From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (76 page)

Ken saw Dorcas
shift slightly, saw her getting ready to run, to make a break for the back of
the bank and the safety of the vault. Aaron put his free hand on her shoulder,
and Ken saw the cowboy’s knuckles whiten as he silently urged Dorcas to stay
put.

He also noticed
that Aaron had his gun pointed at Dorcas’ back. He wondered if that was
accidental, or if the man planned to use one of his two remaining bullets on
her before letting her be turned.

And who gets the
other bullet? The last bullet?

The tapping at the
glass grew louder, hands and fists battering at the heavy windows. The
growling was a rippling, surging undertow, dragging Ken into a place where
despair and death were the only possible outcomes – and became, in their way,
the only welcome options.

He felt himself
start to rise. The power of the sound, of so many of the
things
made it
impossible to do anything else. His knees popped, and his left leg twinged,
the pain from when he had twisted his back to avoid falling into a student in a
hall only a few hours and a million years ago yanking him suddenly back into
reality.

Had he really been
about to stand up? To
give
up?

Yes.

He fell back to the
floor. Almost to his belly. Looked at Dorcas and Aaron. Dorcas was gripping
her broken arm, her face white and her jaw clenched. Under other circumstances
Ken would have guessed she was in pain, holding herself to abate the agony.
But now he suspected that she was
causing
the discomfort. Using it to
keep her grounded, to counteract the strangely hypnotic effect of the zombies’
shrieks.

And Aaron…. Aaron
had his eyes closed. Showing no outer signs of turmoil or stress. He almost
seemed to be napping.

The noises of a
thousand hands slamming the windows ceased. It didn’t peter off, didn’t
dissipate, just suddenly stopped as the zombies moved away as one. Off to the
next target. To the next victim.

Ken started to peek
over the counter. But a motion caught his eye. Aaron, gesturing for him to
wait. He did. A moment later, Aaron nodded, and Ken looked over the
countertop. Just in time to see a last zombie ambling away.

He glanced at
Aaron.

How had the cowboy
known?

No one moved for a
full five minutes after the things were gone. Then Dorcas stopped pressing her
broken arm, and exhaled explosively. She wiped at tears that were streaming
down her cheeks.

“We should go,” she
said.

“You still want
to?” asked Aaron. Ken got the feeling the cowboy wasn’t asking him – just
Dorcas. Like the other man had decided that Ken was skirting the edges of
Crazytown.

Aaron’s sticking
around for Dorcas. Not for me
.

He wondered what
would happen if Dorcas said she
didn’t
want to go. If he’d have the
strength to keep going toward his family.

Toward the center
of town.

Wouldn’t it be
better – smarter – to run? To get out of the urban center? To go somewhere
with fewer people… fewer zombies?

Dorcas nodded,
“Let’s go find his family.”

And that answered
that. She was still a virtual stranger. Ken knew almost nothing about her.
But she had rescued him, and was willing to risk herself to rescue his loved
ones.

For a moment,
standing on the brink of the end of the world, on the edge of a doom greater
than any he had ever imagined possible, Ken felt like things would work out.

Then he stood. Got
a good look at the windows. Red handprints smeared across them from top to
bottom. Light filtering through them in splashes of scarlet that made it seem
as though the interior of the bank was awash in blood.

“You guys ready?”
he asked. His voice came out husky, the tone of a man struggling to hang on to
hope.

Sounds beside him,
the gentle whispers of a man and woman standing.

“Let’s go,” he
said.

They stepped
outside.

Ken led the way.
The entry to the bank, like the entry to most places of business in this part
of the world, consisted of an interior set of doors and an exterior set. The
typical setup for extreme cold weather, allowing for an “airlock” of sorts
where people could shuffle off their winter snow, snap their wet umbrellas, and
shift into the warmer interior.

Ken felt fine going
through the interior doors. He pushed them open and stepped into the small
anteroom. Aaron and Dorcas stepped in with him. The interior doors shut
behind them.

He felt trapped.

Claustrophobia
gripped him in a way that he had never before experienced. He was in a huge
glass bowl, one that allowed a floor to ceiling view of him on two sides.
Nowhere to hide. If one of the hordes came by, or even a few individual
zombies….

He wanted to run
back into the bank. Wanted to hide in the vault until this all ended. Even if
the end that came was his death.

He remembered the
feeling of despair that came when he called on the cell phone. The need to
give up that he felt when the zombies screamed. Was this part of that? A
residual effect that would eventually fade?

He hoped so.

He doubted it.

Ken realized he was
standing still. Frozen by panic, an easy target.

Move, dammit
.

He couldn’t.

He thought of
Maggie’s face. Of Derek’s lopsided grin. Of the silly faces Hope made
whenever she posed for a camera. Of Liz’s burbling baby laugh.

Will I find them
alive?

He grabbed the
outer door. Swung it open.

He didn’t step
out. Just listened.

No screaming. No
cries of pain. No growling.

No sound of
thunder.

He nodded over his
shoulder at Dorcas and Aaron. They joined him on the street. Aaron still had
one hand on Dorcas’ shoulder, still had the other curled around his silver
Magnum. The hammer was cocked.

The street was empty.

Smoke filled the
space between the buildings. Car alarms could be heard pealing their shrill
cries up and down the city. None on this street.

Ken spared a quick
glance at the car next to the bank. The one the zombies had swarmed around.
It was a blue Nissan sedan. The windows had been knocked out, and dents dipped
sharply into the car’s frame every few inches.

Ken wondered what
the hands that had done this looked like. He hoped they were mangled and
useless; that they weren’t possessed of some strange healing faculties.

The interior of the
car was empty. Shards of glass littered the seats, a parking permit for one of
the local neighborhoods hung from the rearview mirror.

A single thumbprint
of blood on the beige dashboard.

Ken moved away from
it.

The bank they had
hid in was on the corner of 12th and Idaho. The Wells Fargo Center was on 9th
and Main. Only about four blocks away.

A lifetime.

He began to walk.
Staying in the shadows as much as he could. Not easy to do. Much of this part
of the city block was devoted to parking lots for the local business. The lots
were choked with cars, many of them on fire, and Ken had to keep crossing and
re-crossing the street, Aaron and Dorcas close behind, to find buildings to
walk beside.

Plus, it was almost
three o’clock and the sun was high overhead. What shadows were cast by
buildings and the few trees that had not been plowed under by runaway vehicles
were thin and held close to the objects that cast them. And all were rendered
weak by the ever-present gloom of the smoke that hung a pall over everything.

Besides, he didn’t
know if the zombies saw the same way he did. Maybe they saw
better
in
shadows. Maybe they saw heat waves, or pheromones.

Still, it made him
feel better to hug the buildings. Dorcas and Aaron did the same.

One of the problems
with any city is the feeling of disconnection. It’s a fact of life: you can’t
see more than a block in any direction when you’re standing among buildings
that reach into the sky. Boise was smaller than most big cities – only about
two hundred thousand people, about a dozen real high rise buildings – but it
was big enough to provide that same feeling of disorientation. That strange
sensation of being right next to something that could be
anything
.

That was why it was
such a surprise when Ken came across the rubble. Huge pieces of concrete, some
of it so white it seemed to gleam in the sunlight, other pieces gray and
ashen. He couldn’t figure out where they had come from.

Dorcas figured it
out first. She sobbed, a cry of anguish that exploded out of her. “It’s the
One Capital Center,” she managed.

Ken gaped. That
was impossible. The One Capital Center was still a block and a half away.

He began picking
his way between the pieces of rubble. Some of it had sheared through other
buildings on either side of the street.

He saw a shoe.
Didn’t look closer. Didn’t want to see.

He walked around a
huge piece of glass and steel and concrete, a chunk the size of an elevator.

And stopped dead in
his tracks.

The street was
blocked.

No, not blocked.
Gone
.

And Dorcas was
right. The rubble they had been walking through was definitely the remains of
the One Capital Center. Ken could tell, because he was looking at what
appeared to be the top three floors of that building.

It was as though
someone had sliced off the top of the One Capital Center, an almost perfect
cross-section, and carefully positioned it a full block away from where it
should be. The floors were laid across Idaho Street, sagging across the middle
of the road, hanging on the buildings on either side. The bottom level – what
Ken guessed had once been the twelfth floor – sagged low enough almost to touch
the road. Every window had burst, and he could see right into the offices that
had once been an everyday part of life a block over and some two hundred feet
higher.

Almost as
incredible, the buildings to either side of the displaced building had been
crushed into rubble. Not a single door or window could be made out, not a
single storefront could be discerned. Just two uniform mountains of debris,
one on each side of Idaho Street, which glittered eerily as minute bits of
glass caught what light penetrated the smoke and other particulates in the air.

“What could have
–” Aaron’s voice almost echoed in the space created between the buildings on
three sides. Even the ever-present bleating of car alarms was quieter here, as
though reverencing the dark miracle of this event.

“Must’ve been one
of the jets,” said Ken.

“An airliner
wouldn’t do this,” said Aaron. “Maybe make a building fall down, but not blow
its top like this.”

“Maybe one of the
stealth fighters,” said Ken. He was whispering. They all were. Praying in a
chapel of the damned and the dead.

“Stealth
fighters?” Aaron sounded surprised. “There aren’t any stealth fighters
stationed near here. Not even at the Mountain Home base.”

Ken shrugged.
“Maybe not, but I saw two flying over the city when this…” he waved a hand,
encapsulating the nightmare they had found themselves living, “… all started.
One crashed into the other.”

Aaron pursed his
lips, thinking, and Ken wondered again about this cowboy. “Maybe,” said
Aaron. “Depends on the payload, but maybe.” Then he looked around. Shrugged
as if deciding the question was academic. “We should get moving,” he said
quietly. He stepped toward the sagging rubble before them.

Dorcas pulled
back. “Shouldn’t we go around?” she said.

Aaron shook his
head. “Can’t,” he said, as calmly as though discussing which route to take to
the movies, which kind of cereal to buy at the store. “We’re trapped here. No
exit. Gotta go forward.”

“Why can’t we go
back?” said Ken.

And then he heard
the thunder.

Two hundred
thousand people in Boise. Maybe twenty or thirty thousand more during the day,
when people came in for work.

Half of them turned
instantly.

Odds were that of
the remaining half, most were killed in the first few minutes. And the great
majority of those that remained were turned.

So how many zombies
roaming the streets? A hundred fifty thousand? A hundred eighty?

Ken did all these
calculations in the instant it took to turn toward the tired-looking,
decapitated chunk of the One Capital Center.

In the time it took
to take Dorcas’ hand and get to where Aaron was waiting for them, the cowboy’s
hand resting casually on one of the broken window frames of the building’s
displaced twelfth floor, Ken did another calculation.

Maggie and the kids
were dead. Out of two hundred thousand people – and change – there was no
chance they had survived. The world had ended. Skyscrapers had literally been
cut to pieces. A mother and her children alone had no chance.

“Come on,” said
Aaron. His voice was brisk, and Ken realized he had stopped in mid-step,
halfway into the building that lay in the middle of the street. As though
pausing between one world and another, deciding which Hell he would prefer.

The thunder was
joined by screams and growls. He didn’t have to look to know the first zombies
had caught sight of them.

How many
thousands? How long before they catch us?

The growls made him
want to give up. He realized it was some kind of psychic effect, just one more
way they attacked. But knowing it didn’t change its effectiveness.

Just give up
.

He looked at
Aaron. The cowboy nodded quietly, as though to say, “If you want to stay, I
won’t stop you. Man’s gotta choose his own path.”

Ken stepped into
the building.

Aaron clapped him
on the back, half encouragement, half propulsion. Ken stumbled forward.

Into the darkness
of a world destroyed.