From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (78 page)

Dorcas screamed,
too, and pulled away from the door. Her hand got tangled in Ken’s, and that’s
how they found out that the door was locked, but not locked
shut
. The
knob wouldn’t turn, but when she pulled away and her hand knocked into his arm,
he pulled back automatically without letting go of the doorknob… and the door
just swung open.

He grabbed Dorcas,
who was lunging toward Aaron, by the back of her tank top. Yanked her
backward. She screamed, reaching for the cowboy.

Aaron had his right
hand clutched to his chest. His left circled the neck of a zombie. The cowboy
slammed the beast’s neck into the stairway railing, hard enough that the crunch
of the thing’s windpipe collapsing was audible over the roar of the
hundred-plus other zombies that were pushing up the stairs.

“Aaron!” Ken
called, backpedaling frantically through the open door.

Aaron followed,
kicking and punching so fast that Ken almost couldn’t see the movements. Ken
was a decent fighter. But he wouldn’t have wanted to face off against the old
cowboy.

Aaron threw another
flurry of punches with his good hand, then turned and threw himself through the
fire door. Ken slammed the door shut, looking around for some way to barricade
it.

Something battered
at the door from the other side. Hard enough that Ken bounced a foot off the
door before pushing back. But he couldn’t get the door to meet the jam. It
was a full four inches away from meeting that safety point.

Hands – big and
small, light and dark, whole and mangled – curled around the door. Reaching
for him. He shrank from them, but couldn’t move too far or he would give up
the frail leverage that was letting him hold the door this close.

“Help!” he
screamed. The scream came from somewhere deep within, from a place in his soul
so dark and profound that it had never before been given to light. More than
panic, more than terror. It was a lust to hang on, a need to
live
, to
continue
.
“Help me, dammit, someone help me!”

Aaron launched
himself at the door. The cowboy’s strength stopped it from opening any
further, but didn’t get it closed. And even if it had, Ken didn’t know what
they’d do to
keep
it closed: the thing was unlocked, and he didn’t see a
locking mechanism on this side.

Dorcas was nowhere
to be seen. Ken wondered if “the right thing to do” had finally been to run
away.

Aaron’s face was
pale. The old cowboy still held his right hand against his chest. The fingers
of that hand were curled and twisted, broken in too many places to count. The
thumb hung loose, sprung free from its socket and wagging grotesquely with
every movement Aaron made.

One of the zombies’
hands snaked out from behind the door and grabbed a hank of Ken’s hair. He
screamed as the thing pulled him toward the edge of the door. Toward the
darkness beyond.

He gritted his
teeth and pulled back. Felt wads of hair separating from his already bruised
and bloodied scalp. But the thing’s hand was too strong, and had too good of a
grip on his hair. It pulled Ken closer. He couldn’t get away.

He heard the
moaning growl of the zombies, only inches away.

The chittering
click of teeth, snapping toward him.

Felt hot breath on
his skin.

Closed his eyes.

“
MOVE!
”

Ken’s eyes snapped
open. He reacted instinctively, a final surge of adrenaline enabling him to
yank his head a few inches to one side.

“
Close your
eyes!
”

Again he acted
instantly, conscious thought an interloper that would only have gotten in the
way. His eyes shut again, even as he registered that the shouting voice did
not belong to Aaron or to Dorcas. It sounded young, the voice of a teen or a
man in his early twenties.

The world caught
fire.

Even through closed
eyes, pink blooms of flame burst across Ken’s vision, burnt his retinas and
made him feel like he’d just stepped face-first into a laser show at a rock
concert.

There was an
explosion, then a scream. Another sparkling fireball, another explosion.

The wet hand that
had been pulling at his hair shook suddenly, then let go. The door fell shut
behind him. Something that sounded like a stampede was happening beyond the
steel fire door.

Ken opened his
eyes.

It
was
a
kid. Ken guessed he was eighteen. Good looking in the way that only the rich
can be: well-scrubbed, well-coifed, well-dressed. A visual triple threat and a
danger to any woman within ten years of his age. Unlike Ken, Dorcas, and
Aaron, the kid had somehow avoided getting his clothes trashed. He looked like
he had just happened along in between college classes. Or during a break at
his fashion photo shoot. As though the impending end of the world was
something that probably inconvenienced him, but not to the point that he would
leave without doing his hair.

The kid held up
three colorful cardboard tubes, each over a foot long and several inches wide.
Blue-gray smoke curled out of their blackened edges. The pungent smell of
gunpowder – almost a perfume compared to the ever-present scent of death that
had so consumed the world – pricked Ken’s nostrils.

“My dad always buys
too many fireworks on the Fourth of July,” the kid said with a lopsided smile.

The growling beyond
the door started again. So did the horrible, hacking coughing.

The kid’s smile
dissipated but didn’t disappear. “I think we should vamoose,” he said.

The kid spun
around, revealing a backpack crammed full of lumps that Ken assumed were more
fireworks. The kid ran down the hall, toward a shattered window where Dorcas
was waiting. The older woman looked on the verge of a heart attack. She must
have gone to look for some way to block the door… and found a strange,
pyrotechnic guardian angel instead.

Ken pushed away
from the door. He helped Aaron stand as well. The cowboy nodded thanks, then
the two of them ran after the kid.

They joined Dorcas
at the window. It was a hard run: unlike the lower floor, this one had not
escaped the destruction of being flung a block over and two hundred feet down.
The floor was uneven, gutted. It creaked and groaned under Ken’s feet, and at
one point Aaron’s right leg fell through completely. His leg just disappeared
up to the knee.

He didn’t make a
sound. But his white face grew several shades paler.

Ken helped him pull
himself free. Hard because he didn’t even dare touch the walls on either side
of the corridor. They looked on the verge of collapsing, and he suddenly felt
like he was in some strange above-ground mineshaft that might simply
disintegrate around them at any moment.

He helped Aaron up.
The cowboy’s leg came out of the floor, and as it did the entire structure
shuddered. As though Aaron had loosened some hidden keystone that the
architects had put just under
this
particular spot with instructions
never never ever to touch it or the entire thing would come down.

He and Aaron both
froze. The rational part of him realized that if three entire stories of a
skyscraper were about to come down around you, the
last
thing you wanted
to do was freeze. But rationality wasn’t always the commanding impetus.
Sometimes instinct ruled. Sometimes we stood still in the face of danger. We
played dead in the hopes that the destroying angel would pass us by.

The building
stopped shifting.

But now Ken thought
he heard the rattle of something reaching for the doorknob of the stairway door
they had just left behind. He and Aaron looked at one another.

They ran again.

They reached
Dorcas, who was still waiting at the end of the corridor. The hall turned into
an L-intersection, branching to the left, a solid wall hiding a bank of what
Ken assumed were offices to the right.

The kid was gone
from view, but Ken heard him scrabbling around the side of the broken
floor-to-ceiling window. Ken leaned out and felt his jaw fall open.

Each window of the One
Capital Center was taller than a man, and several of them hung together in
floor-to-ceiling sheets. Every six windows, a thick concrete mullion separated
the next set of windows. Most of the windows were gone, or at most holding a
few razor shards like angry teeth grimacing at the unfairness of what had
happened to this once impervious-seeming structure.

The kid had moved
out of the window the hall faced, shimmied onto the outer sill, and then moved right
across the outer face of the building, clinging to the muntins that remained –
many little more than jagged bits of metal and weatherstripping – and then
slipping past the concrete mullion to the next bank of windows.

He showed no
inclination to go inside the building. When he saw Ken gawking at him, he grinned.
He still looked like a cover model for a teen magazine, and Ken suddenly hated
him just a little bit.

Irrational, but then,
so was the fact that the young guy looked so nice in the middle of disaster.

“Come on,” shouted
the kid. “Safer out here.”

Ken didn’t like
it. But then, he liked the idea of staying in the hall even less. Especially
since he heard the sound of growling behind them. The things in the stairwell
sounded like they had regained their composure. They were coming.

He looked at Dorcas.
Arm still in a sling. At Aaron, his good right hand looking like a spider that
had been squashed by a steel-toed boot.

“Can you guys make
it?” he said.

“We’ll have to,”
said Aaron. His face was still white, but he looked less like he was going to
fall over than he had a moment before.

“We stay in here
and they get us for sure,” agreed Dorcas. “Nowhere to go.”

“You first,” said
Ken, gesturing for Dorcas to go ahead of him.

“Don’t be stupid,”
she said.

He didn’t have time
to argue the finer points of chivalry. He climbed out the broken window
frame. Glass crunched as he stepped onto the outer sill. His body seized up
automatically as his eyes tried to convince his mind that he was walking out
the thirteenth floor of a high rise.

“I’m not that high
up,” he said to himself. Trying to persuade himself that a fall wouldn’t kill
him. The fall out of the school earlier hadn’t killed him, had it?

He looked down. Searching
for a way to convince his recalcitrant body that stepping outside the building
was the right thing to do.

He looked down.

And that was a huge
mistake.

In his flight up
the dark stairs, through a disembodied structure that had no right to be there,
Ken had forgotten that the zombies following them weren’t the only ones they
had to worry about.

There were also the
ones that had been coming in through the
other
side of the building.

Those zombies had
come in, had joined with the ones following the survivors. And Ken had assumed
for some reason that that was it. Done deal.

But he was wrong.
The ones that had joined up with their pursuers were just a small portion of
the horde that had come at them from ahead.

This horde numbered
at
least
in the tens of thousands. And they were all crammed into the
street right below Ken’s feet. Growling and howling in a macabre imitation of
a New Year’s celebration at Times Square. Only instead of waiting for a
glowing ball to drop, they were reaching up in the obvious hope that flesh and
bone would plummet to their grasp.

And as they had
done when he and Dorcas were on the garage, they were swarming on top of one
another. A dark wave of unlife: burying itself, rising a bit, burying itself
again, rising still further.

They were easily
thirty feet below him.

Only now it was
twenty-nine.

Twenty-eight.

And the growl….

Give up. Give
in. Give up. Give in
.

“Now would be a
good time to move,” said the kid.

Ken almost jumped
off the side of the building. The kid had come back, sidling silently to Ken’s
side and standing within a few feet of him. He was holding one-handed to a
piece of weatherstripping that looked almost strong enough to hold up a
malnourished infant. Still grinning.

“Just follow me,
bud,” said the kid.

And Ken hated him
not at all. Just followed him.

He heard crunches
and crackles and knew that either Dorcas or Aaron was close behind. But he
didn’t look back, afraid that if he did he would also see the surging things
below.

How close are
they, Ken? Give up….

Just climb.

Twenty feet?
Eighteen? Give in….

CLIMB!

The kid moved
quickly but carefully, and Ken realized his motions were slightly exaggerated:
he was showing the others where to grip, where to place their feet.

“What’s your name?”
said Ken. Not an appropriate moment, perhaps, but he didn’t want to think
about what he was doing, didn’t want to think about what was below, didn’t want
to ponder what might lay ahead.

“Christopher.
Watch out for that glass.”

Ken shifted his
hands in time to avoid gashing his palms.

The end of the
building was coming up. He didn’t know what they would do then.

The growls below
were close. Getting closer.

Worse, he heard
growls inside the structure. The zombies inside seemed to have been thrown off
by the fact that their prey had disappeared from the building, but how long
before one of them spotted the survivors at a window frame?

Aaron grunted. “I
think we got trouble.”

Ken looked at
Christopher. The kid was grinning again. Or still. Maybe he hadn’t stopped.
And now Ken was unsure whether he hated the kid or not. He suspected the teen
might be a bit crazy.

Crazy or not,
Christopher didn’t seem perturbed by the sound of zombies closing in on them
from inside the building, or by the zombies surging toward their feet. He
swung his pack around and unzipped it.

“You trust me?” he
said to Ken.