From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (79 page)

Ken felt suddenly
ill. “Do you trust me?” was the kind of question
designed
to make
someone uncomfortable. Like saying, “I love you” to someone, there were only
two possible outcomes: bliss or Titanic-scale wreckage. And the possibilities
for bliss were limited when zombies were coming at you from all sides and from
below.

A new set of noises
chipped in at the edges of Ken’s already severely fragmented thoughts. He
looked up, unsure if he was trying to zero in on possible new threats or just
avoiding the kid’s question.

And saw that the
zombies were above them as well. On the roof. Leaning over. Leaning out of
the windows of the floor above them.

Some of them leaned
too far. They fell. Not afraid, still reaching as they fell. Dorcas screamed
as one of the plummeting beasts almost grabbed her tank top on its way past.
Another of the falling creatures actually got a hand on the sill that Aaron
stood on, but the cowboy kicked the beast in the face and it, too, fell.

Not far. The
rising, turbulent mass of the creatures on the street was now only about
fifteen feet below them.

Give up. Give
in. Give up. Give in….

“Do you trust me?”
the kid said.

Ken looked at him.
The words, “Hell, no,” sprung to his lips.

And died there.

The kid wasn’t
grinning.

Ken nodded.

The grin came
back. “Good. Then I need you guys to stay right where you are.”

“
WHAT?
” Ken
shrieked. Then he had to flatten himself against a shard of glass, trying not
to impale himself as another zombie threw itself at him from above. He felt it
pass by, felt the small hairs on his neck – the few that hadn’t been burnt,
bludgeoned, or beaten into oblivion – blown by the wind of the thing’s passing.

When he pulled back
again, the kid was gone.

“Where is he?
Where’s Christopher?”

Neither Aaron nor
Dorcas answered. They were busy dodging the things tossing themselves down at
them like grasping, bloody spears.

Ken looked to his
left. The building ended in a corner about twenty feet away. No idea what was
beyond that.

But he couldn’t
stay. He knew that was what the kid – Christopher – wanted. But staying was
suicide.

Zombies below.

Zombies above,
throwing themselves down.

Ken thought about
going back in the building. He looked through the shattered glass of the
window he stood before.

It looked like it
had once been an office. Maybe an insurance company or a brokerage firm.
Something that used a lot of cubicles, a lot of phones. Everything was a
wreckage of wires and computer pieces and modular foam walls that had been
tossed around like the building blocks of an angry child.

The wreckage was
the only reason the zombies in the office hadn’t grabbed Ken, Dorcas, and Aaron
yet. As it was, they were only a few feet away.

The zombies
growled.

Ken felt something
grab him from behind. Felt something clinging to him, felt a heavy weight hit
him like a bludgeon.

His foot slipped.

Ken felt something
breathing in his ear.

Then he heard
Dorcas scream and saw her kick out. The thing on his back chuffed, not in pain
but in something like irritation. She kicked again. It fell.

Ken almost fell,
too, his body fairly leaping upward as the extra weight left his body. He
lurched forward, not caring that he almost skewered himself on a shard of
glass. Just wanting not to fall to the things below.

Ten feet below.

But not as close as
the zombies
within
the building. They were only a few feet away.

Reaching for him.
For Dorcas. For Aaron.

And where was the
kid? Where the hell had Christopher gone? Had he abandoned them?

It was a tough
world – and it had certainly grown tougher in the last hours. Even in a place
as neighborly as Idaho, people didn’t leave their doors unlocked anymore.
People worried. They didn’t just
trust
.

But Christopher had
asked Ken to trust
him
.

So did Ken trust
him?

Yeah.

The things inside
were five feet away.

Ken knew he should
run. Not that there were many places
to
run. But he could have edged
toward the corner of the building. Tried to get away. Tried to flee.

He didn’t. He
stood firm.

He trusted.

There was a moment
of peace. A single second - the fraction of an instant
between
seconds
– where the world seemed to pause. There was no fear, there was no blood and
violence. The zombies throwing themselves from above seemed to pause in
midflight, the things cascading over each other in an effort to reach up seemed
to stop piling higher.

The monsters that
were now only inches away from reaching Ken and his friends seemed to cease all
motion. He could see their teeth bared, the blood caked on so many of their faces,
the skin pulled from bare bones on others.

But he felt no
fear. He felt only regret. Sadness that he wasn’t going to see Maggie, wasn’t
going to kiss her one last time. That he wouldn’t hold Derek, Hope, or Liz.

And then even that
was gone. There was only a strange something that was at once familiar and
unknown.

Resignation?

No.

Then, before he
could figure out exactly what the feeling was, he heard four words.

“Hold on to
something!”

Ken’s hands
clenched. He didn’t even know
what
they were holding. But they held on
tight. In the next instant there was a flash so bright it felt like a new sun
had been born right in front of him.

The world snapped
back into motion.

The feeling that he
had been on the verge of understanding was gone. Disappeared in the
brightness.

Boom
.

The zombies in the
building, the monsters that had a moment before been only inches from grabbing
him, screamed in what sounded like rage, loss, anger.

Ken opened his
eyes. Stars and neon Rorschach inkblots swam past his face. But even through
them he could see the zombies. No longer inches away. No, they had been
decimated. Incinerated, blasted to pieces. Some of them – the ones closest to
Ken and the others – were still in one piece. But they were dazed. Confused.
Skin shredded from bones in awful wounds that would have killed a human and
should
have killed these things.

They stood.
Probably a dozen of the zombies left within range. Still more than enough to
kill Ken and Dorcas and Aaron ten times over. Especially since a single bite
would finish any of them.

The closest one to
Dorcas – a man with a mangled face who wore a bright shirt that said, “ASK ME
ABOUT OUR DAILY SANDWICH SPECIALS” under swaths of blood – reached for her. Dorcas
leaned back, but couldn’t get far because the things above were still flying
over the edges of the roof and the fourteenth floor, only the arc of their
momentum keeping the creatures out of range. And Dorcas only had one good
hand. No way for her to hold on, lean away,
and
fight off the things
outside and inside the building.

Sandwich Special
grabbed at Dorcas. Put a bloody hand on her arm.

Ken moved toward
her.

And again the
voice: “Don’t move!
Just hold on!
”

Sandwich Special
yanked Dorcas forward, drawing her through the empty hole of the window by her
broken arm. She screamed. Cried.

Something cracked.

The entire floor of
the office beyond the windows turned from a chaotic shambles of blood and
equipment into a shifting quicksand of concrete and steel. The zombie let go
of Dorcas, sliding into the hole that had opened up ten feet away. It slid
through and disappeared, followed by the other zombies in the room and covered
by equipment and bodies.

Dust puffed out of
the rooms, as though Sandwich Special were an overzealous illusionist seeking
to obscure his his exit.

The entire building
shook. Not like it had when Aaron went through the floor. That had been a
shudder, a twitch. This was a determined tremor, a seismic event.

“Come on,” said the
voice, the same voice that had warned Ken and the other survivors to hang on.

Ken looked over. And
there was the kid. There was Christopher. Grinning again.

His backpack was
gone.

The building
lurched, and Christopher’s feet came off the sill he stood on. His smile
wavered, but didn’t disappear. He got his feet back under him and started
moving toward the corner of the building again, as though none of what had just
happened had been at all unnerving or unusual.

Ken looked over at
Dorcas. She was gaping past him, so at least he wasn’t the only one stunned by
what was going on.

Aaron just looked
on. Waiting to start moving.

Another zombie fell
from above. Fell to the horde that was now only about eight feet below them.
Ken felt his lips curl as he saw them, crushing one another to get to the few
people above. Destroying themselves in their single-minded need to kill.

He turned his head
to the left. Started moving.

Time to go.

They all stayed as
close to the building as they could, trying to be at one with it, even as it
shimmied and fractured within. Ken would have gone inside again if there had
been an inside to go
to
. But the entirety of the office they faced was
gone, slanting away to an anemone-like pile of rebar, wiring, and building
materials.

In the darkness of
the hole beyond the windows, Ken thought he saw some of the pieces of the pile
moving. Buried bodies, crushed forms that could not be alive but were somehow
still animate.

He looked away.
Concentrated on sliding a foot at a time toward the corner. On ignoring the
bodies casting themselves from on high like angels determined to fall to Hell
as fast and as hard as possible.

Dorcas shouted.

“You okay?” called Christopher.
He didn’t look back, though. He was almost at the corner.

“I will be if you
move faster,” she snapped.

Christopher made a
noise that sounded strangely like a chuckle. Ken couldn’t be sure – it was
such an out of place sound that cognitive dissonance set in and insisted that
it couldn’t be laughter or any of its subsets.

The growling below
was so close. Calling them. Insisting without words that Ken just let go and
drop down. Each handhold became harder to maintain, each time he slid a foot
it got a bit tougher to care if the spot he chose was a good one.

Christopher
slipped. Almost went down into the massive tumor below them. Ken wondered if
the kid was still smiling.

He didn’t think so.

The kid pulled
himself back up. And then he was gone, disappeared around the corner of the
building. A moment later, Ken began to move around the corner as well. It
would have been an impossible move under normal circumstances – there were no
real hand-or footholds, and the windows on either side were too far apart to
simply reach around and grab hold. But the building was shifting every second
now, and the quoin stones on the corner had pulled apart enough to allow easy
movement around the edge of the building.

Ken took a step,
moving blind. The corner was actually
inverted
, jutting into the
building and then out again before becoming the adjoining face of the structure.
He couldn’t see Christopher, and had no idea what the kid had planned – if
anything. He hoped there was something good, though, because the things below
were close enough to smell. Blood, sweat. Voided bowels. Desperate madness
and a hunger that was beyond alien.

He shimmed across
the first angle of the corner. Reached across to the next face of the corner.
Put his left hand in a crack between the huge stones of the building. Put his
left foot between another.

Dorcas started
coming into the recess as well.

The building heaved
suddenly. Metal sheared off inside the structure. Another pitch and roll.
Aaron shouted.

Then pain.
Agonizing, white-hot.

Ken screamed. He
looked at his left hand.

The crack he had
wedged his hand into had fallen shut. The stones had rejoined, lonely lovers
too long apart.

He was stuck fast.

And he felt a hand
caress his foot.

“What is it? What
happened?”

Ken heard the
words, but couldn’t answer. Everything he had, everything he
was
, was
focused on the nova of pain at the end of his left arm.

“What happened?”
Same words, different tone. The first time it was Dorcas, asking him. This
time it was Aaron, leaning around and asking
her
.

“He’s caught,” she
said. She kicked down. Something snarled.

Ken felt something
touching the ragged bottom hem of his pant leg. Didn’t care.

He was whispering.
Holding fast to the stones of the building with his right hand, stuck via his
left. Whispering.

“Give up, give up,
give up, fall down, we all fall down.”

Dorcas smacked
him. A quick, almost light slap across the back of the head. It reminded Ken
of all his other aches and pains, made him aware that he hurt
all over
.

And it was perfect.

He stopped
whispering. Kicked at the thing below him. Aaron and Dorcas were talking in
low tones. Aaron handed her something. She passed it to Ken.

A knife.

Ken stared at it.
He didn’t realize what he was supposed to do with it for a moment.

“You’re not gonna
die here,” said Dorcas. “You have a family waiting for you.”

“I can’t,” said
Ken. He looked at the knife; knew that it must have come from the cowboy.
About four inches long, one side a curved razor-edge, the other a serrated saw
blade.

“I can’t,” he
whispered again.

The hands grabbed
his legs.

“You have to,” she
said. “We can’t get by you, so you have to or we’ll all die.”

He took the knife.