Renegades (10 page)

But there were no more emergency rooms.

No more hospitals.

He didn’t know if there’d even be a tomorrow.

So he held her as tightly as he could.  Held her until she groaned.

“Ken,” whispered Christopher.  “Your turn.”

He loosened his grip on Hope, then made sure her arms were securely around his neck.  After a moment, he took the belt off his pants.  He slung it around his chest, and it just went around her narrow torso as well.  He cinched it through the last hole on the belt.  Not much as far as safety harnesses went, but it was better than nothing.

“Hold on, okay,” he whispered.

She nodded.  “I’m scared.”

“Me too.  But if you hold on tight, maybe I’ll be less scared, okay?”

She looked at him.  Serious eyes that shone in the darkness.  She nodded.  “I’ll hold you.”  Her arms tightened.

Ken thought of Derek.  His children were good.  Genuinely
good
people.

Please, God, let me save her.  Let me save Liz.  Let me save what’s left of my family
.

He stepped through the elevator doors.  Onto a ledge, six inches wide and nothing below.

Please, God
.

39

He only stepped in a few inches before Christopher grabbed him.  The young man seemed unaware of the fact that he was dangling only inches away from a dark nothing that extended probably over a hundred feet below them.  Ken remembered the way they had met, only maybe an hour – and what seemed like a hundred years – before.  Christopher had saved them all from a small horde, blowing up a floor of a building, and showing them how to scale the outside of it to escape.  He seemed equally at ease hanging onto a vertical surface as he did on terra firma.

“Where’d you learn to do this?” Ken asked.

Christopher laughed.  “Parents kept shipping me off to taller and taller boarding schools.”  His smile widened.  “New York was the highest.”

“Come on,” said Aaron.  “No time for jabbering.”

“Shouldn’t there be a ladder?” said Ken.

Christopher pointed.  There
was
a ladder.  It ended about ten feet above their heads, sheared off mid-rung.  Above that was a pile of rubble that didn’t look very stable.  Probably the remains of whatever motor room had housed the elevator equipment.

“Come on,” said Christopher.  He helped maneuver Ken into position, then he and Aaron dropped Ken below the greave.

Beneath the spool that held the elevator cables, things got dark in a hurry.  Dark, and torn up.  What Ken had assumed was a normal elevator shaft proved to be marred by tears and gaps, the cylinder obviously crooked even in the small area that he could see before darkness claimed the tunnel.

Ken felt around with his feet.  The side of the shaft was crumbling nearby, and he was able to stand on some partially-pulverized concrete that formed a foothold.  He didn’t know how stable it was, but it was all he had.

Better than nothing
.

A ghostly wail came from the darkness.  The zombies in the building, searching for them.

“Now what you’re going to do is rappel down,” said Aaron.  The cowboy was leaning down, whispering only a few inches away from Ken’s face.

“I don’t have any gear,” said Ken.

“You ever rappelled before?” asked Aaron.

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t know what to do with the gear anyway.  So we’re good either way.”

The cowboy grabbed one of the cords and pulled it over to Ken.  It didn’t have much give, and when the cowboy pulled it over Ken’s neck the steel cords bit into his skin.

“Ow!” Ken said.

Below him, the groans intensified.  And now they sounded like they were even with him, too.  Were they on the same floor?

“It’s better tight.  It’ll tear your neck up, but better that than falling, right?” said Aaron.  Ken nodded.  “Now step over the cord.  No,” said the cowboy as Ken clumsily complied, “with the other leg.”  Ken adjusted.  The groaning of the things was getting louder.

“They’re coming,” he said.

“Then move faster.”  Aaron instructed him on how to wrap himself up in the cord until he was cinched in a tight curl of the steel cable.  There was almost no play in it, and it bit painfully against his crotch and his neck.

“Now,” said Aaron.  “Listen close.  Step back.  The cable’ll hold you.  Hold on with your right hand – your good hand – onto the cable that’s between your legs.  That’ll keep you from going down too fast.  You can hold your girl with your left arm.”

“Okay.”

“Just remember – the heights are nothing to worry about.  Falling never hurt anyone.  Hitting the bottom is the problem.  So don’t let go.”

Ken waited for more.  Silence.  “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Aaron looked over.  Then back at Ken.  The cowboy’s face was pinched and nervous.  “I’d appreciate it if you got a move on, son.”

Ken nodded.  “Hold on, Hope.”

Hope’s arms tightened around his neck.

He suddenly remembered countless cartoons from his childhood, hearing animated animals say, “Look out for that first step, it’s a
doooozie
!”

He stepped back.

40

He held on tight.  Tight to Hope.  Tighter to the wrapped steel cables in his right hand.  The fibers bit into his flesh, and he could feel the skin tearing away from his neck as he let himself fall down through the air.

Down through the darkness.

He wondered how far he should go.  And answered the question as soon as he asked it of himself.

You go as far as you can, Ken.  You go until you can’t go anymore
.

He dropped into nothing.  Looked up and saw he had already fallen farther than he thought.  The light where Aaron and Christopher had been was nothing but a point above him.  A star in the darkest night he had ever experienced.

There was nothing else.  Nothing but black and the weight of his daughter against his chest and neck.

And the groans.  The growls.

The zombies sounded like they were everywhere.  They sounded like they were above, below.

They sounded like they were
in
the shaft.

“Daddy,” said Hope.  Her voice was low.  A whisper.  As though she sensed danger’s propinquity, and even her child-mind knew that silence was critical.

“Shhh,” he said.  Gentle.  He didn’t want to scare her worse than she must already be.  Worse than
he
was, for that matter.

Still dropping, still letting steel threads slide through his clenched hand.  The cable was covered in some kind of thick grease, but even that wasn’t keeping friction from rubbing his skin raw.  He felt like his hand was bleeding.

How far down?

As far as you can get.

He wanted to shout.  To see if Maggie was near.  But what if he was heard by… other things?  What if his shouts drew danger rather than comfort?

He looked up.  The light that had been a star was now just a hint, a dream of a memory.  Then a black shape came between him and the memory and all light was gone.

He figured the dark thing must be Dorcas, lowering herself one-handed.  Christopher and Aaron would be following her.

All the way down.

As far as we can get
.

As far as we can go
.

But he didn’t go any farther.  He stopped.

Because he heard another sound.  Another growl.  And this time it wasn’t bouncing up from some unknown place below them.  It wasn’t reverberating off broken walls, thrown to his ears by the acoustics of disaster.

No, it was
here
.

A moment later the sound came again.  And with it the smell, the warm, rotten smell of one of the things.

Inside the shaft.

41

Ken couldn’t tell if the thing was on a ledge like the one that had circled the shaft behind the elevator doors above, or if it had found some piece of ladder to climb, or if it was just scaling the bare walls of the concrete tube the way the zombies had climbed the walls of the buildings outside.

Nor was there any indication how it had come to be in the elevator shaft in the first place.  Maybe it was some hapless maintenance man, caught in here when the change came, converted to a mindless monster and stuck since that first instant.  Then Ken realized if that was the case the others who had come this way already would have made some kind of noise of warning.

No, the zombie was a new arrival.  Had to be.

The things were like cockroaches, sliding into any available crack or crevice, squeezing in to search for food.

Ken held his breath.  He continued letting the cord reel through his hand, praying that Hope would remain silent.

He realized the area was starting to brighten.  What had been a pitch black mystery had turned into a thick gray fog.

He looked up.

The star had returned to the sky.

The light was coming down.

Ken looked over.

And saw the zombie clinging to the wall of the shaft directly across from him.

42

The thing was facing away from him, hanging to the wall.  Ken couldn’t tell what it was clinging to: in the brightening light he could see that parts of the shaft were wrecked, huge pieces of concrete barely hanging to their moorings.  Other areas looked smooth and unmarred.

The part of the shaft where the thing was climbing looked relatively whole, and Ken couldn’t tell if it was holding to something as a man would, or if it was somehow adhering to the smooth surface of the shaft.

He could see the thing’s head was tilted back, though, and it was easy enough to observe that it was tracking the light above them both.

Hope inhaled.  She was going to scream.  When she did, it was over.  The thing would notice them.  Would come for them.  Would leap to them and knock them into the void, or would simply pull them to pieces right there on the cable.

Or it would bite them.  Would change them.

A scuttling noise aborted the little girl’s scream mid-breath.  Ken looked over and saw another zombie pull itself through a crack in the side of the shaft.  The crack was too small for something its size, too small by far.  The zombie didn’t care.  It yanked itself through the crevasse, seeming to shed what remained of its clothing and the skin below it like a snake, and when it came into the shaft it was bleeding along its entire length and breadth.  Impossible to tell if it was even a man or woman.  Just a growling, chittering length of pulpy blood.  A
thing
that stuck impossibly to the slick interior of the shaft.

Twenty feet away from Ken and his daughter.  Empty air the only thing separating them.

It hadn’t seen them yet.

Yet.

The two things scuttled along the wall of the shaft.  Drawn to the light that was still dropping closer, closer.  They climbed upward, and as they did Ken realized he could hear a subtle popping noise every time they moved their hands.  It sounded like the noise you might hear pulling your foot out of a wet bog.  A suction seal breaking.

They were moving toward Dorcas.  He could see her now, dropping toward them.  He didn’t know if she was aware of them.  He doubted it.

He didn’t know what to do, either.  Did he call to her?  If he did, he would draw their attention.  And die.

What would that gain the group?

He pulled Hope tighter.  So tight he thought he heard her bones creak.

The two zombies, ever clearer as the star of brightness dropped closer and closer, climbed.  Chittered.  Growled.

Dorcas stopped her descent.

She must have seen them.

One of the zombies shrieked.  That trilling call that Ken thought was meant to summon others.

Sure enough, a moment later another one of the things began pushing itself through that same crack.  Peeling off its outer layers of clothing and skin on the jagged edges of the concrete rift as it yanked its way into the shaft.

And then another.

Another.

Another.

He heard something skitter behind him.  Trilling.

He turned his head.

There were more of the things behind him.

They were everywhere.

43

For some reason, Ken was less frightened than he was disturbed.  As though his fear had been short-circuited by some internal sense that what he was seeing was not just horrifying but
wrong
.

Humans should not be able to scale sheer, unblemished walls.

They should not be able to do what these
things
were doing.

They moved strangely in the pseudo-illumination of the small light above.  Seemed to jump from place to place.  One moment in one position, then Ken blinked and when he opened his eyes their configuration had changed.

There were more and more of them, too.  At first just five or six, then ten, then a dozen, then twenty.  Then the walls of the shaft started to disappear under a shifting blanket of torn and bleeding flesh.

Many of the things had the same tumorous growths that he had seen on the zombies that exploded out of the webbing in the attorneys’ offices in the other building.  Dark masses that were covered in thick hairs and looked strong as armor plating.  They appeared in random blotches all over the things’ bodies, and for some reason they, too, struck Ken as deeply, innately wrong.  They made his skin crawl, made acid creep up into the back of his throat.

The things clambered up and down the shaft.  Some of them looked at him, others stared at Dorcas.  Still others seemed to be focused higher and lower – no doubt putting their sights on the others who hung helpless on the cables in the shaft.

What would happen when they were ready to strike?

Ken had his answer a moment later.

One of the zombies screamed.