From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (69 page)

Ken didn’t try to
stop. For one thing, he was sure it wouldn’t work. He had already fully
committed to his headlong flight down the stairs, and the treads themselves
were miniature waterfalls of blood that allowed next to no purchase for his
feet. For another, even if stopping were technically possible, he felt his
left leg cry out in anger as he twisted away for a moment. His knee buckled
and he almost went down. The only thing more dangerous right now than falling
into the arms of the things on the landing would be
rolling
into their
arms, he reasoned.

So he didn’t
attempt to halt his downward trajectory. Didn’t try to grab the blood-slicked
banister with his own blood-slicked palms.

Instead he put his
head down, his arms out. He felt like he must look foolish, like if his kids
could see him they would think he was doing a funny dance of some kind. Some
weird imitation of a crab with hip dysplasia meant to amuse them.

But there was
nothing amusing about his intent. He didn’t want to stop, he could only speed
up. Could only drop his head between the two students, grabbing onto both of
them with his arms, lurching forward as they grabbed at him, screaming as their
nails drew red furrows in his back, screaming again as he felt them leaning
down to bite him to tear him to
turn
him, then….

The tinkle of plate
glass, double panes heavy enough to deal with winter storms but not prepared
for the weight of three bodies hurled at them…

… shearing,
screaming pain as glass fell all around him…

… growls, something
tugging at him…

… falling…

… he hit something
hard.

And then all was
dark.

Something was
tugging at him. Pulling his arm.

Ken opened his
eyes. Or thought he did. He couldn’t see anything. What was wrong with his
eyes?

He smelled smoke.
Wondered what was burning. What was happening, where he was.

Where are the
kids?

Is it my
birthday?

His thoughts spun
around in his mind like the lights on a police car, all atwirl and making no
sense at all.

Have to go to
the zoo.

The thing that was
pulling at his arm yanked harder. Ken felt himself blink. Light started to
make its way to his brain, started getting parsed and evaluated. Nothing
concrete yet, but he thought it was only a matter of time.

The pulling at his
arm was getting somehow more… serious? Severe? Like whoever was doing it was
really wanting him to pay attention.

Probably Hope.
She’s never been very patient.

He knew that wasn’t
right. Knew that he was hurt, that his thinking was askew, but knowing it
didn’t stop the flurry of nonsense that seemed determined to captain his mind for
a bit.

The light he was
seeing started to resolve into colors. Orange. Red.

Fire?

That was the first
thought he had that he knew made sense. Something was on fire. Something
close. It explained the smoke he smelled, the colors, the heat he suddenly
realized was washing across his face and making his skin feel like dried
parchment.

Then more detail.
He swiveled his head.

Looked at his arm.

Screamed.

There was something
there. It used to be some
one
, perhaps, but no longer. Not now. You
couldn’t call it someone when it was only there from the waist up.

Another student,
Ken realized. And with the realization came the return of memory, the
recollection of what had happened.

How long was I
out?

The thing next to
him had been torn asunder somehow, and now lay in a blackened, curdled heap of
its own innards. Ken looked around and saw that the student’s lower trunk and
legs – still clad in a mini-skirt that was definitely
not
dress
code-approved – were laying in the grass a good ten feet away. They were
half-pinned under an SUV that was burning brightly, sending black puffs of
smoke into the air like an old West smoke signal, like it was humanity’s last
chance to ask for help.

Maybe it was.

Ken’s gaze went
back to the girl. She was still alive. She couldn’t possibly be alive,
couldn’t be
moving
. But she was. She was pulling at his arm, using him
as an anchor to draw herself closer to him.

Her teeth were only
inches from his fingers.

He screamed and
rolled away. The motion made the world spin into darkness for a moment, made
nausea and pain roll through him in competing surges.

He opened his eyes
again. The girl was still there, a few feet away. She looked enraged, like he
had broken some basic rule of the universe by refusing to be bitten.

“Screw you,” he
said. He meant it as a personal buck-up. It came out as a whisper, as
something that scared him.

How did I get
here?

Then he remembered:
the stairs. The window.

He must have gone
right through. Not his intention, but whatever worked.

What had happened
to the other two? To the ones he took with him?

He cast his eyes
around, looking for them and seeing nothing. That was bad. Not knowing where
the monsters were, he sensed, was a good way to a quick death.

Or worse.

He tried to keep
looking, but sudden exhaustion gripped him and he went limp. He was on his
back, and his eyes went skyward of their own accord.

He looked up,
realizing he was still directly below the window – two and a half stories high
– that he had come out of. Only the fact that the ground below was new-sodded
grass, and a very lucky landing, had kept him from being killed.

He also saw the
reason the two students he’d taken with him hadn’t followed him down and killed
him.

They were hung up
on the outside of the building. One had been pierced through the middle by a
shaft of glass, hanging just outside the window itself. The other kid had
somehow gotten tangled on a flagpole that bore the school’s banner. The teen-thing
was snarling and growling like an oversized fly caught in a spider’s web, but
at least it wasn’t paying attention to Ken.

For now.

He looked around.
Didn’t see any more of the things nearby. But he didn’t think that was likely
to last. Not that he had any basis for that assumption. For all he knew they
would sit down and start composing beautiful haiku in the next few minutes.
But it seemed to him that the safest course was to assume the worst. And the
worst assumption included the things in the school making their way outside.
And soon.

As if to
congratulate him on his sound thinking, he heard a door open nearby. It was
one of the emergency exits, the sound of the door slamming open against the
brick façade of the school accompanied by a harsh electronic alarm.

Maybe it’s
someone normal
.

Whoever it was
screamed. Not in pain, but in rage. The shriek of an animal hearing a hated
sound.

Ken rolled to his
hands and knees. The world kept sliding out from under him and he suspected he
was probably seriously concussed. Maybe worse. He needed medical attention. A
hospital.

The angry growl nearby
suddenly changed. Now it sounded distinctly like a beast that had just caught
sight of a meal.

Ken tried to
stand. Made it to his knees before pitching forward face-first into the lawn.
The grass was soft enough to save him from serious injury, but still felt
bone-shatteringly hard as it ground his lips into his teeth.

He pushed himself
up again. Blood and spit oozed out of his mouth. He saw a tooth, bright white
in the sunlight, sitting naked on the grass.

Whose tooth is
that?

The growling behind
him was louder. Much louder. Like more than one voice, too.

Ken forced himself
up. He felt sick to his stomach, felt like dying might not just be inevitable
but
welcome
. The only thing that kept him going was a sense that he had
to be somewhere. Was supposed to meet someone.

Where am I
supposed to be?

He took several
lurching steps. Vomited on himself but managed to remain upright. He seemed
to recall that puking was a sign that a concussion wasn’t too bad. Or was it
the opposite? Was he dying?

Focus
.

One foot ahead of
another.

He stayed vertical,
but knew he was moving too slow. The
things
were out here. He could
hear them.

He risked a glance
over his shoulder, even though it made his already-spinning world start to
whirl that much faster, like a carnival ride that hadn’t had a government
safety check in decades.

There were three of
them. Four. Now five. Coming out of the school’s side door. They looked
confused, like they weren’t sure how they had gone from indoors to outside;
like doors taxed their suddenly-altered mental states.

They wandered in
tight circles just past the still-burning vehicle that had plowed into the
school. Their movements were jittery, but somehow familiar. They looked like
something Ken had seen before. He sensed it might be important, but didn’t
have a chance to dissect the thought.

Because that was
when they stopped being awed by the outside world; stopped being amazed by the
magic portal that had brought them beyond the walls of the high school.

They saw Ken.

They might have
seen him before, but forgotten him in the strangeness of the outside world. He
didn’t know. But now he saw them clearly zeroing in on him. He heard that
strange, animalistic growl coming from all of them, that ratcheting cry that
screamed of hunger, of rage, of
need
.

They ran for him.

He turned away and
did his best to run as well. Not easy when the world felt like a Slip ‘n Slide
coated in motor oil. His legs kept lurching in opposite directions, like his
brain wasn’t sure which side should be dominant.

There was no way
this was going to work.

He looked over his
shoulder.

Four things that
looked like they had once been students, and one that was vaguely recognizable
as one of the front office staff. They had already halved the distance between
him and them. They traveled in a tight group, coordinated as any group of
special ops soldiers, within inches of each other yet never getting in one
another’s way.

They were at the
burning SUV. Maybe fifteen feet from him.

Fshhh-woosh
.

It sounded at first
like a giant inhaling. Then breathing out. Then….

Boom
.

The SUV exploded.

The fireball went
up twenty feet in the air. It hit the bodies of the two things tangled on the
outside of the building and Ken heard them shriek in pain as their skin curled
and sloughed away from their bones.

More important, the
explosion also rocketed
outward
, completely engulfing the five monsters
chasing him. They didn’t shriek. They didn’t make a single sound. Just
disappeared in the high-intensity explosion.

Ken had an instant
to smile, then the heat reached him. It felt like it seared all the hair off
the back of his head, felt like it burned the shirt off his back. Instant
sunburn.

The shockwave came
next, knocking him off his feet again, back down to his hands and knees. He
heard a voice in the dark hollows of his mind – a voice that sounded
suspiciously like his own – complaining petulantly about that fact.

Hey! I just
managed to get
up
!

Then Ken heard
something new. His mind, shocked, bruised, tossed, concussed, had trouble
figuring out what it was.

Thwap
.

He looked over and
realized that a half-melted SUV door had just landed a few inches from his
head.

He was in the
debris field.

He started to lurch
to his feet. Only one thought in his mind: to get away from the fallout of the
explosion. What had just saved his life might still kill him.

He got as far as a
half-squat before something hit him in the back of the head.

Ken’s head tilted
forward instantly. He felt sticky wetness running down the back of his burned
neck.

Darkness wrapped a
shroud around his sight, and his last thought was, No fair, I just got
up
!

“Stay with me.
Stay with me.”

Ken heard the
words, but they made no sense to him. Not where he was, floating in the
blue-green water of Kauai. It was his honeymoon. He and Maggie were floating,
drifting. Everything was perfect. Perfect….

Except for the damn
sunburn.

He must have been
laying on his stomach too long. His back felt positively blistered.

He turned over on
the raft, flipping over so that he could give his chest an equal chance to
bake. He’d never been one to tan – he wore sunscreen with the same SPF level
as lead paint and still ended up looking like a lobster – but at least he could
embrace the burn.

He looked over at
Maggie. Floating there in a two-piece bathing suit on her own inflatable
raft. A local kid had let them borrow the rafts when Ken told him they were
newlyweds. “Just float, man,” said the kid, with the mellow tones of an island-born.
“Just float, feel the ocean. Let it carry you a while.” Then his deeply
tanned face seemed to split in two, cleaved by a smile so bright it rivaled the
perfect sand underfoot. “Just don’t do the nasty on my rafts, man. My sister
uses these things.”

Then he was gone,
apparently trusting in two strangers to find him and return his property when
they were done.

So Ken and Maggie
floated. Drifted. And he stole glances at his new wife and wondered how
serious the kid had been about his injunction against nasty-doin’ on his rafts.

Maggie didn’t look
at him. But apparently she had some special sense that women had when in the
presence of overblown hormones. “Cool down, Don Juan.”

“I have no idea
what you’re talking about.”

“We’ve had sex,
like, sixteen times today.”

“Not more than
twelve.”

“You’re going to
have to find an entire rhino horn and grind it up in a gallon of Gatorade.”

“Totally worth it.”

“You sure? You
could just dry up and blow away.”

“I’ll chance it.”

He paddled over to
her. She still had her eyes closed, but her smile rivaled that of the kid who
gave them the raft.

He reached for her.

Whoomp
.

Something exploded
in the distance. He looked over his shoulder, but all he saw was surf and
shore, leaves and the too-green-seeming plants that he was still trying to
convince himself weren’t some kind of Hollywood special effect.

He shrugged and
looked back at Maggie. She was still smiling, but now her face was wrong. It
took him a moment to realize what it was about her, but then put his finger on
it: her lower face was missing. The bottom half of her jaw was gone. Her
tongue wagged freely against her chest.

“You okay?” she
asked.

“Yeah,” he said,
though suddenly he didn’t feel so okay.

“C’mere.”

He leaned in to
kiss her.

Another muffled
explosion sounded. He looked at the beach again. The boy who had loaned them
the rafts was there. He was on fire, waving at them and shouting.

“Go with the flow,
man!” Then he turned to ash and glowing embers, a solid outline of what had
once been flesh. “Just give up!”

Ken turned back to
Maggie. She shook her head. “Stay with me,” she said. But now she didn’t
sound like his wife. She sounded old, used up. Spent.

He blinked. And
where Maggie had been, now there was someone else. A woman he’d never seen
before, looking down at him –

(Down
at me? I
was on top of the raft, on top of
her
. How can she be looking
down
at me?
)

– through eyes that
peered at him with concern. The eyes seemed to shine, and it took Ken a second
to realize that it wasn’t so much that they were bright as that the rest of the
woman’s skin was so dark. Dirty.

No. Not dirt.

Blood.

His lips moved.

“What’s… what’s
happening?” he said.

“Shh,” she hissed.
She looked up and away as though waiting for something to pass. Then she
looked back at him. “End of the world, sonny.”