From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (77 page)

Part of the reason
Ken chose history as a profession was the outright strangeness of it. He
delighted in the twists and turns, the odd and unpredictable moments. As a
kind of testament to the strange, each year he told his senior students the
tale of Royal Air Force Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade.

Alkemade was a rear
gunner in a bomber during World War II. When his plane was attacked by German
fighters, he discovered his parachute had malfunctioned. Faced with the choice
of staying in his plane and burning alive, or jumping and dying on impact, he
chose the latter.

He fell eighteen
thousand feet. Slammed into pine trees and the snowy ground of the Third
Reich.

And found he had
not only survived the fall, but done so with nothing more than a sprained leg.
He was captured by the Gestapo, who, upon verifying his claims of falling
almost four miles out of a plane with no chute, made him a prisoner of war… and
treated him more or less like royalty.

Now, moving swiftly
into the remains of the top of the One Capital Center, Ken wondered how those
Germans would have reacted to an entire
building
plopping down apparently
untouched in their midst.

The interior of the
building was surprisingly intact. Chairs had rolled around, papers were
everywhere. But a lot of the desks and filing cabinets appeared to be close to
where they should be.

Some of the desks
still had people sitting at them.

Bloody, broken.
But still there. As though even death could not stop some of the more
dedicated workers from running the rat race to the bitterest of ends.

The survivors moved
through the outer office, which was mostly cubicles and secretary stations.
Through a door.

The screams behind
them sounded muffled for a moment. Ken remembered that the things at the high
school seemed to have trouble with doors. He hoped that was a problem shared
by all of the zombies.

Aaron took the
lead, breaking to the left in the hallway the door opened into. The floor
slanted subtly upward, creaking underfoot. Ken wondered how much stress this piece
of the building could take before just folding into itself like a hundred
thousand ton house of cards.

The building
shuddered.

“They’re inside,”
whispered Dorcas.

“Yup,” said Aaron.

“Doors,” said Ken.

“What?” said Aaron.

“They have trouble
with doors.”

Then he heard the
noise of a door swinging open. The growl bounced its way into the hall.

“Apparently not
anymore,” said Aaron.

“Run!” Dorcas
screamed.

His feet pounded
through the near-dark of the corridor, a place that had no business being here.
And Ken couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t belong, either. That he had
overstayed his welcome in a world that had changed so radically that he no
longer understood it.

Not that he ever
had. Not really. All he had ever been one hundred percent sure of was that
Maggie loved him. And that he loved her and the kids. So if they were gone…
what use sticking around?

He turned a
corner. Felt his depression lessen. Realized it was that damn screaming.
That growling, that psychic attack.

They’re getting
stronger.

That had to explain
why they were barreling through the doors, too. Ken had led the way, pushing
through several fire doors in the halls of the dismembered structure, slamming
each shut behind them. It made no difference. The zombies opened the doors
just fine.

They’re getting
smarter
.

He looked behind
him. Couldn’t see their pursuers. But he could hear them. Slavering,
growling, too many bodies crammed into too small a space. But he knew that
they wouldn’t be falling over one another like a human mob would do. They
would all know exactly where the others were, would move and adjust to make way
when necessary. Only when there was a need to climb atop their unnatural
brothers and sisters – like when they had climbed to reach for Ken and Dorcas
on top of the garage outside the homeless shelter – would they step in one
another’s path.

Ken pushed himself
to run faster.

The hall grew
brighter. Shattered windows ahead. A way out.

He could see Idaho
Street, littered by more refuse. Something that looked like a plane fuselage.

And another
screaming horde of zombies coming right at them.

“Ken,” said Aaron.
The cowboy still sounded so matter-of-fact it was creepy.

“I see them,” said
Ken. He did
not
sound matter-of-fact.

“Where do we go?” said
Dorcas. She was panting, and sounded as panicked as Ken did. For some reason
that made him feel a bit better.

Small
consolation not to be the only terrified person when you get torn to pieces
.

“Up,” said Aaron.
He jerked his head to the side.

There was a small
side branch to the corridor. A dark sign that said “Exit” in what had probably
once been brightly-lit green. Now, in the darkness, it looked like it was
written in frozen ichor.

They ran down the
side hall. Ken hoped they weren’t just running to an elevator – one that was
probably still lodged somewhere in the rest of the One Capital Center, a block
away. Or that if they
were
heading toward a stairwell, that that
stairwell was going to be usable: no guarantees the rest of the building’s upper
levels would be in as good a shape as the part they had already passed through.

So many things
to go wrong
.

Just run, Ken.
Worry later.

He ran.

The corridor ended
in a bank of elevators. One of the sets of steel doors was shut, the other
featured doors that had been twisted and bent by the massive forces that had
sent the building here.

“Shit,” said
Dorcas.

“Here,” said Aaron
at almost the same moment. A small door they had already passed. They had
missed it in the near-darkness of this part of the building.

The zombies were
behind them. Ken could hear them in the darkness. Moving slower, as though
searching more carefully in the depths of the structure.

Something creaked.
The building lurched under their feet. Ken shouted.

The zombies
screamed as though in answer.

Lights in the
darkness. Ken realized he was seeing the zombies’ eyes. They glinted like
those of hyenas around a tribal fire. Hungry. Lapping up the light and
holding it inside.

“Go!” Aaron cried.
He sounded nervous. Ken did not feel at all happy about that fact.

The three survivors
ran through the stairwell door.

The hall had been dark.

The stairwell was
black
.

Ken froze
automatically. As though the lack of visual input was a wall that he had
walked into face first. An immovable object met by a very stoppable force.

Then he heard the
noises. The things.

He reached out.
One hand feeling for a banister, the other for Dorcas. He found both at the
same moment. “You guys with me?” he asked.

Dorcas said,
“Gotcha.”

Aaron grunted. Ken
took that for a yes.

He started up. He
had no way of knowing what lay before him. He could be marching them straight
at a sheer drop-off. And worse than the sense of physical disorientation was
the emotional vertigo. A few hours ago he was part of the human race; a member
of the top link on the food chain.

Now he was a blind
grub, running through the torn remnants of humanity’s iron trees, blindly
burrowing for shelter from the new apex predators.

He drew Dorcas and
Aaron up, up, up. Climbing – slipping, tripping – up unseen stairs toward an
equally dark future.

Below them, the
fire door opened.

Snarls. Growls.
The unspoken imperative to
give up, give in, give up, GIVE IN
.

Ken kept pulling,
kept climbing.

The banister
twisted under his hands. He thought it must have warped in its strange flight
through the air. Then realized it was just the turn at the landing.

The things below
began climbing. He could hear them, but it seemed like they were quieter. His
own labored breathing almost overpowered the noise of the throng pressing into
the stairwell behind him and his new friends.

The near silence of
the zombies scared him. Badly. Things were changing in the world. And the
changes were all for the worse.

One of the zombies
coughed. The sound seemed to be swallowed up by the stairwell. But not before
the others began making the same sound. It wasn’t a normal cough, not the kind
of thing Ken associated with a cold or a bit of dust gone down the windpipe.
It was hacking. Painful. It sounded like the things behind them were in the
throes of some horrific ordeal.

Dorcas’ hand
crushed his knuckles. He guessed she was trying to keep from screaming. He
knew
he
was.

He kept moving up.
Step after dark step, the blind literally leading the blind.

The coughing,
chewing hack-sound remained below them. Whatever was happening was keeping the
zombies locked in their place.

Then the coughing
stopped.

The growling
started again. And maybe it was just Ken’s imagination, but to him the sound
was deeper now. Stronger.

“
Faster
,”
whispered Aaron.

Ken rounded another
landing. Stepped forward. His foot slammed into something hard and
unyielding. It was his left foot, of course, the pain of the hit mixing with
the pain he was already feeling in his left leg. He almost yelped. Bit his
lip and swallowed the sound.

Dorcas, moving
quickly behind him, slammed into his back. The momentum drove him forward, and
then another, softer hit as Aaron hit
her
and pushed them
both
into whatever Ken had knocked into.

Ken pushed himself
away from the thing. Felt it with his free hand. It felt like a file
cabinet. A big one, made of heavy sheet metal or maybe even steel. Ken pushed
it. It didn’t budge.

“Back,” he
whispered.

The growling below
was closer.

He hoped that there
was a door at the landing they had just passed.

He hoped that they
could get to it before the zombies got to
them
.

Ken did not like to
race. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed the martial arts: there was no
running. At least, not to see who could get to the finish line first. His
body type was just a bit on the thick side to be effective as a sprinter. Not
that he was fat, but he didn’t have that long, lithe form that enabled people
to knife through a hundred-yard dash in record time.

Now he was running
the most important ten feet of his life. Down stairs, in pitch black, to a
finish line that might or might not hold the hoped-for door. And even if there
was
a door, what if it was warped in its frame, like the elevator doors
had been? Or what if something was blocking it from the other side?

He ran like Maggie
was on the other side of the door – the door that he hoped was there.

He heard the
growling, the tramping of more feet than he could count. His pulse thundered
in his ears, but did not take away the sounds of the things coming straight at
him.

Forget about
them. Think of Maggie.

She’s dead, you
know.

Maggie. In her
bathing suit, like she was in Kauai
.

Like she was in
your dream. Dead and pulled to pieces
.

He slammed into the
wall. His whole body hit at once, nose and groin and knees and toes. He
groaned.

The growls seemed
to orient on the sound. He felt a hot hand on his arm, a hand slick and wet
and lacerated.

A gust of warm air
as something moved past him. He heard a grunt – a reassuringly human sound.
The thud of flesh on flesh. Then Aaron bellowed, “Get the door open!” from just
to Ken’s side.

Down
the stairs, in the midst of
them
.

Ken tried to yank
his wits back into place, one hand reaching out to fumble around on cool concrete,
the other moving around his face of its own accord, as though he was worried he
might find that parts of him had fallen off with the impact.

There was another
thud. A screech that disappeared into nothing. One of the zombies must have
fallen – or been thrown – over the stairwell. Not that there could be far to
fall – the decapitated building only went down to the street level thirty feet
below. But the screech cut off with a wet smack as the thing hit whatever
rubble and wreckage served as the non-building’s foundation.

Not that it
mattered. There were probably a hundred – a thousand, ten thousand – more of
the things. A single one falling wouldn’t make a difference to the survivors’
chances.

Ken’s fingers found
a seam. A steal plate that probably covered a locking mechanism.

A doorknob. His
hand closed around it at the same time Dorcas’ did. They both twisted. The
doorknob rattled…

… but didn’t turn.

“No, no, no!”
screamed Dorcas.

Another zombie
shrieked and fell. Aaron was silent, and Ken wondered how he was functioning
in the darkness. How he was fighting. How long the man could survive.

The cowboy
screamed.