Genesis (11 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 blond 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.”