Genesis (3 page)

Bugs.

Lots of them.

The high school was all indoors.  It had to be; Boise, Idaho, didn’t get cold on the same level of, say, Missoula, Montana, but the idea of walking between different buildings during a winter snowstorm would have been supremely unpleasant.

Ken’s class was on the third floor of the high school, the east side.  One side of the classroom was mostly glass, just a wall of windows that allowed a view of the city.  It was a nice view, but Ken hated it.  It was just one more thing to distract the kids, especially with all the construction going on downtown: huge cranes moving steel girders into place were far too interesting for a mere teacher to compete with.

Now, however, the cranes were the furthest thing from his mind.  Instead, he was staring at the windows themselves.  Or at least, at one of them.  The second pane from his desk.

At first glance, the window appeared to be covered by some sort of corrugated cardboard, dark and rough.  But then Ken saw that the ripples in the “material” were moving.

Feet.

Legs.

Carapaces.

The bodies and body parts of thousands –
tens
of thousands – of insects that for some reason now clung to the single pane of glass.

One of the students cursed.  Normally the word would have gotten the kid a trip to Principal Connors’ office, but Ken barely registered the sound.

He stood up and walked to the window.

“Mr. Strickland….”

He glanced at Becca.  She had half-risen from her seat, one hand reaching toward him.  She looked like a damsel in a Saturday morning serial, reaching for her beau as he embarked on a dangerous mission.

A chill ran up Ken’s spine.  He turned back to the bugs.  He didn’t want to go.  But he
had to know
.

He moved to the window.

The insects crawled over, under, across one another.  A teeming mass of life.  But they did not leave the confines of the single pane of glass.

Something buzzed and hit the pulpy mound of insect bodies.  It hit hard enough that the window beneath clicked.  Ken’s face was within inches of the glass when it happened, and he jerked back.  Someone behind him screamed.

“Just another bug,” he said, realizing what had happened as he said it.  Just another bug.  Another bug.

But why?

Another buzz as something flew to join the coagulating pile of insects.  He could actually hear them through the glass, their feet clambering over the window and each other,
tic
-ti-ti-tic-tic-tic-tic
.

His guts roiled.

He grabbed his stomach with one hand.  With the other, he reached up –

(
Don’t do this, Ken, it’s a bad idea….
)

–
and
tapped on the glass.

Nothing happened.  The bugs didn’t seem to notice.  He tapped again, harder this time.  They continued buzzing over and around each other, but none took flight, none were startled away by the intrusive vibrations he must surely be sending among them.

Ken slammed the flat of his fist against the window.  A sharp crack punched through the otherwise still air.  The window split.

The bugs kept crawling.  None flew away.  They remained on the single square of glass.

And then one of the students screamed.

Ken didn’t turn around, because he saw the reason for the scream in almost the same second.  So did most of the kids.  They emptied out of their chairs and stampeded to the windows.  Normally the kind of thing Ken frowned on.

Not this time.

This time he was too busy looking at the plane.

He wasn’t an aviation expert.  He could discuss airplanes from a historical perspective, but he didn’t know much beyond that.  He could tell, however, that the plane he was looking at was a big one.  Maybe a 747 – he didn’t think the Boise Airport handled anything bigger than that.

Whatever it was, though, it was falling.  Not coming in for a landing at the airport, not doing a dangerously low flyover.  It didn’t even look like it was crashing in the sense that Ken thought of it: a dive that was just a bit too low, or listing to one side as though it might have an engine out.

It was simply plummeting, spinning on three axes, flipping tail over wing, nose over belly.  Smoke was coming from its sides, as though someone had smashed out the windows before setting off a smoke bomb.

One of the wings exploded.  It happened fast, and more violently than Ken could have imagined.  No apparent smoke, no flames.  Just one moment there was a wing and the next the plane was raining fiery shrapnel from a jagged stump where the wing used to be.  The explosion sounded like a muffled pop at this distance.

A few of the students screamed.  Ken did, too.  He thought about telling them to get back, not to look.  But there was
a disconnect
between his thoughts and his mouth.  He kept looking.  Kept staring as the plane fell.

A second later, two more jets entered his field of vision.  These were military, he could tell.  Probably from the Air Force Base in Mountain Home.  They looked like some kind of stealth fighters, flying in a tight formation like black insects carrying the world’s deadliest stings.

Then, an instant before the 747 completed its topsy-turvy fall to earth, one of the stealth fighters abruptly jerked into the flight path of the other.  The move was so sudden that Ken jumped in place.  The two fighters impacted.

These two jets were close enough that when they hit it wasn’t a muffled pop, but a thundering boom that rattled the windows in the classroom.

It was enough to shake some of the fuzz from Ken’s mind.  He turned and said, “Move away, guys.  Move away from the glass!”

He was trying not to scream.

The two stealth fighters fell in a tangled mass of light and dark, black metal burning bright.

Before they fell to earth, before any of the students turned away, the falling 747 finished its collision course with the world.  Another huge, window-shaking thud.  A bright ball of fire exploded somewhere downtown.  Smoke surged like a living thing, reaching up to swat at the sky.

“Get away from the glass!”

Now he
was
screaming.  He needed them away from the windows.

Mostly because he didn’t want the kids to notice that the bugs – the things that had called him to the glass in the first place – hadn’t taken flight, even when the explosion from the two doomed fighters rattled the glass.

He also hoped none of them had noticed the
other
things.

Six
.

Six
.

SIX, GOOD GOD,
SIX
!

That was how many other aircraft he had seen in the sky.  All falling.

Boise Airport was not Los Angeles International.  Six had to be pretty much every single commuter jet on approach in the area.

All falling.  All looking like they’d been knocked from the sky by the hand of God.

“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland….”

The voice burrowed into his consciousness, someone speaking his name over and over again like a weird chant.  He wondered how long the sound had been going on.

How long did it take for someone to lose their mind?

The students were all crying, whimpering.  Some of the kids were holding one another, faces resting in boyfriends’ chests or on girlfriends’ shoulders.  Their expressions seemed decades older than they had only moments before.

“Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland Mr. Strickland
Mr. Strickland….
”

He finally managed to penetrate the fog of shock long enough to recognize the voice.  It was Becca again.  She was pointing at something else.  Not falling planes or bugs gone mad.  Something new.  Something on the floor.  Something….

This time it was Ken who cursed.  No one called him on it.  Everyone was too focused on the windows, on grief.

A few of them, like Becca, even noticed Matt Anders.

Matt was a small kid.  Quiet.  The kind of boy who went with the flow, who did what was asked.  A teacher’s wet dream from the perspective of being no trouble at all about anything.  But Ken always worried about Matt.  Wondered what kind of life the kid was going to have if he could never find his own opinions, his own point of view.

Now, though, all of that might be moot.  Matt was laying on the floor of the classroom, splayed out full-length in front of his desk, his feet twitching spastically against the cheap tile, his head rolling back and forth as white froth oozed from his mouth.

“He having a seizure?”  That was Ricky Briscoe, looking over the tops of his huge glasses, staring at Matt like he was a cool new trading card at the comic book store.

“I don’t know!” snapped Ken.  He knelt down next to Matt and tried to remember what to do in case of seizures.  The school made the teachers take CPR and first aid classes, but most of that was geared toward broken bones and the like, not grand mal episodes that occurred in the middle of some major terrorist event.

“Get up, move!” he shouted, waving for a few students nearby to give him space.  The students stepped back and Ken swept all the closest chairs away as well, giving Matt a clear area where he wouldn’t collide with anything.

“Shouldn’t you get him, like, a spoon or something?”

Ken didn’t look at the speaker.  Didn’t have to.  Becca.

“I don’t – I don’t think so, I –“

Then the screaming began.  The
real
screaming.

Matt Anders was on the floor.  Rolling around, having a seizure.  Ken had his hands on the boy’s shoulders, trying to keep him from rolling into the chairs, trying to keep the scrawny kid from braining himself on the metal legs only inches from his face.  He wouldn’t have thought he had enough mental space left to look at something else.

But he did.  The screams
forced
him to look.

He glanced over his left shoulder.  Just a quick peek.  Just a glimpse.  Just a tiny look that was more than enough to afford him a full view of the hell that had opened up around him.

The first thing he saw was Becca.  Of course, it was
always
Becca.  Becca, who was so careful to be the center of attention.  Becca, who wanted to succeed at everything, even if the thing she succeeded at carried no value at
all.

Becca, who was now shrieking as she tried to hold Ricky Briscoe away from her.

And as Ken watched, Ricky leaned in close, snarling, and clamped his teeth on
Becca’s
throat.  Becca had time for one more agonized scream before Ricky’s jaws ground down.  The girl’s scream turned to a loud gurgle, then to a horrible wet murmur as Ricky yanked his head back, and pulled her throat out with his teeth.

Blood
geysered
, arterial spray painting surrealistic designs on the mint-green walls of the history classroom.

Becca’s
fingers clawed at the raw gap where her throat had been.  Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.  Blood continued to jet out of her throat, coating Ricky’s face.

He grinned and turned his face skyward, like he was standing under a summer rain.  Ken noticed that the boy’s glasses had come off, and his eyes were empty of anything but joy at the blood coursing over his skin.

Becca fell.

But the screams continued.  Impossible.  Becca was dead.  She
had
to be dead.  Her blood was no longer jetting across the room in a high-pressure stream, just trickling out of her with the weak force of gravity as she lay face down on the floor.  No, she was dead.

So where were the screams coming from?

It took a moment for Ken to realize what was happening.  Like his brain was operating on a slightly different time stream, something a few seconds delayed from the rest of the world.  He knew he should be reeling from what had just happened, knew he must be in shock.  But all he could think to do was look around for the source of the sound he heard.  The source of the shrieks.  The screams.

They were coming from the other students.

He looked at his class.  Realized that he had been wrong before.  What he had seen previously had not been Hell; it hadn’t even been Hell’s doorway.

But this….

The students were killing each other.

Ken gazed at what was happening in dumb horror for perhaps as long as two seconds.  Two seconds in which he saw half the class – students he knew and loved – grappling with and trying to kill the other half of the class.

The aggressors all looked like Ricky Briscoe had looked: eyes empty of anything but unadulterated rage.  Nothing left of what they had been.  Like they had been…
erased
.

Shirley DeMarco, a girl who never caused any trouble, who sat at the back of the class and who Ken had to coax into participation, was straddling another student.  Ken couldn’t tell who the other student was because Shirley was
gnawing
the other student’s face with her teeth, chewing and smacking like she was tearing into a filet done extremely rare.  The student below her was writhing and screaming, but even as Ken watched the unfortunate student’s form went still.  Ken didn’t know if the kid was dead or just unconscious, but a moment later he knew as Shirley – nice, mousy Shirley – buried her face in the student’s neck and started chewing away.  Blood spouted, obscuring Shirley’s visage, her dead eyes.

Ken moved his gaze to another pair of students.  A girl –

(
Who is that?  What’s her name, oh, God, why can’t I remember her name?
)

–
who
was attacking a much larger boy with a letterman jacket.  She clamped her teeth on his shoulder and bit down and the boy – Stu Clancy – howled and shoved her with an explosion of his thick muscles.  The girl flew back through the confused melee that the classroom had become.  She tripped over a pair of bodies that were locked in a
deathroll
on the now blood-slicked tile floor, slipped on a patch of what might have been brains forcibly expelled from a student’s skull, and fell.

Her head smashed into the sharp corner of a desk.

Ken saw the girl’s –

(
Laura Briscoe!  It’s Laura Briscoe!  What the hell is happening, Laura?
)

–
head
seem to implode.  Pink and gray ooze exploded out of the wound.  Her head went convex.

She didn’t die.  Didn’t even pass out.

No, Laura stood up.  She tilted her head skyward and screamed, a sound so awful and wrenching that Ken wanted to cover his ears.  It seemed like every bad thing that had ever happened in a universe not famous for mercy was packed into that scream.

Then Laura’s head tilted back to its usual plane.  Not staring straight ahead – impossible since one of her eyes was gone, exploded right out of her face with the force of impact into the desk – but rather seeming to peer into an abyss of madness that only she could see.

She howled again, and dove back into the free-for-all.  But whereas the other students seemed to be involved in one-on-one struggles, she tore indiscriminately into anyone who came within her reach.  Punching, tearing, clawing,
biting
.

And all the while, a hideous pink/gray, bilious goo leaked from the massive rifts in her skull and her skin.

Ken felt like he should call someone.  The principal?  911?

Who do you call when something like this happens?  When your tiny corner of the universe casts off all vestiges of reason and runs rampant on a field of madness?

Who do you call?

For a moment he thought,
Ghostbusters!
and
he knew his own brain was misfiring; madness creeping in at the edges of a mind seeking desperately to find reason and coming up empty.

He heard two booms and figured it must be a pair of the falling planes coming down.  But he couldn’t be sure.

He didn’t know.

Didn’t know who to call.

Didn’t know what to do.

And then he didn’t have time to think about it.  Because in the next moment things got much worse.