From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (67 page)

Ken just reacted.
An all-but-buried part of him wondered how long that would keep him alive, how
long instinct and dumb luck would suffice for survival. But sitting back and
drawing up plans was out of the question when you had a two-hundred-pound man
with gobbets of flesh hanging from his outstretched hands rushing at you.

He had been
crouched atop the bank of lockers, perched like the world’s strangest squirrel
in the space between lockers and the ceiling. Now he scrabbled to his feet and
rammed his forearm through the ceiling tiles above him. He stood, following
his arm through the drop ceiling acoustical tiles, ramming his way into the
plenum between the tiles and the structure of the building itself.

He felt a hand grab
his ankle. Felt fear shoot lightning bolts up and down his body.

He’s going to
bite me. I’m gonna get bitten
.

Ken froze, unable
to move for a critical second, as though
hoping
on some level for the
bite to come. For this to end.

It didn’t happen.

A moment later he
realized why.

“Too high,” he
muttered, and with the words he kept punching his way into the space above the
drop ceiling.

The lockers were
almost six feet tall. No way Joe Picarelli could bite him at that height. He
was safe. For now.

The hand on his
ankle clenched. Ken had an instant to remember the superhuman strength of the
kids he had battled in the past few minutes before Joe yanked his leg out from
under him. He almost tumbled down into the maelstrom of teeth and nails and
flailing limbs and death and madness below. Barely managed to grab onto some
kind of ductwork in the ceiling plenum.

Ken felt himself
pulled taut, like one of those Gumby dolls he had played with as a kid.

He remembered that
he inevitably ended up pulling the legs off those toys. The thought was not a
comforting one.

He looked down, but
couldn’t see anything. His belly was pressed into the edges of one of the metal
grids that held the acoustical ceiling tiles. He couldn’t tell how close he
was to having his feet or legs bitten by Joe or some other person.

He pulled, trying
to muscle himself up and out of harm’s way. Joe wouldn’t let go, though, and
Ken felt himself tiring. He was in good shape, for a teacher, but he was no
match for whatever unnatural power was flooding the muscles of the gym coach.

Pain lanced through
his calves. He thought he’d been bitten; waited to change into whatever those
things were.

The change didn’t
happen. Nothing came but more pain. He felt his pants leg soak with blood.
Joe must be pulling his skin and muscle away from his leg with his fingers,
yanking at him like Ken might work at a difficult chicken leg during a family
barbecue.

Then he felt
something else, a strange, mushy sensation that pushed its way through the
pain. Something moving around the soles of his shoes. Pulling and pushing at
once.

Ken realized that
Joe had pulled him close enough that the gym coach was biting his feet. Only
the fact that Ken favored thick-soled Doc Martens shoes had kept him from being
wounded.

Ken cried out, an
inarticulate scream of pure terror as he realized that the span of his life and
sanity could now be measured in centimeters. He kicked out, felt the heavy
soles of his shoes smash into Joe’s face. He kicked again. Again. Crunches,
strangely delicate, like wishbones popping.

Joe’s hands kept
raking at Ken’s legs. Ken kept kicking. The crunches started to sound
muffled, wrapped deeper and deeper in soft tissue.

The hands fell away
abruptly. Ken’s body went from taut to slack, and his lower half slammed
painfully against the lockers as a shriek scraped against his eardrums. He
knew it was Joe. Just like what had happened to Laura when she had tripped
into the desk.

Ken yanked himself
up until he was standing on the lockers again. Then pulled himself into the formless
black above the ceiling tiles.

It was dark. The
only sense of reality was provided by the hole he had come through and the
rolling waves of sound from below, a pounding tsunami of rage and terror that
threatened to drown him.

He moved forward.
Didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to keep moving.

Had to get to
Maggie. Had to get to the kids.

If they’re even
alive.

What were the
chances of a woman, with a nine-year old, a seven-year old, and a two-year old
in tow, making it through what was happening?

He didn’t know.
And didn’t care. He had to find them. No matter what.

Light punched into
the darkness. A hand burst through the tiles in front of him. A black outline
pushed its way into the slightly greater darkness around them both.

Ken didn’t move.
He held his breath. He couldn’t tell if the thing nearby was male or female,
student or teacher. And he certainly couldn’t tell if it was a normal person…
or one of the crazy things that had somehow supplanted normality.

The dark form
remained as still as Ken. He could see its outline, lit by the flickering
fluorescents in the hall below. But no features. Just a hunched, silent form.

Then it growled.

The thing lurched
at him, jumping over the hole it had just opened in the ceiling. Ken turned
away, still hunched in the tiny space in which he had taken momentary refuge,
but not before he saw the face of the thing following him.

Not a person.
Not a girl or boy. Just a thing. Just an
it
.

Its forehead and
eyes were unscathed. High cheekbones that could once have belonged to a
beautiful girl or to a fine-featured boy.

Ken couldn’t tell.
Because everything below that was a travesty. The nose was gone, chewed to
oblivion, just bits of flesh with sharp white shards of bone poking through.
No upper lip.

The lower jaw was
completely gone. Ripped away by some impossible force. The lower face sagged
as though saddened by the loss of itself. Ken thought for a fraction of an
instant that the student’s throat was cut, but then he realized that what he
had taken for a congealing trail of blood was in fact a limp, loose tongue
hanging against the neck of the once-teen’s shirt.

Then he couldn’t
see it any more. His back was to the abomination, he was crawling along the
metal framework of the drop ceiling. Trying to move as fast as he could while
at the same time knowing if he put his hand down on a tile instead of on the
ceiling grid he would plummet through into the hall below and death – or worse
– would be swift and inevitable.

He tried to think
as he spider-crawled from support to support, bunching his body up and over
bundled A/C vents that squirmed over the drop ceiling like silvery
caterpillars. Tried to think what to do, where to go.

And kept coming up
empty.

The thing behind
him snarled, the sound coming out strange and wet, saturated by blood and
unmuffled by the enclosure of a lower palate.

Ken realized he was
screaming, too, and wondered how long that had been going on. Wondered if it
would ever stop.

He tried to think
of Maggie. Of Derek and Hope and little Liz. He tried, but all he could hear
was the pound of hands and feet behind him; all he could feel was blood
dripping off his calves and his cheeks; all he could see was darkness.

He felt a hand at
his foot. Just a brush. It didn’t grab him, it wasn’t close enough to get a
grip.

But it was close
enough to make him forget what he was doing. To make him panic.

Ken’s ongoing
scream notched up an octave and he threw himself forward. His hand came down,
not on the sharp edge of the ceiling grid but on the hard-sponge feel of the
ceiling tile. He came to his senses in that moment, tried to stop himself from
moving forward, but it was too late. Even in this screwed up version of
reality, even in the madness that had replaced his universe, apparently physics
still mattered.

He couldn’t arrest
his forward momentum.

Couldn’t stop
himself from pitching over the edge of the grid…

… hitting the
ceiling….

Falling through.

Ken swung down into
the hall, his hand reaching out as though to break his fall. One of the things
below saw it and grabbed for him, blood-stained teeth gritted around chunks of
something. He snatched his arm back and the thing missed him by a hair’s
breadth.

Then he felt
something at his feet, which were still laid out full-length in the ceiling
space. He knew it was the thing that had followed him up there. And knew
there was no way he could fight it off.

He swung his body
up, arching his back and reaching blindly behind him, trying to find a grip on
the ceiling grid that he had just fallen through.

It didn’t matter.
He didn’t know why he bothered. He was going to be bitten. He could feel the
thing on his legs. He didn’t have time.

Still, his body
kept moving. Kept clawing for purchase. Giving up wasn’t an option, it
seemed; survival as much a matter of motor memory as it was of will. He felt
like he had no say in his own soul in that moment; like a creature greater than
himself had briefly taken control and
forced
him to endure, to strive,
to continue.

He grabbed the grid
and started to haul himself backwards into the ceiling space. Like being born
in reverse, going from blood and light into the darkness again.

He felt teeth on
his leg.

And the thing
didn’t bite.

Why?

He flipped himself
into the plenum, and realized what had happened: the thing wasn’t biting him
because it
couldn’t
. It only had an upper jaw. No lower jaw to grind
against, no lever it could use to exert enough pressure to puncture his flesh.

Still, he was
bleeding from where Picarelli had clawed at his legs. What if the thing bled
into him? What if its saliva got into his wounds?

The thought sent
Ken into a paroxysm of motion. His legs kicked out, catching the mewling thing
in the loose sacks of flesh and fluid that were all that remained of its lower
face. The thing screamed its wet cry, its hands raking toward Ken’s eyes.

He rolled away.
The thing hit the ceiling tiles where Ken had been a moment before and went
right through. A crescendo of screams sounded, the noise of feeding beasts
interrupted in the midst of their frenzy.

Ken rolled back and
looked through the hole in the tiles. He couldn’t see the thing that had
attacked him. Just a carpet of moving monsters standing atop another carpet of
blood and body parts and gore.

He felt his stomach
lurch. Forced himself not to vomit.

Maggie. Derek.
Hope. Liz.

He focused on
them. On their faces. He pushed back to hands and knees and kept crawling
across the grid. Vowing not to fall. Hoping he could keep his promise.

Outside, something
exploded. He couldn’t tell exactly what. Whatever it was, it sounded huge. It
shook the foundations of the school. He almost fell through the ceiling,
almost pitched over with the violence of the invisible blast that felt both
impossibly far and right next to him.

Something big.
Something big just went up
.

And Ken knew that whatever
it was, it signaled the end of everything he knew.

His world
disappearing.

Darkness rapidly became
both armor and enemy.

In the empty space
between the ceiling grid and the building superstructure, Ken felt safer than
he had since first seeing Becca’s throat torn apart. But he also had a moment
to think, a moment to wonder what was happening. The blackness all around him
writhed like serpents, and all he could see was students pulling each other
apart.

He vomited.

He tried to stop
it, but it came anyway. Like he was trying to physically purge himself of the
memory of what had just happened to his world.

He heard the wet
splat of his lunch hitting the ceiling tiles. Waited for the sounds below to
change; for one of the monsters to figure out he was up here.

Nothing happened.

He felt weak. He
wanted to lay down. Just sleep, right there in the ceiling like a rat.

The thought of
Maggie and the kids kept him going.

Slivers of
illumination occasionally forced their way between warped ceiling tiles,
shadow-traces of the brightness that had once been a way of life but was now
merely something to be remembered. His reality now was darkness and pain.
Pain in his legs, where Joe Picarelli had yanked gobbets of flesh away from his
calves; pain in his face, where the newly-transformed Matt Anders had raked
bleeding furrows in his cheeks and temples on his way to a three-story drop out
the window.

He kept crawling.
His hands and knees were on fire as well, the entirety of his body weight
resting on the thin metal ridges of the drop ceiling grid as he hid from the
nightmare below.

How am I going
to get to Maggie and the kids?

Forget that, how
am I going to get out of the
school
?

Something hit his
head.

Ken’s heart felt
like it was trying to pummel its way out through his face, slamming hard
against his ribcage and then his throat. He dropped backward in the darkness
and his teeth gritted as though in weak parody of the viciousness of the
children he could still hear killing one another below him. But it wasn’t
mindless savagery that made him clench his jaw, it was raw terror. The
knowledge that something else had found him.

That he was going
to die.

He held still in
the dark, trying to ignore the terrible screams and somehow-worse growls below
him. Trying to ignore the pain in his body, the pain in his soul. Trying to
forget the fact that he had only minutes before killed one of his students.

Who was here?

Nothing else
moved. Nothing else breathed.

Nothing growled.

He was alone.

After a moment he
reached out. Felt for what had touched him.

His bruised and
abraded palm sung on harp strings of pain as it brushed against something cool
and unyielding and he realized that nothing had touched him. He wasn’t in
danger – at least, no more than he had been a moment ago.

No, he was simply
at the end of the line. He had run out of crawlspace. The plenum ended with a
wall, and he had no way of knowing where he was in relation to the school’s
layout. He could still hear growling, so he suspected he was over the hall,
but he couldn’t be sure.

He waved his
hands. Felt nothing. He began to move laterally, inching in the direction he
hoped was the outer wall of the school. Nothing concrete in his mind, other
than the idea that he didn’t want to descend in the hallway. That would be
suicide, and he hadn’t stayed alive this long just to throw it all away in a
painful splash of red.

He kept Maggie in
the front of his mind. Kept her smile before his eyes. It was hard. The dark
kept crowding out the image, kept replacing it with thoughts of what might have
happened – what
must
have happened –

(
she had three
kids with her, do you think she could have survived this? could she
possibly
have survived this?
)

– kept replacing
the sight of her grin with a sickening view of her face ripped to pieces, her
jaw gone like the student that had trapped him up in the ceiling.

He kept moving.

He lost track of
time, moving inch by painful inch through the darkness. It could have been
minutes or hours. All he had was memory and pain, a mixture of pleasure and
distress.

Thoughts of asking
Maggie to marry him. He hadn’t had the money for a diamond ring, so he’d
bought a simple gold circle, but she cried like it was ten carats of perfect
clarity.

Thoughts of Matt
going through the window, a sullen growl the last thing the world would have to
remember him by.

Thoughts of little
Liz, taking her first steps and slapping her naked baby belly in pleasure, her
mouth open wide in a grin that seemed to light up the whole world.

But could it light
up the world now?

Ken stopped moving
suddenly. He held himself motionless.

Everything was
still the same. Darkness all around. Pain biting at his face, his legs, his
hands.

Everything was
still the same.

But somehow, it was
all terribly different.