Renegades (17 page)

Ken lurched at Buck.  His vision had strange black spots in it now, and he couldn’t see much of what he was doing, but he saw the elevator fall, and saw the big man’s face.  Saw that the man wanted to fall, wanted to die.

Ken grabbed him.  Pulled him forward, yanked him the rest of the way into the hall at the same instant the elevator’s overstressed and acid-eroded cables and brakes finally gave up their fight with gravity.  The entire apparatus fell, and Ken caught a glimpse of what seemed like hundreds of zombies crawling over the top of the elevator car, vomiting that darkly glowing acid and then reaching for the gap in the outer doors as they plunged past.

Then gone.

Buck was weeping.  Sobbing and saying, “Shoulda let me fall, shoulda let me fall,” over and over.

Ken stared at him dumbly.  He didn’t know what was happening.  His thoughts still tumbled in a free-fall that matched that of the elevator.

A crash sounded from the elevator shaft, and shrieking cries echoed up the chimney-like structure.

“Did you hit me?” said Ken.  He didn’t intend it as a way of snapping Buck out of his litany of self-pity, he was far too frazzled and confused himself to do something like that.  Still, Buck stopped his recitation and nodded.  He was half atop Ken again, and Ken thought, We’ve got to stop meeting like this.

Aloud, he said, “Why?”

“I wasn’t trying to,” said Buck.  “I was trying to get that thing to let go of you.”

“Oh.”

“I hit you with the head.”

That didn’t make sense for a second.  Then Ken understood.  “With the zombie head?”

Buck nodded.  “It wouldn’t let go when I hit it, so I figured….”  He shrugged.

Ken laughed.  The laughter hurt his head.  And his back and his ribs and everything else below his hairline.  But he couldn’t stop.

Until his daughter started shrieking.

75

At first Ken actually got excited when he heard the sound.  Because it was the sound of a baby crying.

Liz.

But when he scrambled to his feet, he saw Maggie.  Saw Liz still dangling like a lifeless ragdoll from the carrier.  The toddler’s head slumped forward, her beautiful blond hair obscuring her face.

She’s dying
.

Ken ignored that thought.  Even though he knew it was more than likely.  Toddlers didn’t stay unconscious for this long through this much unless there was something seriously wrong with them.

Still, he forced himself to focus on something else.  On the source of the shriek that was not Liz.  Was not a toddler screaming in pain and confusion upon waking to a world turned inside out.

No, it was Hope.  The seven-year-old was standing between Maggie and Ken, rigid as a steel bar, fists clenched at her sides.  Her face was turned up, her mouth opened.

And she screamed.

Ken had never heard Hope scream like that before.  She was a daredevil, always the first one on the playground, always the first one to try a new toy… and so always the first one to fall and the first one to get hurt.  But even with the bumps and bruises and cuts and scrapes, he had never heard her sound like this.  She sounded like every atom of her body was being ripped away, one at a time, in a torture so horrific that no one would ever understand it.

Then she fell.  The strength visibly fled from her limbs,  and where every muscle had been clenched a moment before, now she transformed to a jumble of loose bones and skin.

“Hope!” shouted Maggie.

Aaron and Christopher were both near Ken’s daughter, one on each side of her.  Both moved for her, but the cowboy reached her first.  He caught the little girl before she fell, wrapping her up in his good arm.

“Let me,” said Christopher.

“No,” said Aaron.  “I got her.”

“Really?” said Christopher.  He rolled his eyes.  “You got one good arm, man.”

“I’m fine.”

Something moved past Ken.  It took a moment for him to realize it was Buck.  The big man took Hope from Aaron without a word, cradling her gently in his arms.

He looked different holding her.  Not the petulant, entitled ass he had seemed to be at first.  Not the self-pitying man of a moment before.

He seemed whole.  Like he was holding not merely a little girl, but the only thing tethering him to life.  Not survival, but
life
.  Two different things, Ken knew.

“We should go,” said Buck.  His voice was strange, and Ken wondered what was happening.  Not just to Buck, but to all of them.  The world had changed, and the change had not escaped them.

What are we?

“Maybe I –“ Maggie began.  She took a step toward the man. 

“Let him,” said Ken.  He felt woozy, and put a hand to his neck.  It came back red.  Sticky.  He wanted to vomit.  He  leaned against a wall that was painted white and had red streaks across it.  Like everything else, it was dirty and bloodied.

He felt an arm slip under his.  Knew it was Dorcas.

“Where to?” she said.

Why are you asking me?

He blinked.  Everyone was looking at him.  Everyone but Maggie, who was staring at Buck like she expected him to run off with Hope at any second.

Ken wiped his mouth.  He needed to drink something.  He was thirsty.

His fingers came up red as well.  He hoped it was just a bloody cheek, and not internal bleeding.

More screams came from inside the elevator shaft.  Closer.  They were climbing back up.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He pushed away from the wall.

Dorcas had to help him.

76

“Where now?” asked Christopher.  Ken waited for someone to answer, then realized with a start that they were looking at him.

Waiting for him.

He didn’t know why.  Maybe because he was from Boise?  But so was Christopher.

Because he had family?  That didn’t make much sense.

Regardless, they waited.  And he hated it.  He hated that suddenly he had more than just a daughter in a coma and another who wanted to go to the monsters and a wife who hated him for losing their son to worry about.

Now he was responsible for
everyone
?  When had that happened?

He didn’t have time to figure it out, or time to argue about the fairness of it.  He looked around.  They were in another hallway, and one that didn’t look familiar.  He’d never been here before.  He’d been in the upper floors of the building – though the floors had been several blocks over at the time – but he had no idea if the layout was the same or not.

He decided to assume they were.

“Left.”

They moved.  Christopher took point, leading the way with his light, sweeping it left and right.  Buck and Maggie followed, each holding a silent child.

Ken and Dorcas limped behind them.

Aaron brought up the rear.  Ken saw the older man sag for a moment, and wondered how badly
he
was hurting.  But then the dangerous look returned to the cowboy’s eyes and Ken knew that anything – man, beast, or monster – that came upon Aaron in the next few minutes would likely regret the move.

The corridor was deserted.  Doors lined the way, and papers littered the floor where they had fallen from several billboards on the walls.  Probably advertising local businesses and clothing drives and the upcoming “Fill the Boot” drive where local firefighters stood in the streets with empty boots asking for donations for burn victims.

No more of those.  Plenty of victims, but the first responders were gone.  Dead or themselves converted to the scourge that had swept the earth nearly clean of human life.

It was a marvel that this place was even standing.  The top of the building had been blown clean off by a combination of a collision with a stealth fighter and exploding ordnance, and Ken figured it wouldn’t take a whole lot more for the whole place to come down around their ears.

Everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing.  No one spoke.  It felt like they weren’t in a building, but in a hole deep underground.  The kind of place where touching the wrong thing would cause a subterranean landslide.

He and Dorcas were falling behind the others.  Ken realized it at the same moment he felt a hand at his back, gently urging him to greater speed.

“I don’t know if he can,” said Dorcas, responding to Aaron’s unspoken exhortation.

“Gotta,” said Aaron.

And Ken knew why.  He could hear it, too.  Could hear the things coming out of the elevator shaft in the darkness behind them.

Some of them must have perished in the fall.  Or if not perished, then at least been damaged beyond the ability to climb back up.  Laying at the bottom of the shaft, their broken bodies intertwined with the wreckage and cables.

But some had made it up.  More than some.

It sounded like a lot.

77

“Here!”

Ken heard Buck shout, then saw the big man dart to the side.  A moment later Christopher wheeled around and followed.  So did Maggie.

Ken moved through the open doorway the rest of them had disappeared through, partially of his own volition and partially because Dorcas more or less pushed him through.  He didn’t know what would happen if she let go of him, but suspected he’d just fall and lay there.  Maybe twitch a bit if he was lucky.

Once inside the door, everything disappeared.  Literally.  There was no trace of Buck or Maggie or Christopher or the kids.  No trace of anything at all, for that matter.  No office, no floor, no nothing.  Just empty space before them, dimly lit from somewhere below.

It took a moment for Ken to refocus, to crane his neck down, each vertebra popping and screaming in protest as he did so.  He felt something trickling on his lip and figured his nose was bleeding as well.

Can’t keep this up.

Not much choice.

Sure, keep telling yourself that, Ken.

He finally saw the floor.  It had collapsed a few feet past the doorway, falling away at a forty-five degree angle and ending in a pile of rubble on the level below.

At the bottom of the ramp, Maggie was being helped to her feet by Buck and Christopher.  Buck was still holding Hope, and Liz sagged from her carrier, arms and legs limp and lifeless-seeming.  It was clear that they had all slid down, and just as clear that this was the best way to make their way one floor closer to freedom from this building.

“Come on!” shouted Buck.

“You’re nuts,” said Dorcas.  Ken couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or Buck or herself.

“Not much choice,” he said.

A grunt sounded behind them.  Aaron.  He squeezed into the small area of the floor that still remained intact and then slammed the door shut.  “Go,” he spat.

Dorcas sighed.  She sounded beyond tired.  Weary.  Losing hope.

How much longer before we just stop?  Before dying becomes preferable?

But that wasn’t really the question.  If death had been the stake, then Ken suspected they would have given up long before this.  It wasn’t just death, though.  It was whatever waited at the end of a bite.  Whatever cross between madness and oblivion would claim them.

Not just death, but damnation.

Dorcas helped Ken lower himself to a seated position, then sat behind him, her arms clasped around him and supporting most of his weight.  He remembered doing this with Liz and Hope and Derek, all of them sitting in a long train on the slide at the local park, sliding down and laughing and then laughing harder when their combined mass inevitably caused them to stall halfway down.  “Daddy’s Choo-choo” they called it.

“Choo-choo time,” he muttered.  Tears came to his eyes.  Derek would never ride the slide again.  Not even if they had playgrounds in Heaven.  Because he
hadn’t
simply died.  Nothing so kind.  Nothing so merciful.

Ken thought he might lose it.  He had seen his own students pull each others’ guts apart, had cut his own fingers off to survive, had somehow waded through a city full of the living dead.  And now he was going to be done in by the memory of a little boy laughing as he went down a slide.

“What?” said Dorcas.  She glanced back at the door with eyes clearly expecting it to be flung open at any moment.

“Nothing.”  Ken leaned forward.  Tilting into darkness, but away from memory.

He slid down the broken floor.  Dorcas came with him.  He moved faster than he expected – a lot faster than the green plastic slide at the park – and started to panic when he realized he was going to roll off the edge of the floor and into a pile of broken shelving that featured several stake-like pieces of wood and metal.

Christopher snagged him, reaching out and stopping his forward momentum with a low, “Oof.”  A similar noise nearby indicated that Buck and Maggie had stopped Dorcas.

Christopher helped Ken to his feet as Aaron came sliding down.  The cowboy somehow ended the slide on his feet, not needing any help but seeming to just step off and start walking forward, gesturing for the others to follow.

Dorcas resumed her position under Ken’s arm.  He glanced at Maggie as she did so, wondering – hoping – if his wife would try to take the older woman’s place.

Maggie didn’t.  She didn’t even look at him.

Just turned her back and followed Aaron as he picked his way through the rubble.

78

This room was a large interior room of the building.  No outside windows, so the only illumination was still Christopher’s light.  A light that did little to brighten, and less to cheer.  It served to highlight large objects in their path, but not much else.

Aaron was still in the lead, but Christopher was right beside him.  Buck and Maggie followed them, the kids in their arms.

And Dorcas and Ken were left in back.  With the noises.

At first Ken thought that the things had found them already.  Strange sounds assaulted him at every step.  And every time he heard something it registered as more than noise.  It was a blow to the base of his spine, a pounding that ran the length of his already-pained left leg, then up to his back and through to the bottom of his skull before rattling around in his head like a bell clapper.