From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (70 page)

End of the
world.

End of the
world.

End of the
world. Apocalypse. Go directly to jail, and definitely do not collect two
hundred dollars.

Ken blinked slowly
as the words danced an electrified jitterbug through his mind.

It felt like his
eyelids had gained weight. He didn’t remember blinking being this hard before.

Before
what
?

And then it snapped
back. Images of Becca clawing at her torn throat, of Stu with his blank stare,
of Matt flipping out the window. Joe Picarelli pulling looping coils of guts
out of a student.

Falling.

The SUV exploding.

He looked at the
woman above him. She was crouching, her palm parallel to the floor in the
universal sign for “shut-the-hell-up-bad-shit-is-happening.” Ken didn’t say
anything, just studied her.

She looked like she
was in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. It was hard to tell through the
blood and dirt that coated her skin and clothing. The only real clues were the
hints of gray that peeked through her matted hair, and the wrinkles on her face
that had caught thick streaks of gore.

Ken’s gaze moved
from her body to her hands. One was still outstretched, still signaling
quiet. The other held what looked like an L-shaped lug wrench, though it was
much longer than any other such tool Ken had ever seen: nearly four feet of
solid metal. The socket end looked clotted with blood and hair, and the other
end terminated in a flat, blade-like apparatus that was probably supposed to be
used for wedging tires off of rims. It was bloody as well.

The woman looked
down at him. “They’re gone.”

“Where are we?”
said Ken. He tried to sit up. Pain sprinted from the base of his spine
through the top of his head. He winced.

The woman squatted
beside him. “Easy,” she said. “We’re in some tax office. H&R Block or
something.”

“Tax office?” Ken
couldn’t quite make sense of the words. He looked around. All he saw was
beige ceilings, a beige wall, and some sort of desk/reception setup that hid
everything else from view.

His benefactress
seemed to think he was challenging her choice of refuge. “It was open and it
was empty,” she said. “Not like I had a lot of choices, draggin’ your ass.”

“No, I….” Ken shut
his mouth. Tried to order his thoughts. “Thank you. For whatever you did. I
just don’t understand what exactly that
was
.”

She smiled then, as
though he had said something tremendously funny. “Understanding went out the
window about an hour ago, kiddo.”

He smiled back.
“I’m Ken,” he said. It felt weird to say it. He was laying on his back,
possibly badly hurt, looking up at a woman who looked like she followed the
Countess Bathory bathing regimen, and he felt compelled by some sense of good
manners to introduce himself. He laughed.

She laughed, too.

“I’m Dorcas,” she
answered. She shook the lug wrench at him at the same time. “And if you make
fun of my name, I
will
brain you.” She was smiling as she said it.

“I wouldn’t dream
of it.” He held up a hand. “You mind helping me up?”

She nodded, and her
free hand clasped his. She had a very strong grip. A lot of the women in the
area worked farms, and Ken guessed Dorcas was one of them. She certainly had
the attitude of a woman accustomed not just to rowing her own boat, but
chopping down the tree and making the damn thing in the first place.

He got halfway up,
proud of himself for not vomiting all over the desk, and then was stopped by
Dorcas’ hand on his shoulder. “Slow up,” she said. “It’s not smart to be in
full view.”

Ken straightened a
few more inches. Just enough to see over the reception desk. He wanted to see
where in the world he was.

What
his world had become.

At first he didn’t
see anything. Just a wall of windows with “Brooke Gale, CPA,” and “Got Taxes?”
and “Se habla español” written across them in large white letters.

He recognized the
signs. He’d never been in the office – never had a need to, since the kind of
money he made as a teacher generally insured that his taxes could be figured
out on the side of a cereal box and squared by sending Uncle Sam a roll of
shiny nickels – but he drove past it every day.

It was a
quarter-mile from the school.

A quarter-mile
closer to the Wells Fargo Center.

A quarter-mile
closer to Maggie and the kids.

“How did we get
here?” he said.

Dorcas favored him
with a look that made it clear she thought the question an exquisitely stupid
one. “I brought you,” she said.

“How?”

She grimaced. “I
was fixing a flat on the side of the road when everything started to fall apart.
Couple cars crashed, couple more stopped and the people in ‘em came after me.”

“How’d you…?”
Ken’s voice drifted away. He didn’t need to ask. “That’s quite some tire iron
you’ve got.”

“Yeah,” she hefted
it in both hands for a moment like a star hitter about to go on deck. “My
ex-husband made this for me. He was a walking penis, but good with tools. I
think it was his way of letting me know he didn’t actually want to have to be
around to help me with anything ever.”

Ken was saved from
having to figure out how to respond to that by the fact that several figures
ran by the windows. Dorcas grabbed him and hauled him a bit lower, so they
could barely see over the top of the reception desk.

The figures ran
lithely, with a grace and speed that Ken normally associated with professional
athletes. But one of them looked like a soccer mom and the other two were
dressed in fast food uniforms. All three were spattered with blood. The
soccer mom was holding onto something that looked like a human spine.

They were gone as
fast as they came. Just a few streaks of red across the glass.

“How
did
you
get me here?” asked Ken. He was speaking to speak, he knew. Talking to keep
his mind off what had just happened, off the pain that was still roaring
through his body.

“I found you by the
high school. You looked pretty bad, but alive.” Her eyes never wavered from
the front of the office. She looked like a hunter, eyes ready for any sign
that would lead her to what she sought. Ken had been invited to go hunting
several times over the years, but had never gone. He was regretting that fact
now. Something told him it might have offered him a few useful skills.

“Anyway,” Dorcas
continued a moment later, “there had been some kind of explosion, looked like
–”

“An SUV blew up.”

Dorcas nodded.
“Yeah, but it looked like maybe more than that. Maybe hit a gas main or
something as well. Wasn’t a whole lot left of that side of the school.”

“What?” He was
dumbfounded. Somehow the idea that the school had fallen prey to whatever
sickness – attack? infestation? – that had altered everyone was easier for him
to deal with than the concept of the building suffering a gas explosion.

All those kids
dead, he thought.

Then he thought:
they were
already
dead.

Of course, he
didn’t know that. He didn’t know
anything
. He was just guessing. And
guessing was a terrible way to go about making life and death decisions.

Dorcas was nodding
slowly. “Yuh,” she said. “Good thing for you, too, ‘cause I don’t think these
whatever-they-ares would have left you alone if you’d fallen over in the middle
of anywhere else. You being in the middle of a big ol’ kaboom is what saved
you.”

Another one of the
things ran by. Dorcas waited until it was gone, her hands tightening on the
lug wrench to the point that Ken worried the thing beyond the windows would see
her knuckles glowing.

It didn’t, though
it stayed at the windows for a very long time, smelling along the glass like a
two-legged bloodhound. Ken looked around for something to use as a weapon.
The receptionist’s desk was clean to the point of being irritating. The only
things on it were a few post-it notes, a pencil, and some letters. Ken thought
about opening the drawers, but he didn’t know how well-developed the things’
hearing might be.

After another few
breathless moments, the thing ran off. Ken noted that it looked less sure on
its feet than had the first three, though he didn’t know why. It hadn’t
appeared injured. He filed away the information.

“So anyways,”
Dorcas continued, as though they had been interrupted by nothing more than a
minor annoyance, a glitch in the day’s proceedings, “even though you hadn’t
been torn to itty-bitty bits, I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to leave you
there, so I grabbed you and brought you here.”

“But how? No
offense, but I’m a bit too big for you to pick up.”

A cloud of smoke
drifted by the window, as though to underline his question.

Dorcas grimaced.
“Yeah, I had to drag ya. You’ll probably find a fair amount of gravel in the
back of your head, legs, and ass tonight. Sorry.”

Ken tried not to
gawk at her. She had dragged him for a quarter-mile? She had to have done it
one-handed, too, or she wouldn’t have been able to retain her XXL lug wrench.
And she was
apologizing
?

“Why?” he said.
And even as the word escaped him, he wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Why had
she cared to stop for him in the first place? Why would she apologize when
she’d done nothing to warrant an apology? Why had he survived when so many had
not?

Why was any of this
happening?

Dorcas lavished
another one of her “my, aren’t we the idiot?” looks on him. “It was the right
thing to do,” she said. “Jesus said ‘Do unto others.’” Her eyes flashed to
the side. “You’re head’s bleeding again.”

Ken touched his temple.
His fingers came away red. The sight of his blood made him woozy. Or maybe it
wasn’t the sight, but the fact that he’d probably lost so much of it. Either
way, he once again found himself riding a Tilt-a-Whirl that nobody had bothered
to ask him if he wanted a turn on.

Dorcas put a hand
on his shoulder. “You should lay back down.”

“Can’t.” He closed
his eyes, willing the vertigo to stop. It didn’t. He opened his eyes and
concentrated on seeing
through
his dizziness. He seemed to have better
luck with that, if only marginally. “My family’s out there.”

Dorcas’ face
tightened. “Where?”

“Wells Fargo Center.”

She nodded. “Well,
we best get to it, then.”

“To what?”

“To them.”

She started moving
toward the front doors. Ken moved after her, pausing only a fraction of a
second. He didn’t have to ask her why. He knew what she would answer.

“It’s the right
thing to do.”

The Wells Fargo Center
was less than two miles away. Less than a half hour’s hard walk under normal
circumstances.

But then, these
were hardly normal circumstances. Now, with the world spiraling into a
maelstrom of chaos and violence, two miles could take a day. Longer. There
was no way to know.

Ken took a moment
to search the receptionist’s desk. It yielded little more helpful than the
pencil he had already seen. Just a ruler too flimsy to use as a weapon, and a
plastic stapler that would probably fall apart if he tried to use it for
anything more strenuous than attaching one sheet of paper to another.

Welcome to the
world of disposable living
.

Looked like he
would be leaving the office as empty-handed as he came in. At least he was
still alive.

Dorcas led the way
out, creeping on cat-feet to the front of the drab room. She unlatched the
door, and Ken was amazed anew at the woman. Not only had she rescued him, not
only had she dragged him a quarter-mile through decidedly hostile territory,
she had had the presence of mind to lock the front door when she came inside.

The tax preparation
office was in the middle of a small line of businesses. One of the little
groupings of buildings that would grow a few stories every block or so until
they became the dozen or so high rises at the center of downtown Boise.

Ken looked around.
Smoke clouded the air, turning day into a half-lit twilight. It was hard not
to cough. Pits of brightness peeked through the air in every direction as
dozens of fires burned unchecked, as though Hell itself was forcing its way
through to a higher plane – or dragging this plane lower. Cars lay askew in
the streets, some crumpled into each other, some crumpled into buildings,
others simply abandoned. There would be no driving anywhere within city
limits, not in the permanent gridlock that had fallen upon Boise.

Ken could also hear
the sounds of chaos. The crackle of flames. Glass tinkling. Sounds of concrete
and shearing off in the distance, and steel bending under some unimaginable
forces.

Car alarms chirped
all around him, a cacophony of noise that mixed and mingled and could almost
hide the other sounds.

Almost.

But the electronic
screams of the car alarms could not quite mask the flesh and blood shrieks of
people being maimed and dismembered and killed.

And turned.

“Have you seen
anyone get bitten and not turn?” he whispered.

“Turn? What’re you
talking about?” she looked up and down the walkway. Ken followed her gaze.
There were four cars in the small parking lot. Two of them had their doors
hanging open, their own alarms blaring and adding to the bedlam. But no one
could be seen.

There was some
blood on the sidewalk below his feet. Nothing like it had been at the school,
but more than you could write off as a passing nosebleed.

“Turn. Into one
of… one of them.”

Dorcas swiveled to
stare at him with wide eyes. “You mean if you get bit you turn into one of
these crazies?”

Ken nodded. “It
happened to one of my studen – I saw it happen,” he amended, trying not to
think about Stu, screaming as blood streamed through the bite on his shoulder,
staining his letterman jacket even as his eyes drained of their humanity. It
was an impossible thing to try. Ken suspected that moment would be present in
every moment he experienced for the rest of his life, like a horrible stained
glass window through which he viewed the world.

“So they’re
zombies,” said Dorcas.

“What?”

But she was already
moving away, almost dancing down the sidewalk, hugging the walls of the
building as long as she could. She looked like she’d trained for this. Maybe
she had. Ken again regretted not going hunting.

He also wondered at
what she’d said. Zombies?

He was a history
teacher. He believed in facts and events, in what actually happened.

But he also knew
that much of history was a lot closer to fiction than to fact. Often “history”
was simply what the winners of major conflicts got to call their propaganda.

So… zombies.

Zombies – at least
in the movies and stories he knew of – were mindless.
That
certainly
matched up with the things that had taken over Boise. The trouble they
obviously had with doors seemed to bear that out, as did their lack of speech
and their incapacity for fear – the ones that had come out the window with him
hadn’t been afraid, just angry.

Zombies were hard
to kill. Ditto the things here. They had been bashed, blown up, pulled to
pieces. And still they kept coming.

So how did you kill
a zombie? Ken tried to remember the few zombie movies he’d watched. He
preferred light comedies or straight action to horror films. But he thought it
was shooting them in the head. Major brain trauma.

And that
didn’t
jibe. When Becca hit her head she went berserk. When Ken kicked Joe
Picarelli’s skull bones back into his brain, the gym coach rampaged throughout
the hall of the school. Neither died. They just went even crazier.

So no. Not
zombies. Or if they were zombies, then the stories had gotten some things very
wrong.

He realized that
Dorcas was holding up her hand, motioning for him to stop. He skidded to a
halt, instinctively drawing as close to the nearest wall as he could. It was
an ice cream shop. Baskin Robbins. The neon sign that usually bragged about its
“Thirty-OneDerful Flavors” was dark.

Come to think of
it, Ken realized that the lights had been off in the accounting office where
Dorcas had taken refuge.

Were lights on
anywhere in Boise?

In Idaho?

How far did this
go?

Dorcas spun
around. “Go!” she whisper-shouted. “Go, go,
go gogogogogo
!”

She looked
terrified. Ken would have bet she could play a game of high-stakes poker
against a room full of Bond villains. He had no wish to see what had scared
her.

So he ran.