiences. Had been bound by pain and death and sacrifice. Family.

“Where’s Brandon, Elijah?” she said.

The huge man shook his head. He tried to talk, choked, tried again. “When you were being attacked, he hit them with the RPG.”

Theresa’s face shone with the dread certainty of someone who knows the end of a terrible story, but cannot help but listen to the whole of it. “He could have run,” she whispered.

Elijah shook his head. “There wasn’t time, and you know it. And he didn’t know how to drive the –“

Theresa cut him off with a gesture. She hugged him again. “I know,” she said. Her voice was a harsh whisper. “I know, you dumb bear.”

Elijah hugged her so tightly Ken thought he could hear Theresa’s ribs creak. Then he released her and Ken could see wetness shining on his face. “Your brother let himself die so we could live,” he said. “Let’s not waste that.”

Theresa nodded. The harshness came back into her expression, her eyes deadened. She looked at the group.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

She looked at the still-crying Lizzie and the still-silent Hope as she said this.

Ken didn’t like the look she gave them.

47

The run was blessedly short. Ken could feel the survivors – at least the ones he knew, if not Elijah and Theresa – going slower and slower with each passing yard, foot, inch.

They had to move around piles of debris, over crashed cars. One time they even had to help one another under a pile-up of construction scaffolding that had formed a weird tunnel that all-but-completely blocked the street. It was strangely beautiful, and Ken couldn’t help but feel like he was being born again as he crawled through one side of the tunnel and came out another.

They heard the growl. The call to surrender. But it was far, and weak.

They had time, they had entire minutes. And that seemed better than anything Ken could remember. An eternity of safety. He almost didn’t know what to do with himself.

Start a new hobby, Ken.

Build a business, Ken.

Sail around the world, Ken.

Figure out what the hell’s going on with your kids, Ken.

The last was troubling, and impossible to figure out. At least for now. He shelved it.

They ran around a final series of half-demolished buildings. The structures stood gray and already seemed to be crumbling in the harsh light of the day, an apocalyptic scene that seemed months into the dissolution of society, not mere days.

How far can we fall? How fast?

The speed at which everything had crumbled was astonishing. The rot had set in, not merely among the undead, but among the basic structures of life before the Change. Everything was moving too fast. Ken felt like he was on top of an ice floe heading toward a waterfall. Trying to keep upright, trying to balance, trying at the same time to jump to a new location that would no doubt provide footing just as treacherous as the spot he had just abandoned.

They turned a final corner.

No more buildings ahead. Just empty space. A long straightaway for a while, more buildings in the distance, but nothing for at least half a mile.

But Elijah was slowing down.

“A beauty, ain’t she?” he said.

Ken didn’t understand. And then he did. He looked at the one thing between them and the next bit of civilization.

Buck was a bit faster on the uptake. “Are you totally fricking kidding me?” he said. He glanced at Maggie, apparently remembering her giving people an earful over choices of language in front of the kids. She didn’t look back, and Buck looked relieved that “freaking” wasn’t on the forbidden list.

Elijah nodded. “That’s my baby.”

Then he turned to face the group. Theresa did, too. And they were both holding guns. Theresa had hers pointed at Buck, and Elijah’s was directly centered on Maggie.

No, Ken realized. Not at Maggie and Buck.

They were aiming at Hope and at Lizzie.

48

Ken moved. The calm before had been the eye; now he was the hurricane.

But before he could take more than a step, someone grabbed him. An arm went around his throat, cinching in tight. He felt the hand at the end of the arm clasp something.

Figure four. A good one.

The thoughts were automatic. They were also the last ones that were fully-formed and conscious before black threads began weaving across his vision.

A proper choke hold does not cut off air. Going without air is not a full choke to martial artists. It is suffocation, and suffocation can be endured for seconds or even minutes.

A choke, a true choke, however, is much more dangerous. It cuts off both air and the passage of blood from heart and lungs to head. It causes the brain to lose oxygen. It causes unconsciousness in seconds. If held longer than ten or twelve seconds it can cause paralysis, brain damage, death.

Ken saw the black move across his eyes.

What’s going on? Wazzgoinon?

He saw Christopher move at him. Saw a boot kick out and catch the young man in the solar plexus, dropping him. Maggie screamed. Buck clearly wanted to move but just as clearly didn’t know what to do while still holding Hope and facing down the barrel of a gun.

Ken disappeared into black.

49

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

Ken had a Big Wheel trike when he was a kid. He loved the feel of the plastic grips, the streamers his parents bought him and the way they waved behind the grips when he went so fast it felt like he could fly.

But he especially –

(Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.)

– loved the sound. The big plastic circle at the front going over the seams in the sidewalk cement, followed by the sound of the two smaller back wheels following suit.

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

It was the Big Wheel that he rode back to consciousness. The Big Wheel that he took back with him, riding on it and somehow smiling even though the worst had happened.

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

(Aaron did it Aaron did it he knocked me out and dropped Christopher and what the hell is going on?)

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

Ken opened his eyes. The Big Wheel disappeared.

He couldn’t see anything. He thought he was blind for a moment, wondered if Aaron had held the choke too long. Another irony: to survive the zombies and be destroyed by his friend.

Then he realized that he could feel fabric across his eyes. The darkness wasn’t absolute, it was the filtered black of a blindfold.

At the same moment he felt thick fingers. Heard a familiar voice.

“I’m going to take this off. Please don’t act crazy or it goes back on.”

The blindfold came off. It wasn’t much brighter without it. Ken was sitting in what he instantly recognized as a train.

Tok-tok.

Tok-tok.

It was moving. Railspan by railspan passing below the turning wheels, taking them God only knew where.

Aaron was kneeling in front of him. The cowboy stared at Ken with concern.

“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on,” he said.

END OF BOOK FOUR

THE SAGA WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK FIVE

THE COLONY: SHIFT

Also, check out this excerpt from MbC’s newest paranormal thriller, CRIME SEEN:

Evan White looked at his hands again, as though this time he might see something different. As though this time they might hold answers; might tell him where his life had gone and how everything had turned to crap so very quickly.

For the briefest instant it seemed like he was on the edge of an epiphany. An understanding that would shift not merely his perception but his existence.

“I’m the one you’ve been looking for.”

The voice sounded in Evan’s head, the memory bouncing around like a bullet in his skull, ripping apart bits of his mind. Peeling away his brain a layer at a time, drilling deep, revealing… what?

The call had come on his cell phone. Just one more call, like so many that had come in the wake of… in the wake of what had happened.

Tragedy brings out the worst in humanity. It brings out the leeches and the sycophants and the crazies. At first Evan thought that the call came from another one of the latter: just one more nut-job who had seen the case in the paper and wanted five seconds of vicarious fame. In a world where heiresses could sex their way to stardom and ninety percent of prime time news seemed to be devoted to what some anorexic starlet was wearing, Evan shouldn’t have been surprised. Shouldn’t have been disappointed.

But he was. He felt his spirit die a bit with every call.

“Do you have a name?” he said.

The phone had sat silent in his hand for a moment. That was the first time he thought he might be talking to someone out of the ordinary. Not that he believed for a second it was the someone. No. But maybe not a nutter, either. Nutters talked too much, answered too quickly. A simple “Do you have a name?” would have been an invitation for a torrent of crazy, a deluge of insanity.

Not silence.

Finally, the man on the other end of the phone said, “That’s not important. What’s important is the look on your wife’s face when she died.”

Evan went cold when he heard those words. Maybe the man on the phone was a kook. But Evan had to know.

He had to.

“Is this a joke to you?” he said.

The man laughed. And the laugh was the thing that cinched it, the thing that guaranteed that Evan would go where the man wanted him to go, on the off chance that he actually knew something.

Because whether this man was involved in the murder of Evan’s wife or not, the laugh was the scraping, scratching howl of a madman. The shriek of a devil who hadn’t quite figured out the best way to destroy his fill of happiness, to quench his fill of joy.

Evan didn’t know what the man wanted, exactly. But the laugh told him that it involved pain. Misery.

Death.

The conversation played over and over in Evan’s mind. It kept on turning and returning, spinning around until he had checked it from all angles, listening to it until he could hear no more.

Again he felt like he was on the edge of something, some realization that would… matter. That would even, perhaps, take away the image of his wife’s face as it had been when he saw her last.

Then he realized it wasn’t epiphany he perched on the edge of. No, just a barstool. Backless, the kind that would let you spin around on a whim. In better places that might be because you were hoping to find a romantic attachment, maybe just people-watch. Here, though, you could probably spin around forever and never find anything good to look at. Torn faux leather gouged at Evan’s thighs and buttocks, biting through the cheap fabric of his suit pants, and a backless stool in this kind of place just meant you had a good chance of cracking your head open after the night’s bender stole your backbone.

Evan looked at his drink again. Wondered if he should drink the rest. Probably not. He wasn’t even sure what it was. This wasn’t the kind of place you came to drink high-quality booze, it was the kind of place you came to drink angry and get angrier. The kind of place you came to get drunk, but what you ended up doing more often than not was getting in a fight.

It was small, poorly lit even by the low standards for this kind of place. A few tables – one or two even had chairs – and the bar. The bar itself was sticky, made of a wood that had been burnt and stained by countless old cigarette butts and spilled drinks and blood until it was a dark, grainless brown that might be oak or cherry or walnut or Formica laminate for all Evan could tell.

Bleed on a thing long enough, it stops being what it was, and turns to just a faded brown bar in a bad part of town.

At the other end of the bar, a girl with short-cut hair that had been dyed in every color of the rainbow was holding the hand of a drunk. Evan thought at first she was a hooker, but something about her changed his mind. He couldn’t see her face, but something about the way she held herself didn’t say she was turning tricks.

“I’ll read your palm one time,” said Rainbow Hair. “One time.”

The drunk snorted. He was a big guy, dressed in flannels and jeans that had seen lots of wear. Maybe a dock worker. “Can you really do this?” he said, every other word nearly a mumble.

“I’ve always seen the truth,” said the girl in a tone that was too bright to belong in this bar.

The drunk laughed. “Tell me a lie. Lies are better.”

You got that right, thought Evan. Then he turned away from the pair. They weren’t what he was here for. They weren’t who he was looking for.

“No worries,” laughed the girl. “Whenever people see the truth, they always forget.”

Evan’s cell rang. The ring tone was one Val had picked. He hadn’t changed it yet.

“White,” he said into the phone, the typical answer he gave. He never needed more.

The voice that answered wasn’t that of a lunatic in human shape. Evan didn’t know if he was happy or sad about that. He felt confused, felt like he hadn’t been able to get his head on straight since….

Since Val. Don’t lie. Not to yourself.

Regardless, the voice that came from his cell was a comfortable one, though with a hard edge hiding just behind it. Evan always thought of those old pictures of Japanese samurai when he heard this voice: men who were honorable, who were good. Who moved slowly and deliberately… until it was time to attack. Then, God help anyone who got in their way.

“Anything?”  Max Geist was as to-the-point on the phone as Evan was. Part of why they got along, he supposed: neither of them felt a need to pad their lives or conversation with things that weren’t necessary.

Evan sensed motion at the bar’s entrance. He wasn’t sure how – perhaps he glimpsed it in the mirror behind the bar, a reflection torn apart by innumerable bottles in colorful glass. Maybe it was a trace sound he registered subconsciously.

Whatever it was, Evan spun on his seat. His free hand fell to his belt, brushing past the badge clipped there and circling the grip of the handgun holstered directly behind it.

His hand relaxed almost as fast as it had clenched. The movement wasn’t someone entering, just someone leaving. The door to the bar had been propped open – apparently to better allow drunks and flies to find their way inside – and now Rainbow Hair was making her way out.

Ken wondered what she looked like.

He wondered why he cared.

He remembered Val’s face.

He turned away from that thought, turned his attention back to Geist’s question. “Nothing,” he said. “Haven’t seen anything.”

He spun back to the bar. Sipped at his drink.

“Well, it was a long shot,” said Geist. He sighed. “Don’t stay up too late.”  And then he hung up. He didn’t say goodbye.

Music had been playing on a juke box behind Evan. The song stopped at almost the same moment Geist hung up. Evan dragged his gaze away from the half-filled drink he had been nursing for what seemed an eternity.

Quarters clinked. He heard that hollow click-clack of jukebox keys being pushed.

And the same damn song started again. It was “You Spin Me Round” by Dead or Alive. Evan had nothing against the song – it was as good as anything from the late eighties could be – but he had heard it enough for one night.

“How many times you gonna listen to that?” he said.

The woman at the jukebox didn’t even look at him.

“How many times you gonna keep listening to cranks?” she said. Her tones were clipped, almost harsh. Angela Listings, she of the Dead or Alive obsession, was Evan’s partner. She was currently wearing no-nonsense jeans, a t-shirt, and a jacket bulky enough to hide her service revolver. But no amount of cumbersome, off-the-rack, shapeless clothing could hide her beauty or her attitude.

She was the kind of woman that men pursued… for about a minute and half. But most men didn’t like that she could beat them in a fight of wits or of straight-out fists.

And she was the kind of girl you would take home to mother only if dear old Ma had a strong constitution and found perverse joy in meeting hard-ass bitches.

She turned to him now. Oval face, with a deep tan that couldn’t quite hide the small spatter of freckles across her nose. Eyes that Evan knew could be wide and inviting when Listings wanted them that way. Now they were at half-mast, hooded like those of a bored viper seriously considering a random strike just because-screw-it-that’s-why. She was waiting for him to answer.

How many times would he answer these calls?  How many times would he trudge down dead ends, follow the same paths that ultimately led nowhere?

He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. “As many times as I have to.”

Listings pursed her lips as though considering whether that answer was acceptable. Evan wondered what she’d do if she decided it wasn’t. Probably just sucker punch him or bite his nose off or something.

Evidently he’d passed the test, though. She sat next to him. He raised his drink in mock salute and brought the glass to his lips.

She intercepted it. Grabbed the glass away from him in a smooth motion that spilled not a drop of the murky liquid within, and shook her finger at him.

“If we’re here looking for a killer, then this is official business and you shouldn’t be drinking,” she said. Then she tossed back the drink.

“Thanks for the reminder,” said Evan dryly. It figured that Listings would be able to throw back alcohol like a Russian sailor, too. She probably wrote her name in the snow, including dotting both “I”s.

“Lighten up,” said Listings. “We’ve been here for over an hour. I don’t think –“

“Hey!”

Listings and Evan both turned to find the drunk standing before them. Up close he was larger than he had seemed when seated at the other end of the bar. He was well over six feet tall, and Evan guessed he was upwards of two hundred fifty pounds.

He revised his earlier guess – the guy wasn’t a dock worker, he was the dock.

The big man was weaving, blurry eyes fading in and out of focus as he loomed over Listings. But his finger, which was roughly the size of a horse’s leg, was completely stable and in control as he jabbed it in her direction. “I know you,” he said. He paused, apparently gathering his thoughts.

Evan took the moment to glance at Listings. She appeared completely at ease, leaning back on the bar, arms loose on the wood/Formica/whatever-it-was. A smile played about the edges of her lips, which worried Evan. It was rarely a good thing when Listings smiled.

“You’re the bitch that keeps turning on that song,” said the drunk. “I heard it, like….”  He weaved again. Evan started to stand, hoping he could keep everyone from losing their cool.

The drunk shook himself. “… like, a billion times. Bitch.”

Listings slid off her stool. Evan would have stopped it if he could have, but it happened too quickly. His partner getting to her feet was akin to a country warning off its enemies by priming all its nukes and putting them on a countdown.

“Don’t,” said Evan.

Listings flashed him a smile. She was gorgeous, and everything that had happened with Val – not just her death, but the things she had done to him before she died – just made him more aware of that.

But under the beauty… danger.

“I got this,” she said. Then turned to the drunk. “Don’t like the song?” she said.

The drunk drew himself up even taller. Trying to stare down the woman who probably only weighed about half what he did. “Not after the first million times.”

Listings moved uncomfortably close to the bear-man. In his face, in his space. “I thought it was a billion.”  Even drunk, Evan figured the guy had to hear the implicit, “Are you too dumb to even count?” in her tone.

The drunk blinked. For a moment he looked like he was going to back down. Evan really hoped that would happen. That would mean everyone left without broken bones or torn tendons or unnecessary trips to the hospital.

Then he blinked again. His eyes both focused on Listings at the same time – a small miracle considering the amount of booze the guy had probably pounded – and he sneered. “Whatever. Hey, I just figured why you like this song. You maybe want me to spin you around?”

He grabbed his crotch.

Evan sighed. He wanted to hide his face in his hands. He didn’t, though. Partly because he felt a duty to keep an eye on his partner, no matter how much she didn’t need it. Partly because what was coming was going to have all the horrific fascination of a train wreck. He just couldn’t look away.

Listings laughed. It was an almost painful-sounding laugh, a rip-rattle laugh that made it clear she wasn’t laughing with the drunk, she was laughing at him. “Classy,” she said. “I assume we’re doing pantomimes because you’re aware the smartest thing that ever came out of your mouth was a penis.”

The big man’s hand clenched on his own groin, as though shock had caused him to clutch desperately for some tangible reassurance of his own manhood. “Wha…?”

Before he could even process the first insult, let alone come up with a rejoinder, Listings had waded back in. She snapped her fingers. “Hey, I know you!  I told your boyfriend his shoes were ugly and he tried to hit me with his purse. That was you, right?”

The drunk’s hand remained clenched on the front of his pants. But his leer, which had frozen into a rictus of confusion, transformed to a snarl.

“Listings,” said Evan. He didn’t know what else he was going to say, what else he could say, but he felt like he should say something.

He suspected if he saw a tidal wave rushing down the center of Los Angeles, he’d probably feel the same urge to speak. And that it would probably have the same lack of effect.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit him,” said Listings. For a moment Evan dared to hope that they might get out of here without things turning violent. Then her smile widened – bad to worse – and she turned back to the drunk and said, “That would be animal cruelty.”

The drunk’s snarl rippled over his entire body. His muscles clenched and he seemed to grow three inches in every direction.

Evan moved. Too slow. By the time he was up, by the time he had moved into position, it had already happened.

The drunk growled, sounding like a wounded animal that had turned deadly in the depths of its pain. He flung himself forward, moving faster than Evan expected. Not just big, not just strong, but agile.

He swung a fist the size of a radiator at Listings.

Evan’s breath caught in his throat.

Don’t kill him, Listings.

Listings moved like a drop of water skittering across a hot stove top. Evan could barely see her, she was so fast. One moment she was right in the path of the fist, the next… gone.

The drunk seemed as shocked as Evan at Listings’ apparent magic act. She hadn’t moved until the last second, the very final moment before he pummeled her out of existence. Now the momentum behind his punch combined with his inebriation to drive him stumbling forward.

The drunk slipped. Slammed face-first into the bar.

Crunch.

Evan winced as he heard the unmistakable sound of bones breaking. Hopefully just a nose.

The drunk slid to the floor between the stools that Evan and Listings had been sitting on a moment ago. His hand covered his face, and his eyes seemed to be spinning independently. He moaned, then slipped a bit lower.

“Dammit, Listings,” said Evan.

“What?”  A few locks of Listings’ long brown hair had managed to pull loose from the rest of her mane. She pushed them back into place impatiently. “I didn’t touch him. He slipped.”

She bent over the drunk. Evan considered pointing out the fact that she had definitely arranged the circumstances so slipping would be a bit more likely, but decided it wouldn’t do anything helpful and shut his mouth.

After five years with Listings, Evan had decided that a good partnership, like a good marriage, was often a matter of just shutting up and letting your significant other do whatever the hell she was going to do. He’d be there if anyone needed help. If not, he’d be there, too. Either way, getting in front of Listings was not a healthy idea.

“Come on, Betty Ford,” said Listings. “Up you go.”

The drunk continued his struggle to get both eyes pointed in one direction as he said, “Who you callin’ Betty?”

He swiped at Listings with one blood-spattered hand. She dodged easily, but her face darkened and her smile returned. “You just don’t learn, do you?”

“Listings, don’t –“

Listings wasn’t listening at all now. That the drunk had come on to her and accosted her was one thing. That he had tried to hit her after she had beaten him would be seen as unforgiveable.

Evan started trying to figure out which was the closest hospital with an emergency room.

Listings raised her fist. It was a small fist, but painfully angular, and several of the knuckles had rows of scars that attested to the fights she’d been in over the years. Evan didn’t move to stop his partner now… not because he didn’t have time, but because he genuinely didn’t want to find out what a coma felt like.

Listings’ hand dropped. Fast as a hornet, so fast Evan could almost hear the air split around it.

But it didn’t connect.

Evan felt like the world, spinning along in its predictable if generally horrible way, had suddenly reversed course. He had seen Listings in a lot of fights. He had never seen her fail to connect with something she tried to hit.

It wasn’t that she missed, per se. It wasn’t as though the drunk managed to slide away from her attack, to dodge her punch as she had dodged his only a moment ago.

No, something – someone – had stopped her. A hand had wrapped around her forearm, stalling her forward momentum, cutting off the attack before it could begin.

Listings looked over her shoulder at the stranger, her anger at the drunk transmuting into rage that someone would touch her.

“Let go of me,” she said.

The man who had stopped her was normal-looking. A bit boring, even. Evan had never seen him before, and even if he had he doubted he would have recognized him. Brown eyes. Brown hair, thinning a bit at the temples and receding a bit along the forehead. And that was the sum total of the man’s physical attributes. Brown on brown, boring on boring. Nothing to hold to mentally, nothing to remember.

He wore a black coat, and it was memorable. It was long and voluminous, seeming to flow like a living thing around the man’s body, pulling light into it and giving nothing in return.

“Let go of me,” said Listings again.

The man smiled. Boring smile. And Evan saw his eyes change. Not in size or shape, but where they had been empty before, now they were full of something terrifying. Madness.

“No,” said the man.

“I said, let go!”

Evan was moving, but again he was too slow. The instant he heard the man speak, heard him say, “No,” he knew that this was the man he had spoken to on the phone. This was the man he had been looking for tonight.

But Listings was faster again. Faster, and too fast, and not fast enough.

She swung at the man, a quick cross with her free hand.

And for the second time tonight, she missed.

The man ducked. Spun her around.

Bright light glinted. Evan had his gun out, but the brightness froze him. It wasn’t the brightness of a light being shone, but of something reflective. Something sharp.

The man had a knife at Listings’ throat. And it was so sharp it grabbed the dim light of the bar and slashed it into a million glinting pieces.

“Don’t move!” Evan shouted.

The man grinned. “Or what?” he said. He pressed on the knife. Not too hard, but even the light pressure made blood well around the blade and drip down Listings’ neck. “You’ll kill me?”  He giggled. “How do you kill a man who’s already dead?”

Evan didn’t have time to digest the weirdness of that. Listings’ eyes rolled as though she was mostly irritated with the whole situation. “Shoot him, White.”

“Shut up, Listings,” said Evan. To the man he said, “You’re the one who called me?”

The man smiled. A boring smile, a banal smile. The mad, mundane smile of any of a million people who go about their lives quietly each day hoping no one will notice how close they are to breaking. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to,” he said.

Evan wondered if anyone had called 9-1-1. In this part of town, in a bar like this, he figured the chances were about even. Not good odds. “What do you want?” he said, as much to stall as anything.

Tears welled up in the other man’s eyes. His lower lip quivered, and Evan thought he might have killed his partner with his question.

“For it to end,” said the man.

The jukebox clicked. Listings had chosen “You Spin Me Round” too many times to count, and now the song was ending. Evan was gripped by the sudden belief that if the song she had chosen ended before he got her free, she would die.

The song was over.

Another began. And whether it was because Listings had pre-programmed it, or because of some cosmic joke, the same song started again.

Evan had completely forgotten about the drunk, still laying at the base of the bar, at Listings’ feet. It seemed like the ridiculous spat with him had happened a lifetime ago. Now his attention went back to the man, if only for a moment. The big guy groaned as the music started again.

The man who held Listings hostage laughed. The same laugh Evan had heard on the phone before, the same laugh that had been pulling his brain apart, pulling apart his memories and laying him bare.

“I really don’t think he likes this tune,” said the madman. Then, to the drunk, he said, “I’ve been watching you, Ken. You’re a rude pig.”

The madman moved. He was fast. Faster than Listings, and also… something else. Something more.

Something that terrified Evan.

The man’s foot moved. Ken screamed, a single shouted “NO!” that was still too slow and then there was a nauseating crunch that was not bone breaking.

The madman moved back, and now the drunk was clawing at his throat. The downed man’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, but no sound came out. Just a high-pitched whistle that made Evan’s skin writhe.

He stepped toward the drunk, knowing he had to do something, not know what that could be.

And Listings seized the moment. She spun away from the madman, a blur as she moved out of range. The man slashed out, his knife seeking her neck, but she seemed to flow under it, grabbing her throat, blood around her fingers.

She came to her knees next to Evan.

“Listings!”

“I’m okay,” she gasped. “Just a scratch. Look out!”

Evan wasn’t Listings-fast, but he did all right. And in this case he was glad because it saved him from being gutted. The madman had followed Listings as she rolled, and now he slashed at Evan, who moved away in time to avoid evisceration but not fast enough to completely escape injury. Heat seared across his stomach and he heard his shirt rip. Blood rolled over the waist of his pants.

He knew the instant it happened that the cut wasn’t life-threatening. Maybe he’d need stitches, but that was it.

In the same moment, he was pulling the trigger. Not realizing he was doing it, just acting on instinct. If he’d had a pillow in his hand he probably would have thrown it, but he had the gun so he pulled the trigger.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

He was moving when he squeezed off the shots. Dodging the madman’s attack, moving out of range of the knife. But even with that movement, he knew he hit what he was aiming at. He saw the front sight and rear sight line up perfectly, saw them both merge with the too-close center mass of the madman’s chest in his black coat.

The three shots blasted louder than thunder in the contained space. Evan’s ears rang, and he figured he’d earned himself a year of deafness as an old geezer.

He didn’t care. Because all three bullets hit. He knew it. The madman who had tried to hurt Listings had been blown right out the open door of the bar.

Evan spun to Listings. She was on her knees, feeling at her neck. Blood sluiced from the long shallow gash along the left side of her neck.

“Didja get him?” she said. She was looking at the drunk.

Evan followed her gaze. The drunk – who, if madmen in trenchcoats were to be believed, had been named Ken – was staring up at the ceiling of the bar. He wasn’t moving. Nor would he. One hand clutched as his throat, the other had fallen onto his crotch, as though even in death he was determined to go out as crudely as possible.

“Yeah,” said Evan.

“You sure?” said Listings.

“Yeah.”

She stood. Walked toward the entrance.

“Where you going?”

“I want to know who this nutcase was. And what he had to do with your wife.”

They left the bar. And as they did, Evan thought, strangely, that they were moving into a darkness that would never end.

Listings pulled out her gun as they hit the street.

“You sure that you’re sure?” she said.

Evan felt like he had just fallen into some funhouse mirror version of reality where cause and effect no longer ruled; where up was down and in was out and when you shot a man three times in the chest he didn’t die.

There was no body on the sidewalk, no body on the street.

A man who had been shot three times, a man who should be bleeding – or dead – on the street… was nowhere to be seen.

CRIME SEEN by Michaelbrent Collings… available now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michaelbrent Collings is an award-winning screenwriter and novelist. He has written numerous bestselling horror, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy novels, including The Colony Saga, Strangers, Darkbound, Apparition, The Haunted, Hooked: A True Faerie Tale, and the bestselling YA series The Billy Saga. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/MichaelbrentCollings or on Twitter @mbcollings.

And if you liked this book, please leave a review on your favorite book review site… and tell your friends!

OTHER NOVELS
BY MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS

THE COLONY SAGA:

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

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

THE COLONY: DESCENT (The Colony, Vol. 3)

THE COLONY OMNIBUS

CRIME SEEN

STRANGERS

DARKBOUND

BLOOD RELATIONS:
A GOOD MORMON GIRL MYSTERY

THE HAUNTED

APPARITION

THE LOON

MR. GRAY (aka THE MERIDIANS)

RUN

RISING FEARS

YOUNG ADULT AND
MIDDLE GRADE FICTION:

THE BILLY SAGA

BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS (BOOK 1)

BILLY: SEEKER OF POWERS (BOOK 2)

HOOKED: A TRUE FAERIE TALE

KILLING TIME

Table of Contents

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