From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (64 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is
that?” he said.

Bugs.

Lots of them.

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

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

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

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

Feet.

Legs.

Carapaces.

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

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

He stood up and
walked to the window.

“Mr. Strickland….”

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

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

He moved to the
window.

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

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

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

But why?

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

His guts roiled.

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

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

– and tapped on the
glass.

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

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

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

And then one of the
students screamed.

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

Not this time.

This time he was
too busy looking at the plane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was trying not
to scream.

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

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

“Get away from the
glass!”

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

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

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

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