From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (66 page)

A moment ago – less
than a moment, a mere
instant
ago – Ken had been worried about Matt’s
hands. Now all he saw was the boy’s teeth. Because what if he got bit? What
if being bit was some kind of death sentence? What if being bit meant he would
end up like the rest of them? Like Stu?

All this went
through Ken’s head in a flash. Too quickly to come up with a plan. He just
reacted.

When Ken was
fourteen he went to a week-long church camp. He got there early, and was able
to score a prime bunk by the door. He put his stuff – mostly books he’d
brought to pass the time – on the bed and went to check out the camp snack
shack.

When he came back a
half hour later, a kid named Adam was sitting on his bed. Ken’s books and
clothes were in a messy heap on the floor.

It didn’t take a
genius to figure out what had happened. Ken, then a full head shorter than
most of the kids his age, had started trembling with rage.

“That’s my stuff,”
he finally managed. “That’s my bed.”

Adam barely deigned
to glance at him. Just laced his fingers behind his head and studiously looked
heavenward. “What’re you going to do about it?”

Adam was a full six
inches taller than Ken. Probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.

The answer was obvious.
Ken gathered his stuff and went to another cabin. He didn’t know anyone
there. He had a terrible time.

And as soon as he
got home he withdrew every penny from his bank account – he’d been saving for a
car when he turned sixteen – and paid in advance for a year’s worth of lessons
at the first martial arts studio he found. He didn’t kid himself. It wasn’t
about self-defense. It wasn’t about “never letting it happen again.”

It was about a
goal
.

He wanted to go
back to camp in one year’s time, and kick Adam’s ass.

In the next year he
absorbed
hapkido. And while he only grew four inches – still short for
his age – he did add fifty pounds of muscle to his frame.

Oddly, at the end
of the year Adam’s attitude had done a complete one-eighty. Maybe it was the
fact that he’d heard Ken wanted to teach him new and exciting ways to die.
Maybe it was just that Ken had a lot more confidence and so wasn’t as easy a
target. Maybe it was just that both of them grew up enough to get over their
insecurities.

Whatever it was,
there was no end-of-the-year ass-kicking. He and Adam ended up being best
friends.

But Ken never quit
martial arts. It slowed down a bit when he got married. A
lot
when the
kids started coming. But he still made time at least once a week to get out
and do some forms, or some weapons practice or sparring.

So when Matt came
at him and all he saw was teeth and all he thought about was turning into
something less than himself, he just reacted.

He grabbed Matt’s
hands, crushing them in his own fingers. Matt kept barreling at him. Teeth
gnashing. Spittle flying from his mouth. That growl, that low, terrible
growl.

Ken knew he
couldn’t stop the kid. Whatever had happened to his students had somehow made
them stronger than they should be. Had turned them from normal-level kids to
high-level ‘roid freaks.

So he didn’t try to
stop Matt. Just let him come. Let him come. Actually
pulled
him.

Matt stumbled
forward a bit. And in the second that he was off-balance, in the instant that
the kid’s feet left the floor and he was completely weightless, Ken fell back
himself. He rolled to his back, still holding onto Matt’s fingers, and used
their joint momentum to yank the boy onto him.

This was the
dangerous moment. The time where if he screwed up, Ken knew he was dead.

He didn’t screw
up. His foot popped up perfectly, jamming into Matt’s gut hard enough that the
boy’s breath exploded out of him. Inertia transferred from downward motion to
upward and backward motion as Ken’s foot kicked up like a piston, shooting Matt
up and over him.

Ken let go of Matt’s
hands. The boy didn’t stop growling, and his claw-fingers grabbed for Ken’s
face, nails dragging bleeding lines across Ken’s cheeks and temples. He just
missed gouging out Ken’s eyes.

There was a crash.

The growling
stopped.

Ken followed
through with the roll, so he ended up on his hands and knees, facing the
direction he had started. He spun around, positive that Matt would be rushing
him from behind.

But Matt was gone.

Ken’s stomach felt
at once tight and loose, a strange dichotomy that he didn’t understand.

He rushed to the
broken window. Looked down.

Matt’s body was
there, three stories below.

Motionless.

Ken had just killed
one of his students.

But he didn’t have
time to think about it, to care about it. Because the window let him see the
city.

“Maggie,” he
whispered.

Boise was a lovely
city. Ken had always thought it was the perfect mix of big-city life – movie
theaters, malls, a few nightclubs – and small-town community.

But now he could
not remember why he had ever thought anything positive about the place. He
could only see the black smoke rising in dozens of locations. Could only see
fire skittering over the surfaces of several of the buildings.

The Banner Bank
building… was just
gone
. Disappeared from Boise’s skyline. Smoke and
fire reached greedy fingers into the sky at the spot where it had once stood,
and it didn’t take a genius to figure out where at least one of the crashing
planes had gone down.

Then, as he
watched, one of the huge industrial cranes that stood in the city center tilted
drunkenly.

It was the one by
the Wells Fargo Center.

“Maggie,” Ken said
again.

The world had gone
mad a moment ago. Now it felt like it was ending. The great crane, tall
enough to loom over the eleven-story building, seemed to hang at an impossible
angle for far too long. A fireball bloomed from somewhere near its base, a
great ball of orange and red that ballooned upward before disappearing into an
ashy black and gray outline.

The crane fell. It
hit the Wells Fargo Center hard enough that Ken could hear it even miles away.
A sickening, lurching crunch of metal and glass and concrete shearing off.

Things fell from
the side of the building. He couldn’t tell if they were huge pieces of concrete
or human beings.

The crane slid
along the side of the skyscraper, gouging great furrows in the side of one of
the largest landmarks in the city. Then it slowed, stopped. Still hung up on
the side of the bank building.

The building where
Maggie was.

Where the
kids
were.

He pulled away from
the window. Intending to turn and run. To get to his car, to race to the bank
where Maggie had been dealing with a re-fi of their house, and find her and the
kids.

It saved his life.

One of the students
– could they even be called students anymore? – had apparently taken advantage
of his distraction. Had run at him from behind. When Ken pulled away from the
window, the kid –

(
Kari Harper.
)

– missed jumping on
his back by stupid, dumb luck. Instead she impaled her throat on one of the
jagged shards of glass left behind when Matt went through the window. Blood
ran over the piece of glass, staining it crimson in a way that was almost
beautiful. Kari twitched like a trout caught on a lure, yanking back and forth
and only succeeding in shredding her throat further.

She grabbed the
shard of glass and tried to pull herself off, but only succeeded in slashing
her palms open. She must have severed the tendons or nerves, because her
fingers stopped working and she just batted at the glass ineffectually until
she finally sagged, still pinned to the windowpane like the world’s largest and
most grotesque insect on a science board.

Ken looked around.
The class was still a battleground. But it seemed like the tide was turning.
Most of the kids still alive had that dead look in their eyes.

Only a matter of
time before one of them took him down. And it didn’t matter how much sparring
he’d done, how many thousands of times he’d punched a heavy bag. One bite and…
what?

Didn’t matter. He
couldn’t let that happen. He had to survive. Had to get to Maggie and the
kids.

As if to contradict
him, a now-familiar growl drew his attention.

Stu.

Blood drizzled
through the mangled bite on the jock’s shoulder, and his blood-crusted skin
looked like it was scabbing over.

His eyes were
dead. Dead, but still focused on Ken.

The big kid rushed
at him.

Ken was dead.
There was nothing he could do.

Where before
several decades of martial arts training had come to his rescue, now they seemed
to have abandoned him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to go.

He just watched as
Stu – a tackle on the high school varsity football team – barreled at him.
Growling. Teeth clicking together in obvious anticipation of ripping the flesh
from Ken’s body.

And Ken stood
there. Just stood.

Goodbye, Mags.

A high-pitched
shriek ripped Ken’s attention to the right. He turned just in time to see a
blur of motion pounce on Stu. Stu roared, screeching in pain as something tore
into him, ripping his ear off.

It was Laura. The
girl that had bitten Stu, the girl he had tossed into a desk. She was still
oozing that pink pulp from the side of a horribly misshapen head, and now Ken
could actually see bone fragments dropping out of her skull. She couldn’t be
moving, couldn’t be
alive
.

But she was. She
was, and she had just saved Ken’s life, buying him time with her frenzied
attack against the thing that had once been Stu.

Laura – the
once-Laura – pushed her thumbs into Stu’s eyes. He shrieked again as her
thumbs went deep into his eye sockets. The eyes seemed to both pop and wilt,
almost disappearing under the pressure of her attack. Gray matter dripped down
his face. He roared and threw Laura away from him.

Ken watched her
body fly into a pile of other students who were rolling around in a mass of
gore. He thought she would return to finish Stu off, but she didn’t. Just
started fighting with whatever was in reach.

Ken turned back to
Stu. The teen’s face was a mass of blood and he was spinning back and forth,
trying to orient on some unknown location.

Me. He’s trying
to find
me
.

Ken didn’t wait to
see if he was right. He ran for the door.

Threw it open.

And was nearly
engulfed.

Ken knew it must
have happened everywhere in the city –the fireballs, the tilting crane, the
explosions had made that painfully obvious. But knowing that hadn’t prepared
him for the scene in the school hallway.

What had happened
in his class must have happened in all of them. And hundreds of kids must have
run, fleeing for their lives and making it as far as the hallway before being
taken down by the things that used to be their friends and classmates.

The walls were
green and white. Or they had been. Now they were green and white and
spattered with impressionistic splotches of red and black. Ken’s first step
into the hall almost ended in disaster as his foot came down in an inch-deep
puddle of blood and he nearly skidded into three students locked into a life
and death struggle near a bank of lockers.

The sound. The
screams rolled over him like a sonic tidal wave, nearly knocking him off his
feet. The growls and high-pitched whines of the students that had succumbed to
whatever maddening impulses were even worse, a pulsing, pounding current that
seemed to whisper madness into the deepest shadows of Ken’s own mind.

Just give up.
Just give in.

No. Mags. The
kids.

They won’t
notice. They’re gone.

I don’t know
that.

You do. They’re
gone.

No.

They’re dead.

NO!

And worst of all
was the smell. The smell of any indoor high school was a peculiar beast, a
confluence of b.o. and aftershave applied by incompetent hands; of perfume put
on in amounts that would embarrass a medieval French prostitute, mixed with the
overriding smell of hormones on the brink of breaking free. But this….

The desperate scent
of terror, the tangy copper-smell of freshly spilled blood. The pungent odor
of bowels that had been purged in fear and death.

The smell brought
Ken back from the edge of an abyss, reminded him that he was still alive.
Alive, and separated from the only things that made his life worth living.

He looked down the
hall to his right, to his left. Saw the same thing in either direction:
teeming masses of students intent on killing or being killed.

And not just students.
Ken saw Joe Picarelli, the gym coach, kneeling over a young girl, yanking loops
of entrails out of her stomach while making that same horrific growl.

Ken backed into a
corner between the nearby bank of lockers and the doorway to his classroom. He
snaked out a hand and yanked the door closed, not sure if that would stop
anyone from coming out but equally unsure what else to do.

He felt like
curling up in a ball at the base of the lockers. Felt like giving up. That
damn screaming pounded at him.

Give up. Give
in. Give up. Give in.

He turned and
climbed.

He hoisted himself
onto the top of the lockers. There was no way to get out of the school via the
hallway, not unless he was suddenly going to channel the ability of an
Australian sheepdog to walk across the backs of the students roiling and
rolling about on the floor like hyper-violent rioters.

So he went up on
the lockers.

Ken didn’t have a
plan. Just knew that to stay still would be to die. To remain would be to
succumb to the pounding voice within him that counseled defeat.

He pulled himself
onto the lockers. There was about two feet of space between the tops of the
lockers and the ceiling. Not much room, just enough for him to crouch and
observe the screaming chaos, the death everywhere.

One of the doors
opened nearby and Emily Sumter, the English teacher, made a break for it. Joe
Picarelli jumped away from the now-still form of the girl whose innards he’d
been yanking out and leapt on the older woman’s back. Emily went down,
screamed once, and then was silent as Joe grabbed her head in both hands and
slammed her face repeatedly into the floor.

She was going to
retire this year, Ken thought. He had an insane moment where he realized he
wouldn’t have to chip in the usual ten bucks for cake and a retirement gift.
Another insane moment where he was actually grateful, because Emily had always
treated him like something you’d find underneath an abandoned refrigerator.

Then Joe Picarelli
stopped slamming Emily’s face into the floor. He looked up.

He saw Ken.

He howled.

And ran for the
lockers.