Renegades (2 page)

DEDICATION

To...

Chad Brown (VAWCF)…

and to Laura, FTAAE.

Contents

Chapter                                                                                         

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80

1

The world had ended four hours ago.

So why was Kenny G still playing music?

Ken Strickland knew he was asking this question as a way to avoid the
real
questions, the questions he
should
be asking.  The questions that had no answers.

But still, it seemed so important.

Civilization had fallen.  Zombies had taken over.  Zombies whose bites caused instant conversion, who were impervious to pain or grief or discomfort.  Monsters whose only apparent thought seemed to be focused on killing those few normal humans that remained.

But Kenny G was still playing music.

Ken Strickland had never hated Kenny G before.  Never particularly liked him, but didn’t
hate
him.  Now, though, in an elevator in the Wells Fargo Center, riding up toward the ninth floor where he hoped against all reason to find his wife and three children alive, he realized that the fall of civilization came with some perks.

There would be no more easy listening, no more Muzak.

Beside him, Dorcas shuffled nervously.  The middle-aged woman was tough as weathered saddle leather.  She had saved Ken’s life several times, even though he was a virtual stranger to her.  But she was nervous now, traveling up in a confined space with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide if things went bad.

Maybe we should have taken the stairs
.

He discarded that idea almost instantly.  Stairs would have taken too long.  And the last time they had used the stairs, things had gone badly.

Plus, who knew how long the power would last?  This might be the last trip any of them would ever take in an elevator.  This might be a magical moment they would tell children and grandchildren about someday.

If we live that long
.

“Wonder how many times people took this elevator,” said Christopher.  The twenty-two year old looked wistful, as though thinking along the same lines as Ken.  He had been the son of Idaho’s governor until a few hours ago.  Then, like all of the people in the elevator, he became just one more survivor, one more refugee, one more person fleeing the hordes that had taken over the world in less than ten minutes.

Aaron grunted.  Ken couldn’t tell if the cowboy was agreeing with Christopher, or telling him to be quiet.  The older man was the most enigmatic of the group.  Ken wondered anew who he was.  How he’d learned to fight, how the older man seemed to know what to do in almost any situation.

Mysteries.  Mysteries in mysteries in mysteries.

No one knew anything anymore.

Welcome to the new world.

The counter on the front panel of the elevator dinged at each floor, a low electronic chirp that was designed to be pleasing and unobtrusive.  Each twitter set Ken’s teeth on edge, made him want to tear the circuitry out by its roots in order to shut down the sound.

4 (ding)… 5 (ding)… 6 (ding)….

Dorcas’ hand tightened against Ken’s right arm.  The hand that held him was strong, though her other hand hung from the end of a makeshift sling, broken during a zombie attack.  Aaron had a handful of broken fingers and a dislocated thumb.  Ken had had to cut off the pinkie and ring fingers of his own hand in order to escape an attack.

Everyone was injured.  Broken.  Beaten down.

7 (ding)….

Only Christopher looked fine.  Better than fine.  He looked like a cover model, stopped for a latte break and helping out with the zombie apocalypse for a few minutes until the photographer called him back on set.

8 (ding)….

“Get ready,” said Aaron.

Christopher nodded.  Ken did, too, though he wondered what they would do to get ready.  Aaron had a gun, but it only had two bullets.  Other than that the party was weaponless.  And even if they each had an assault rifle and full body armor, Ken didn’t know what that would do against hordes of seemingly indestructible attackers.  Nothing seemed to stop the things.  Even major head trauma didn’t slow them down; just sent them into an indiscriminate rage that would have them attacking anything that moved – including each other.

The elevator dinged.  The final floor.

Ken closed his eyes for a moment.  He said a silent prayer.  Imagined Maggie’s face.  The smiles of Derek, Hope, and Liz.

Please let them be alive.  Or let them be dead.

Just not things.  Not zombies
.

The elevator doors opened.

The elevator opened to a corridor.  Just a blank wall.  Normal, save only for the thick smear of brown-red-black that trailed down its middle.

Christopher stepped forward, clearly intending to move into the hallway.  Aaron grabbed him.

“Stop,” the cowboy said.  It was barely a whisper.  The kind of speech Ken associated with survival.

Christopher halted.  The four people in the elevator were silent.  Ken couldn’t even hear anyone breathing.  They were held in a momentary stasis, an instant before the future hit them with its usual freight-train momentum.

What if Maggie’s gone?  The kids?

“Okay,” breathed the cowboy.

Christopher stepped out of the elevator cab.

He looked to his left and right, and Ken saw him grow pale.

“What?” said Ken.

Christopher turned around.  Fast.  Like he didn’t want Ken coming out.

“Maybe you shouldn’t –” he began.

Ken stepped out of the elevator.

And felt a scream tear loose from his throat.

Aaron’s good hand clamped over Ken’s mouth, stopping the scream before more than a whimper came out.  Then the cowboy leaned over and retched.  None of them had eaten since this all started, since the world ended.  There was nothing in the man’s stomach.  But he dry-heaved as though his body was trying to expel the very memory of what he was seeing at either end of the corridor, only about twenty feet away from the elevators.

Two solid walls.  Not of brick and mortar, not of plaster or wood.

Bodies.

It looked like every single person on this floor had run for the elevator at the same time.  And every single person had fallen prey to whatever had turned the world upside down.

The hall was blocked at either end by a solid plug of corpses, bodies and body parts ripped limb from limb and then piled atop each other haphazardly like a madman’s version of an Erector set.  Heads, arms, legs, trunks.  Entire bodies shredded and then stuffed into place.

“What…?”  Dorcas’ voice was soft.  So soft, like the vision of death in the still-lit corridor had somehow stolen away the very years she had lived.  Had turned her into a little girl, shying away from thunder and whimpering at the vision of lightning in the sky.

Humanity’s defenses had been stripped off.  All pretenses of civilization pulled away, and not even their dead were sacrosanct.  Even humanity’s holiest objects had been rendered profane.  The monsters had come for them.

“What do we do?” said Christopher.

No one spoke.  The lights above them flickered, and Ken wondered what would happen if the lights failed – as they would have to do eventually – while they were stuck here between the bodies of the dead.

He was shaking.  His head ached, his back hurt where he had twisted it earlier, the bones of his left leg felt like white-hot pincers were clamped against them every few inches.

His absent fingers, the ones he had hacked off himself, ached.  He missed his wedding ring.

He walked toward the wall of bodies on his right.

He reached out and grabbed a stiff hand.  Pulled it away from the wall of the dead.

A moment later Dorcas and Christopher joined him and they started to dig through the bodies.

Aaron waited a moment.  He had been standing halfway in the elevator cab, and now he looked around and spotted something in the hall: a small aluminum trash can.  He stomped it flat, then wedged it in the track of the elevator.  Ken saw Christopher eyeing the older man.

“We don’t want anything surprising us from behind,” said the cowboy.  “And better to have the elevator available when we want it.”

Christopher nodded and resumed digging.

They pulled bodies and dismembered bits away.  Piled them along the corners of the hall.  Ken tried very hard not to think about what he was doing.  And failed miserably.

He wondered what he would do if one of the hands he touched turned out to be small.  Soft.  The hand of a child.  A hand he recognized.

He kept digging.

Slow going.

It was harder than Ken would have thought.  Partly because it was just emotionally taxing to grab ahold of a piece of what had once been a
person
, to pull it out of a pile of other pieces.  To drag it behind you and try not to think of what you were doing, of the reality of what was happening.

Part of it was because everyone stopped every minute or so.  Just stopped as one, no words spoken.  Listening.  Trying to hear the sound of thunder that would indicate one of the hordes of thousands of once-human killers that now ruled the world.  Or perhaps listening for the growl, that otherworldly sound that the things made.  As a single voice it was disquieting, a sound like someone gargling a mixture of gravel and razor blades.  In a large chorus it had a strange power, a psychic effect that encouraged you to just give up, to give in and die.

But there was also something else at work.  Something making their job more difficult.  At first Ken thought it was his imagination, this last obstacle – a literal wall of gore between him and a goal that he didn’t even know for sure still existed – just pushing him over the edge and making everything seem harder than it really was.

Until Dorcas grunted.  “What the…?” she said.  As with all words in this place that was bookended by death, the words were whispered.  And as with all the words thus far, even whispered they seemed far too loud.  Ken felt like they were screaming in a church.  Any life here had become an obscenity.

The dead ruled this place.  The living were interlopers.  Were profane.

“What is it?” said Christopher.  Even his ever-present smile had waned in the gory environment, though he had somehow managed to keep his clothing less spattered with filth than should be possible.

Dorcas hesitated.  Then she held out the piece of former humanity – now reduced to so much ghastly masonry – that she had yanked out of the crumbling wall of death.  “What is this stuff?” she said.

The others moved closer.  Ken wanted to keep pulling at the bodies at this end of the corridor.  He knew that taking a break was a bad idea; that if he stopped, getting started again would be that much harder.