From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (71 page)

Ken thought they
were going to end up back in the office of Brooke Gale, CPA, but before he’d
taken more than a few steps Dorcas grabbed him and propelled him sideways. He
thought she had gone crazy; was going to ram him into one of the cars whose
alarms was screeching away. But at the last second she swung him and instead
he found himself shoved through the open door of the passenger side.

A moment later,
Dorcas was slinging herself in after him, jabbing at him with her elbows and
screaming, “Get over, get over!”

He heard something clang.
Her monster-sized lug wrench. He wondered why she had dropped it, then
realized she’d done so to make room, to make it easier to close the car door.

As soon as Dorcas
had clearance, she slammed the door shut. Ken heard a meaty thud as it closed
and Dorcas grunted. She must have closed it against her foot or hip. She
didn’t seem to care, though. Nor did she appear to mind the loss of her
formidable weapon.

She just hunkered
down in her seat and motioned for Ken to do the same.

Ken was still half-straddling
the gear selector, so he lurched over until he was fully in the driver’s seat,
then he slunk down as well.

The car alarm was
deafening inside the vehicle. Even so, he thought he could hear a strange
sound. A low, vibrating drone.

“What is that?” he
whispered.

Dorcas looked like
she was about to respond, but instead of answering she said, “The vents!” in
that whisper/shout that Ken was starting to associate with the new normality of
his existence. She batted out her hands, seeming to punch at the dashboard. A
moment later Ken realized she was slamming the air conditioning vents into
their closed positions. He did the same for the ones on the driver’s side,
still unsure what was going on but trusting in Dorcas’ sense of what should be
done.

The sound grew
louder. And with it, screams.

A moment later, Ken
saw. He understood why Dorcas had done what she had done.

And hoped it would
be enough.

Ken thought at
first that he was seeing a sentient cloud. That a piece of the smoke that had
engulfed much of Boise must have broken away, gained intelligence – at least on
a rudimentary level – and begun prowling the streets.

It was an insane
thought. But the world had very recently gone insane, so he didn’t think he
was too out of line having things like that in his mind.

Then he realized
that what came into view – what he glimpsed over the edge of the car door and
the dashboard – wasn’t a cloud of smoke. It was black and constantly
shifting. Composed of millions of bits of what looked like particulate matter.

But it wasn’t
smoke.

It was a swarm.

The low humming he
had heard when Dorcas pushed him into the car: the buzz of millions of wings.

And the screams
were coming from deep within the cloud. Shrieks that sounded like someone
being burned alive. Worse.

The swarm paused in
the middle of the street, as though having a committee meeting about which
direction to move next. Ken realized he was holding his breath.

The bees hovered an
eternal moment. Then headed right at the car. Right for them.

Dorcas started
muttering under her breath. Ken couldn’t tell if she was cursing or praying.

He started tearing
off his shirt. Buttons popped.

Mags gave me
this shirt. She’s gonna be pissed
.

“What are you
doing?” hissed Dorcas.

“The vents!”

“We closed ‘em.”

“You wanna trust
that?”

She hissed.
Started to take off her own blood-spattered flannel shirt, leaving her in a
once-white tank top that had already turned cataract gray.

Ken shoved the
fabric of his shirt against the air conditioning vents on his side of the
dashboard, trusting Dorcas to do the same. In almost the same instant, it
sounded like a hailstorm had engulfed the car. Sharp raps and taps against the
windows, lower thunks against the roof and side panels.

The swarm had
engulfed them.

He felt like
screaming. The only reason he didn’t was that Dorcas was perfectly silent
beside him. Providing a sense of calm that he could not have maintained on his
own.

No, that wasn’t
true, he realized. He wasn’t screaming because he was sure if he started, that
would be it. He would just keep on screaming until whatever madness had
infected the world made its way fully into his mind as well. He would scream
until the world ended.

And then what would
become of Maggie? Of the kids?

He knew he was deluding
himself. Knew they were probably dead already. But he also knew that he had
to cling to something. Sanity hung by the slim thread of hope. He wouldn’t be
the one to snip it.

The bees were so
thick outside the windows that he could see nothing else. Just masses of black
and flashes of orange-yellow in the dark cloud. Just millions of stingers
punching ineffectually at the windows.

He felt something
under his fingers.

Please, dear
God, please don’t let that be –

Another movement.

“They’re getting in,”
he said. He practically had to scream to be heard over the din.

Dorcas nodded. “I
feel ‘em.”

Ken looked around
the car, trying to spot something else that would provide a better seal than
their shirts.

Something buzzed.
Not outside the car.
Inside
.

And he realized
that they hadn’t covered the lower vents.

A moment later he
felt the first insect buzz by his ear.

A moment after that
Dorcas shouted in pain.

And a moment after
that
the first face appeared at the window.

It was one of the
things. One of the zombies. Dressed in the outfit of a motorcycle cop, the
rounded helmet making him appear almost as insectile as the bees that
surrounded him. His mouth was open, and Ken could see bees crawling around the
thing’s gaping maw.

They didn’t seem to
be stinging him. Or rather,
it
.

The thing’s mad
eyes oriented on Ken. It growled that horrific growl, and started to pound a
gloved hand against Ken’s window.

Ken felt a searing
pain at the nape of his neck. Bee sting.

He wondered how
long it would take for either him or Dorcas to just lose it and drop their
shirts from the vents, allowing more bees to flood in and hastening their
deaths.

He wondered why it
mattered. Maybe it would be best to just let it happen.

Another thump,
another face. This time at Dorcas’ window. It was a little girl, barely tall
enough to look into the car. She had blonde hair that had been braided into
pigtails. Ken was sure before all this happened she had probably been
beautiful, a shoo-in for the next Swiss Miss ad campaign. But now her pigtails
had been dyed red, and her lower face was caked in gore.

Her teeth started
clicking together, chittering, a sound that penetrated the thick hum of the
bees and made Ken feel like someone was stabbing his soul with a psychic icepick.
Like the cop, she started pounding on the window. She had to reach up to do
it.

Bees crawled over
her skin. Her open eyes. She paid them no heed. Only scrabbled at the glass,
trying to get inside the car.

Liquid heat poured
over the skin on Ken’s knee. Another bee sting. A groan escaped his lips. He
glanced at Dorcas. She was still holding her shirt against the vents, but she
was white-faced and shaking. She had blood running down her chin, and Ken
thought she might have bit clean through her lip.

Whump.

Ken looked back at
his window. The cop wasn’t hitting the glass with his gloved hands anymore.
He had switched to headbutting the window with his helmet.

Whump
.

He rebounded off
the window. Growled and hit it again.

A crack appeared in
the safety glass.

One more hit and
the window would shatter. The bees could come in and Ken didn’t know if he’d
die in a flood of stings, or if he’d survive long enough to turn into one of
the things outside.

The once-cop reared
back.

The final hit didn’t
come. The cop leaned back, but didn’t punch through the glass with his helmet.
He just kept leaning and leaning, until he was almost bent over backward. A
glance out the other window showed the child doing the same.

Their mouths
opened. They were breathing in unison.

“What the hell –
Ow!” said Dorcas.

“I’ve seen this
before,” said Ken. “I don’t know what it means, but we have a couple minutes
before they start pounding us.”

“Fat lotta good
that does us with the bees.”

A noise that
sounded half solid, half gaseous, drew their attention. The windows cleared of
the millions of bees. They hadn’t flown away. They just fell to the ground in
a carpet of bodies that was inches thick for fifty feet in every direction.

“What the hell…?”
Dorcas said again.

“Come on,” shouted
Ken. “We don’t have much time.”

He threw his door
open. It knocked into the cop, who fell to the ground. Ken jumped out of the
car. His feet came down on the bees and crunched through them to solid
ground. He felt sick to his stomach at the sound.

The nausea
increased when he saw the cop, flat on his back in a sea of insect bodies,
panting that strange pant, his mouth wide open and his eyes rolled back to
white.

Ken couldn’t tell for
sure if the bees were dead, or just stunned like the zombies. He thought dead,
but he didn’t plan to stick around and check for tiny pulses.

A thud sounded
behind him as Dorcas got out of her side. He looked over and didn’t see her,
then she rose into view, shaking motionless bees off her super lug wrench with
a grimace of disgust.

She looked at the
little girl. “What’s this?” she said. It was a question to herself, Ken was
sure. Just a whispered bit of reflection that he had overheard. But it made
him ask as well.

What
is
going on?

He still didn’t know.
Didn’t even know if this was the same thing he had seen before, or something
totally different.

It didn’t matter.
He was alive. That mattered.

Dorcas was alive.
Another thing that mattered.

He hadn’t found his
family.

That mattered most
of all.

“Time to go,” he
said.

Dorcas nodded.
“Hell, yes.”

They ran to the
street first, heading in the same direction they had before Dorcas spotted the
bees. Ken led the way this time. He suspected they only had a few minutes of
peace before the zombies came out of their trances and resumed attacking
anything that moved. So he ran as fast as he could, given his injuries and the
exhaustion that was starting to creep in like a dark smudge at the edges of his
vision.

But as fast as he
wanted to move, he was compelled to slow down when they came to the three lumps
in the middle of the street.

“Bees,” was all
Dorcas said. Then she was past, gesturing for him to come on.

Ken nodded, sparing
one more glance at the three things in the road. They were only recognizable
as people because of the clothing that wrapped their bodies like too-tight
sausage skins. The rest was a bloated, swollen mass. Thousands of stings
covering every inch of exposed skin. He shuddered to think how close he had
come to looking like this.

Day’s still
young
.

He ran. Caught up
to Dorcas. He didn’t know if she was slowing down due to age or exhaustion, if
she was simply letting him keep up, or if he was getting some extra charge from
the fear for his family that kept nipping at his heels. No matter which it
was, he was soon in the lead.

He didn’t know how
long they had to run. He had been in the high school ceiling last time this
happened. Had it been seconds? Minutes? Time and panic had bled any sense of
time from his mind.

They ran toward the
Wells Fargo Center. Bearing east.

One block. It took
forever, moving around the shattered remnants of cars and debris fields that
looked like they belonged in warzones and not in middle America.

Two blocks. Ken
tried not to count the bodies he saw. It was a lot.

They passed a clot
of about fifty zombies in the street. Some of them held pieces of a recently
torn-apart person in their hands. All stared at the sky. Breathing in unison.

Three blocks.

Two more zombies in
the street.

Ken ran past.

And Dorcas
screamed.