From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (68 page)

It took a moment
for Ken to figure out what had changed. Longer than it should have, in fact.
The darkness had become an audible force, a seething surf that pounded against
his ears and deafened him to everything else. So he very nearly missed what
was happening.

And what was
happening was
silence
.

Or no, not
silence. There were still screams and cries and whimpers. Sounds of pain and
misery.

But the howling,
growling cries of predatory rage were gone. Like the kids and teachers who had
been afflicted by the hideous transformation had simply disappeared.

Was that possible?
Ken tried to reach through a dark-sodden memory, tried to pinpoint the moment
when the snarling sounds had ceased. Was it gradual? Sudden? Did it sound
like they’d run out of the building?

He couldn’t be
sure. Couldn’t remember.

Memory was a funny
thing. It could make you remember your first kiss with fondness, even though
it was a travesty of bumped noses. It could make you remember your baby’s
birth with love, even though it resembled a charnel house. And now, when Ken
needed his memory to function with sharpness and clarity, it was apparently
playing hard to get.

Not cool
.

He debated only a
moment about what to do next. Because in that moment, even the cries and
whimpers disappeared. He had no idea what that could mean – surely the
wounded
couldn’t have run out of the place, could they? – but knew it was probably
bad. If for no other reason than because anything good happening at this point
seemed highly unlikely.

He couldn’t stay
here. Couldn’t remain in the comforting cocoon of darkness.

Ken didn’t let
himself think about his decision. Just reached below his face and felt for the
edges of the nearest tile. He intended to pull the edges up a few centimeters,
enough to peek around and get an idea what was happening without being spotted.

Adrenaline betrayed
him. His jittery fingers ripped the corners of the tile upward so hard he
banged himself in the face with the tight square of recycled mineral fibers.
He tasted salt and copper in his mouth. Almost grinned at the irony of giving
himself
a bloody lip in the middle of a city-wide apocalyptic event.

But didn’t.
Because he looked down.

Faces. Lots of
them.

Ken almost
screamed, but managed to bite back the sound.

Kids, teachers.

Standing, sitting,
some splayed out full-length in pools of blood. Others sat on top of what
looked to be their own internal organs, as though they were playing the world’s
strangest game of King of the Hill.

As Ken watched,
several of those with the worst wounds closed their eyes and slumped. Their
chests stopped moving. They were dead. They
must
be dead.

The rest, though….

They were staring
straight at him.

A moment later – an
eternally long moment in which he was certain he had at least three separate
heart attacks – Ken realized that they weren’t staring at
him
. They
were just staring
up
. Staring at the ceiling. And he just happened to
be
in
the ceiling.

Their eyes were
rolled back, the way Matt Anders’ eyes had been right before he went bugnuts crazy
and attacked Ken. Only the whites showed, not even the tiniest traces of iris
visible.

Their mouths were
open wide, like they were straining to catch invisible rain.

They were all
panting, and Ken realized that they were breathing in sync.

In-out-in-out-in-out-

(Two students
slumped, blood loss too great to live….)

-in-out-in-out-in-out….

For some reason,
the synchronized respiration made Ken feel like this was a nightmare. People
going crazy
en masse
was one thing. That could actually happen, right?
Mass hypnosis, too much MSG, everyone holding their cell phones too close to their
heads while Googling porn on the internet… there could be an explanation.

But
breathing in
harmony
?

Then he remembered
the way Matt’s eyes had snapped back into place. How the boy had gone from
normal to killing rage in the space of seconds.

Don’t do this,
Ken.

There’s no other
way.

There’s gotta be
something
.

But there wasn’t
any other way. He could stay up in the ceiling and die like a rat, cowering
and waiting for larger predators to hunt him down, or take his chances now.

He dropped down to
the hallway.

Into the midst of
the quiet monsters.

Quiet. But for how
long?

When Ken dropped
down, he found himself between a girl who looked remarkably unscathed, and one
of the school’s security guards – only distinguishable by his yellow jacket
with “SECURITY” written across it in bold black letters. The guard’s face was
mostly gone, nothing but a single unmarred eye in the midst of raw red meat
that looked like it was already suppurating. The man’s cheekbones poked
through the mangled tissue of his face. The air he breathed whistled in and
out not only through his nostrils but also through flapping holes in what was
left of his cheeks, through broken bones that allowed free access to his sinus
cavities.

Ken didn’t move for
a moment, frozen not by the awesome damage that had been done to the man, but
rather by the single unharmed eye. It seemed almost profane, to have a part of
him so perfect in the midst of such destruction.

He suddenly
remembered a scripture from his childhood:
If thine eye offend thee, pluck
it out and cast it from thee.

Then he realized
that shock was sinking in again. That his brain was making connections that
weren’t necessary, that weren’t even
there
.

Move.

Move.

MOVE
.

He turned. Took a
step.

And knocked into
another student.

He knew this one.
It was a freshman he had in one of his classes, a kid named Ethan Miller. A
good kid. He looked like he’d been bitten, staring up with white eyes at the
nothing above him.

Ethan snapped at
Ken, teeth clicking together a few inches in front of Ken’s nose. Ken had to
swallow a scream, and was sure he was going to die; sure that everyone must be
coming out of whatever creepy trance/fugue had bought him this little time.

But no. The kid
went back to his upward stare, mouth open and panting, and Ken realized that
the boy probably hadn’t been trying to actually bite his teacher. At least,
not purposefully. It looked like this was more of an instinctive reaction, an
animalistic response to unwelcome stimulus.

So don’t touch
anyone
.

He looked down the
hall. Fifty feet to the nearest stairwell. Then down two flights of stairs
and at least another hundred feet before he got to an exit of any kind.

And there were kids
and staff
everywhere
. All of them face up, panting, mouths open. Some
wounded, some whole. All ready to pounce and bite if he touched them, and God
only knew when they could return to their rampages.

Maybe they
won’t. Maybe they’ll just fall down. Go unconscious. Die.

But he knew that
was wishful thinking.

And he knew that Maggie
and the kids weren’t going to get any closer to him if he stayed here and
waited for the things around him to start moving again.

He took a breath,
and started his slow movement through the hall.

Once, when Ken was
a teenager, he played a game of Jenga at a party. The first person who lost –
a girl who had had a bit too much to drink – removed her t-shirt. Strip Jenga
was born.

The rest of the
kids in the circle thought it was a great idea. Particularly since the
inebriated girl seemed hell-bent on getting naked.

Ken, however, hated
it. Hated the idea of a game that was supposed to be just plain-ol’ fun
turning into something where he might end up baring himself in front of peers.
Any titillation he might have felt at the idea of ogling partially naked girls
nearby was completely lost in the embarrassment he was already feeling, both
for the wasted girl beside him and for his future self.

Now, pulling
himself through spaces far too small for his frame, he found himself
desperately wishing for those days. Strip Jenga was eminently preferable to
Death Pick-Up Stix.

Every time he got
too close to one of them, the student-or teacher-thing he was near would
snuffle. Its breathing would momentarily fall out of lockstep with the unified
panting of everyone else in the hall. Its mouth would close, its teeth would
grind. Ken would freeze, unsure whether it was better to remain motionless or
inch slowly away.

As soon as the
person – or the thing that
used
to be a person – looked back to the
ceiling, he would keep on going. Inch by painful inch. Trying not to smell
the coppery scent of blood, the musky odor of urine and feces that seemed to be
everywhere; that pounded at his nose and made him want to vomit again.

He slipped. His
hands went out, heading straight for a girl who stood ramrod still in the
middle of the hall. For a moment he had the crazy thought that if he fell on
her, if an adult
male
teacher fell hands-first against a barely
post-pubescent girl the way he was going to, a lawsuit was a certainty. Then
reality asserted itself. Lawsuits weren’t an issue. His survival was at
stake.

He had the barest
instant to force his body to one side. His back twisted unnaturally, and he
felt something twinge in his spine. Pain ran up and down the length of his
left leg.

He wanted to
scream. Instead he just grunted, and even that sound was mostly swallowed.

He didn’t
understand anything that was happening. Didn’t know what would make the things
around him go crazy again. Sound? Smell? Psychic emanations?

He just didn’t
know.

He didn’t know
anything
.
Other than that he had to get to his family.

He half-slumped
against another bank of lockers. Tried to convince himself that the sticky
wetness he felt against his hands and cheeks where they pressed into the metal
were nothing more than wet paint.

He focused on the
pain in his leg. He had hurt himself lunging out of the way of the student.
Whether it was a bad injury, something that would fatally slow him down or not,
he couldn’t say. All he knew was that his left leg throbbed, then alternately
sent spike-shocks of pain rippling from his pinky toe up to his hip.

He pushed himself
away from the lockers. He knew he had to keep moving. Knew that if he let
himself stop to “rest,” there was every likelihood he wouldn’t be able to start
moving again.

He took stock of
his position. Still in the midst of a frozen explosion of mayhem, still
surrounded by people he had once known but whose humanity had mysteriously
disappeared.

He was ten feet
from the stairs. More importantly, maybe twenty kids and two adults clustered
between him and the top of the steps.

Snap
.

Like they were all
part of some twisted remote system, every single mouth of every single person
slammed shut. Their teeth clicked together audibly, and Ken didn’t think he’d
ever heard anything so terrifying. Not even the sounds of the wounded, the
dying, the
transforming
students and faculty competed with that single
massive crack of thousands of teeth coming together in a single instant.

And one by one, the
things started dropping their chins, looking down from whatever invisible sight
had held them fast. Their eyes swung back into view.

They shook their
heads as though confused.

Ken ran.

He made it to the
top of the steps. Barreling through anyone who was in his way, doing his best
impression of Stu Clancy at a home game.

Only no, that was
wrong. Stu was crazy, he was gone, he was one of
them
now. So Ken
wasn’t pretending to be a star tackle in a clutch situation, he was just himself,
just a single normal person in a world that had tossed sanity out the window.

He hoped that would
be enough.

He hit the first
person in his way hard, lowering his shoulder and plowing into soft tissue that
had begun falling from a deep gash in the student’s guts. The kid snarled and
snapped, but didn’t seem to fully engage. Not yet.

But it was going to
happen soon.

The kid fell back,
knocked over two more of the creatures. They all tumbled to the floor in a
tangle of limbs, snarling and nipping at one another like rabid animals.

Ken was already
past them.

He sidestepped two
more things.

Not students.
Not kids. You didn’t kill a kid, didn’t kill Matt Anders, you killed something
but not him
….

Juked around a clot
of four or five of them.

They all dropped
their chins.

One focused its
eyes on him. A hand reached for him. The thing – a thing that had once been a
student, had once been someone’s daughter – growled.

The sound moved
through the hall like a ripple in a once-calm pool. It bounced over the lockers,
up and down the walls, growing louder and louder as it did.

Ken felt warmth on
his legs. He didn’t know if it was blood from his wounds, or if he had just
pissed himself. He didn’t know if it mattered, either.

The things were
around him.

And they were, once
more, awake.

He was at the top
of the stairs. He threw himself over the lip of the steps, tossing himself
bodily down and trusting to gravity to get him to the bottom faster than he
could do if running. It was a good way to break a bone, he knew, but he also
knew that broken bones would be irrelevant in the next moments. Speed was all
that counted.

The growling behind
him took on a heightened, fever tone. He knew somehow that every eye – or at
the very least, every eye that hadn’t been gouged or bitten or otherwise
mangled into oblivion – was swiveling in his direction. Orienting on a
threat. On prey.

Then he realized
that the bigger problem was in front of him. Two students, arms wide to catch
him, stood on the steps at the landing a few feet below. He was pitching
straight at them, no way to halt his fall. Their hands opened and closed
spastically, their faces ran red with blood.

Their teeth chittered
and snapped, eager for his flesh.