From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (65 page)

Six
.

Six
.

SIX, GOOD GOD,
SIX
!

That was how many
other aircraft he had seen in the sky. All falling.

Boise Airport was
not Los Angeles International. Six had to be pretty much every single commuter
jet on approach in the area.

All falling. All
looking like they’d been knocked from the sky by the hand of God.

“Mr. Strickland Mr.
Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”

The voice burrowed
into his consciousness, someone speaking his name over and over again like a
weird chant. He wondered how long the sound had been going on.

How long did it
take for someone to lose their mind?

The students were
all crying, whimpering. Some of the kids were holding one another, faces
resting in boyfriends’ chests or on girlfriends’ shoulders. Their expressions
seemed decades older than they had only moments before.

“Mr. Strickland Mr.
Strickland Mr. Strickland
Mr. Strickland….
”

He finally managed
to penetrate the fog of shock long enough to recognize the voice. It was Becca
again. She was pointing at something else. Not falling planes or bugs gone
mad. Something new. Something on the floor. Something….

This time it was
Ken who cursed. No one called him on it. Everyone was too focused on the
windows, on grief.

A few of them, like
Becca, even noticed Matt Anders.

Matt was a small
kid. Quiet. The kind of boy who went with the flow, who did what was asked.
A teacher’s wet dream from the perspective of being no trouble at all about
anything. But Ken always worried about Matt. Wondered what kind of life the
kid was going to have if he could never find his own opinions, his own point of
view.

Now, though, all of
that might be moot. Matt was laying on the floor of the classroom, splayed out
full-length in front of his desk, his feet twitching spastically against the
cheap tile, his head rolling back and forth as white froth oozed from his
mouth.

“He having a
seizure?” That was Ricky Briscoe, looking over the tops of his huge glasses,
staring at Matt like he was a cool new trading card at the comic book store.

“I don’t know!”
snapped Ken. He knelt down next to Matt and tried to remember what to do in
case of seizures. The school made the teachers take CPR and first aid classes,
but most of that was geared toward broken bones and the like, not grand mal
episodes that occurred in the middle of some major terrorist event.

“Get up, move!” he
shouted, waving for a few students nearby to give him space. The students
stepped back and Ken swept all the closest chairs away as well, giving Matt a
clear area where he wouldn’t collide with anything.

“Shouldn’t you get
him, like, a spoon or something?”

Ken didn’t look at
the speaker. Didn’t have to. Becca.

“I don’t – I don’t
think so, I –“

Then the screaming
began. The
real
screaming.

Matt Anders was on
the floor. Rolling around, having a seizure. Ken had his hands on the boy’s
shoulders, trying to keep him from rolling into the chairs, trying to keep the
scrawny kid from braining himself on the metal legs only inches from his face.
He wouldn’t have thought he had enough mental space left to look at something
else.

But he did. The
screams
forced
him to look.

He glanced over his
left shoulder. Just a quick peek. Just a glimpse. Just a tiny look that was
more than enough to afford him a full view of the hell that had opened up
around him.

The first thing he
saw was Becca. Of course, it was
always
Becca. Becca, who was so
careful to be the center of attention. Becca, who wanted to succeed at
everything, even if the thing she succeeded at carried no value at all.

Becca, who was now
shrieking as she tried to hold Ricky Briscoe away from her.

And as Ken watched,
Ricky leaned in close, snarling, and clamped his teeth on Becca’s throat.
Becca had time for one more agonized scream before Ricky’s jaws ground down.
The girl’s scream turned to a loud gurgle, then to a horrible wet murmur as
Ricky yanked his head back, and pulled her throat out with his teeth.

Blood geysered,
arterial spray painting surrealistic designs on the mint-green walls of the
history classroom.

Becca’s fingers
clawed at the raw gap where her throat had been. Her mouth opened and closed,
but no sound came out. Blood continued to jet out of her throat, coating
Ricky’s face.

He grinned and
turned his face skyward, like he was standing under a summer rain. Ken noticed
that the boy’s glasses had come off, and his eyes were empty of anything but
joy at the blood coursing over his skin.

Becca fell.

But the screams
continued. Impossible. Becca was dead. She
had
to be dead. Her blood
was no longer jetting across the room in a high-pressure stream, just trickling
out of her with the weak force of gravity as she lay face down on the floor.
No, she was dead.

So where were the
screams coming from?

It took a moment
for Ken to realize what was happening. Like his brain was operating on a
slightly different time stream, something a few seconds delayed from the rest
of the world. He knew he should be reeling from what had just happened, knew
he must be in shock. But all he could think to do was look around for the
source of the sound he heard. The source of the shrieks. The screams.

They were coming
from the other students.

He looked at his
class. Realized that he had been wrong before. What he had seen previously
had not been Hell; it hadn’t even been Hell’s doorway.

But this….

The students were
killing each other.

Ken gazed at what
was happening in dumb horror for perhaps as long as two seconds. Two seconds
in which he saw half the class – students he knew and loved – grappling with
and trying to kill the other half of the class.

The aggressors all
looked like Ricky Briscoe had looked: eyes empty of anything but unadulterated
rage. Nothing left of what they had been. Like they had been…
erased
.

Shirley DeMarco, a
girl who never caused any trouble, who sat at the back of the class and who Ken
had to coax into participation, was straddling another student. Ken couldn’t
tell who the other student was because Shirley was
gnawing
the other
student’s face with her teeth, chewing and smacking like she was tearing into a
filet done extremely rare. The student below her was writhing and screaming,
but even as Ken watched the unfortunate student’s form went still. Ken didn’t
know if the kid was dead or just unconscious, but a moment later he knew as
Shirley – nice, mousy Shirley – buried her face in the student’s neck and
started chewing away. Blood spouted, obscuring Shirley’s visage, her dead
eyes.

Ken moved his gaze
to another pair of students. A girl –

(
Who is that?
What’s her name, oh, God, why can’t I remember her name?
)

– who was attacking
a much larger boy with a letterman jacket. She clamped her teeth on his
shoulder and bit down and the boy – Stu Clancy – howled and shoved her with an
explosion of his thick muscles. The girl flew back through the confused melee
that the classroom had become. She tripped over a pair of bodies that were
locked in a deathroll on the now blood-slicked tile floor, slipped on a patch
of what might have been brains forcibly expelled from a student’s skull, and
fell.

Her head smashed
into the sharp corner of a desk.

Ken saw the girl’s
–

(
Laura Briscoe!
It’s Laura Briscoe! What the hell is happening, Laura?
)

– head seem to
implode. Pink and gray ooze exploded out of the wound. Her head went convex.

She didn’t die.
Didn’t even pass out.

No, Laura stood
up. She tilted her head skyward and screamed, a sound so awful and wrenching
that Ken wanted to cover his ears. It seemed like every bad thing that had
ever happened in a universe not famous for mercy was packed into that scream.

Then Laura’s head
tilted back to its usual plane. Not staring straight ahead – impossible since
one of her eyes was gone, exploded right out of her face with the force of
impact into the desk – but rather seeming to peer into an abyss of madness that
only she could see.

She howled again,
and dove back into the free-for-all. But whereas the other students seemed to
be involved in one-on-one struggles, she tore indiscriminately into anyone who
came within her reach. Punching, tearing, clawing, biting.

And all the while,
a hideous pink/gray, bilious goo leaked from the massive rifts in her skull and
her skin.

Ken felt like he
should call someone. The principal? 911?

Who do you call
when something like this happens? When your tiny corner of the universe casts
off all vestiges of reason and runs rampant on a field of madness?

Who do you call?

For a moment he
thought,
Ghostbusters!
and he knew his own brain was misfiring; madness
creeping in at the edges of a mind seeking desperately to find reason and
coming up empty.

He heard two booms
and figured it must be a pair of the falling planes coming down. But he
couldn’t be sure.

He didn’t know.

Didn’t know who to
call.

Didn’t know what to
do.

And then he didn’t
have time to think about it. Because in the next moment things got much worse.

If you had asked
Ken Strickland even ten minutes ago a question like, “Could you forget about a
student having a seizure in your class?” he would have answered in the
negative. He would also have laughed and possibly asked if you needed a
medication increase.

But that was before
insanity pushed into his class. Before the bugs, before planes bombing downtown,
and before students started killing each other.

Now, he had
forgotten about the boy suffering a grand mal seizure under his hands. Had
forgotten about Matt Anders.

But the growling
reminded him.

That and the fact
that Matt went suddenly and completely still.

Ken’s eyes were dragged
to the silent form under his hands, like he was looking for a single bright
spot of sanity in the black pit of madness that had swallowed his once-orderly
classroom. Like he was looking for some reason he could give himself that life
still made sense – even if that reason was that at least normal things like
seizures were still a possibility.

But even that was
denied him.

He looked down and
saw Matt, still drooling but no longer thrashing around. The boy’s eyes were
rolled back in his skull, his head oriented upward, like he was trying
desperately to see something beyond the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles.

He was growling. A
low, abrasive noise that sounded like he was probably damaging his vocal
cords. It sent another round of shivers up and down Ken’s spine.

Then Matt’s eyes
snapped back into place. They didn’t roll, they actually
snapped
, like
they had been jerked back into their moorings by some electromagnetic force.
The pupils were hugely dilated.

Matt’s gaze focused
on Ken. The growl turned even darker.

The boy launched
himself upward. His teeth gnashing. His hands clenching.

Only the fact that
Ken’s hands had already been on Matt’s shoulders saved him. Only the fact that
he had half-pinned the boy’s shoulders to the floor kept him from finding out
what it felt like to have his jugular ripped out; to see his lifeblood spew
across the slick killing floor that had once been a place of learning.

Even so, it was
close. Matt’s teeth came together with an audible clack inches from Ken’s
neck, and Ken could hear the boy’s jaws grinding together with a terrible
rasping noise as the kid strained to reach his neck, his face, his flesh.

“No!”

Ken didn’t know if
he was screaming at Matt, or at the other kids in the class who had suddenly
and unaccountably gone insane. Most likely he was screaming at everything and
everyone – at a world that would permit such madness. Regardless, the word
seemed to come with a burst of strength. He pushed Matt away, and pushed
himself back at the same time.

Matt felt like long
cords of firewood under his fingers, muscles bunched so tightly they no longer
felt human. The boy was impossibly strong, impossibly fast. Ken fell back,
thinking he would have a moment to get some clearance between himself and the
still mostly prone kid, but he hadn’t taken two steps before Matt was on his
feet and rocketing straight at him.

The boy’s fingers
were curled into hooks, and Matt knew without a doubt that if the kid got those
hooks into him, it would be hard – impossible – for him to escape.

Time slowed down.
Ken had been operating in a different time zone than the rest of the class.
Now he seemed to be rejoining them, but in a way that slowed down the flow of
their movements.

He heard a scream.
Had an impossible chance to look over.

It was Stu Clancy.
The big jock was gripping his shoulder where Laura Briscoe had bitten him. His
face was white and sweat was bursting from his pores. But not normal sweat.
It looked like he was sweating
blood
, like his capillaries had burst
under the pressure of some unimaginable distress.

Stu screamed
again. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. His face tilted to the ceiling.

And then Ken had to
look away from the terrible vision of the star football player. Because Matt Anders
was about to kill him.