Renegades (8 page)

“I’m here,” he shouted.  “Daddy’s here!”

“Daddy?”  She screamed the word back, divided into equal parts terror, surprise, and faith.  The monsters were here, but now Daddy was here, and he would save her.

Ken hoped her belief was less misplaced than Derek’s had been.

Forget about that.  That’s not for now.  Time for that later.

What if there is no later?

He climbed.  He didn’t look down, didn’t look back.  His wife was back there.  Liz was with her.  Dorcas and Christopher and Aaron, too.

But right now, the world – his whole world – was in his arms, and he had to climb away from the nightmare below.  He held Hope, and she was fragile and bright, and he couldn’t lose her.

The crane shuddered.  Hope screamed, almost barking in her fear.

“It’s okay!” he shouted.  But he didn’t believe it.  Not now.  He could feel the
thrum-thrum-thrum
of feet and hands pounding up the crane.  Could feel the horde pressing up the walls of the Wells Fargo Center.  Could feel the very air thickening with the presence of the
things
coming ever closer.

Then he was at the end of his climb.  He flipped over the edge of the tower, and onto the jib.  The jib, the projecting arm of the crane that was used to move large pieces of equipment and material, extended in both directions, forward and back.  The counter jib stuck into the air high overhead, giving a final defiant middle finger to the forces that were bringing it down.

The other end of the jib, the working jib, thrust downward at a steep incline.  There was a catwalk-like sheet of metal that Ken thought he could walk on, but even so the angle of it scared him.  One misstep and he would just go screaming forward until he either hit the end of the line or slipped off sideways, plummeting into one hundred fifty feet of empty space, to die or be caught by the zombie mob pressed into the streets below.

Hope must have seen the same thing he did.  He felt her arms tighten around his neck and chest.  “Daddy,” she whimpered.

And now he did look back.  He saw Aaron and Dorcas, clinging to each other as though signed up for the world’s strangest three-legged race.  Only they were running a two-handed race up a steep incline of steel bars and crosspieces.  And no awards for second place.

Beyond them, Christopher was with Maggie, the young man seeming to push Ken’s wife upward half by physical force, half by sheer charisma.

Ken couldn’t see Liz’s face.  He had to trust the toddler was still attached to her mother, and still alive.

Beyond them… darkness.  A thick black clot of bleeding, burning, smoking zombies.  Climbing closer.  Gaining.

“Hurry!” shouted Ken.

The others seemed to step faster.

Ken turned to the gangplank.

He stepped forward.  One hand encircling Hope tightly, the other reaching blindly for a handhold.  As soon as he found one he took another step and repeated the process.

Step by agonizing step.  Moving far too slowly.  Knowing that to move faster would be inevitably to fall and to die.  Knowing also that the zombies would hurl themselves forward without fear of death, single-minded in their attempts to reach their prey.

Step by step.

Clanks behind him.  He looked over his shoulder.  Dorcas and Aaron had made it.  Then Christopher and Maggie.  Liz still limp in the carrier on his wife’s chest.

Maggie locked eyes with him.  She was crying, the tears marking white paths through soot-stained cheeks.  She reached out, her fingers extended toward him.

Ken didn’t know exactly what she was reaching for.  The memory of their family, perhaps.  The world and life they once had.  His protection.  Maybe even… just
him
.

Christopher said something, grinning that infectious grin of his as he urged her forward, onward.

Downward.

Ken turned back around.  He kept moving.

The end of the working jib looked like it had slammed into the side of the building across 9th Street.  If so, they might be able to get from one building to another via this strange bridge.

But it was impossible to really tell.  The jib could go right through the building’s walls.  It could also end twenty feet away.  Perspective was a funny thing.  And when you added panic, smoke, and a few hundred thousand building-scaling zombies into the mix, it got even weirder.

Clank, cla-cla-cla-clank
.  The sound of the group slamming over the catwalk suspended high above concrete and a horde of monsters did nothing to help Ken’s peace of mind.

Then something popped.  A loud
ping
as of a steel tether letting go.

The entire crane shifted.  Laterally, this time.  It pitched forward.  Stopped.  Again.

A hard lurch.

Ken lost his grip.

30

Ken went down on his back.  Hard.  A fraction of a second later he heard matching thumps and thuds that told him the rest of the group fared no better.  He had only the barest moment in which to wrap both arms around Hope’s body before he began to slide down the catwalk.

The horde below them surged and screamed, the zombies climbing over one another as though aware that they were only moments from seeing their enemies plummet to their midst.

The metal of the catwalk was far from smooth.  It was pocked by bolts, rippled by the forces that had sheered the crane off at its base.  Still, Ken flew along it with the speed of a bobsledder.  Screaming, holding to Hope.

The end coming close.  Closer.

Closer.

And he could see now that the jib didn’t touch the building beyond.  It ended in mid-air, in dead space.  He couldn’t tell how far it stopped from the side of the other building.

He tried to reach for something that would stop him and Hope from flying out into the void, but they were moving too fast.  The bars and braces of the crane’s lattice-like supports whipped by so fast they were a blur, and the only thing that happened when Ken reached out once was that there was a light
bwang
that was swallowed up instantly in the enormity of the crane’s structure, and he felt his arm go numb with the impact.

He couldn’t stop them.

They flew toward the end of the jib.

And off into nothing.

31

The building that the jib leaned toward was the One Capital Center.

Or rather, what was left of it.

The building had been hit by an Air Force stealth fighter in the first minutes after the change had coursed through fifty percent of the world’s population.  The jet had hit the building and exploded, blowing the upper floors clean off the building, shooting them – virtually intact – into the air.

Ken hadn’t seen any of that.  He and his friends only surmised it when they saw pieces of the stealth fighter, and had come across the top three floors of the One Capital Center sitting across the street several blocks over from where they belonged.  The building had proved to be a necessary escape route, though it had also cost Ken the two smallest fingers of his left hand to use it.

And now he was headed back to the rest of the ruined building.  Not walking, but flying.  Screaming through space, shot off the end of the crane’s jib like some bizarre human cannonball.

He and Hope fell, forward and down, in a short flight that ended faster than Ken was expecting.  They hit and rolled, Ken cupping his body around his daughter, trying hard not to crush her.  He felt glass bite his arms; felt other, harder things push into his flesh as well.  But he didn’t see anything – his eyes were screwed shut so tightly his head ached.  As though his body were convinced that if he saw what was happening, it would be the end of their momentary reprieve.

They stopped rolling.

Ken opened his eyes.  He didn’t want to, but he knew that to lay wherever they were with his eyes closed would amount to a particularly stupid kind of suicide.

He opened his eyes, and saw a pair of cowboy boots about to slam right into his face.

Ken jerked to the side, and the boots slid past him, followed by the rest of Aaron.  Dorcas, too, the older woman clinging to the cowboy.

Ken got to his knees.  He saw that he and the others had been catapulted into the remains of one of the floors of the One Capital Center.  Everything was rubble, the effects of a building that had been hit by a plane carrying some serious weaponry.  No way of telling what floor they were on, but it wasn’t the first one.

“Help!”

Ken’s hand shot out.  He grabbed the newest person sliding across the detritus-coated surface of this place.  He felt fingers curl around his palm, and realized that it was Maggie.  She had slid into range, still on her back, little Liz lolling on her chest.

He caught his wife.

Hauled her to her feet.

And held her.  The horde was coming, but for a moment he didn’t care.  He needed to hold onto Maggie.  To remind himself she was here, she was really here.  Without thought, another hand went around Hope, pulling her to him.  The family.

“Derek,” she sobbed.

“I know,” he said.

Then they were silent.  Not long.  Just a second.  Just long enough to
be
.  Just long enough for the world to take note that it hadn’t won.  Not completely.  The family – part of it, at least – was still alive.  Bruised, fragmented, but still holding on.

“Guys…,” said Christopher.  Ken looked over.  The kid had appeared as though by magic.  He was probably the most sure-footed of the group, so no surprise that he would have made the leap across the gap with the least trouble.

Ken sighed internally.  Ready for Christopher to point to the crane, to where the hordes would be screaming across.

But he didn’t.  He was looking the other way.

There was something behind Ken.

Something
already there with them
.

32

Fear surfed electric waves up and down Ken’s back.  The hordes had come in behind them.  It must be that.  They were surrounded.

Then he heard Aaron curse.  Not a fearful curse, more a resigned one.  The sound of a soldier dealing with tragedy, not terror.

“Cover the girl’s eyes,” said Aaron.  His voice a reverent whisper.

Ken did, putting his hand across Hope’s eyes even as he turned.

It was Buck.  Sobbing, kneeling on the floor before a pile of wreckage whose once-purpose Ken could not even begin to guess at.  No doubt once an integral part of this room, this building, now it was just a tangled collision of steel and trash and concrete; wood and plaster and melted bits of plastic.

And flesh.

The gray man knelt before his mother.  The old lady’s mouth was working, opening and closing and opening and closing as though she had been caught in the grips of the world’s worst indecision.

She looked at the others.  Only her eyes moved.  Her head did not shift.  It couldn’t.  A thin shaft of metal – perhaps a piece of a cabinet, maybe the support bar of a desk organizer – jutted out of her cheekbone, disappearing into her skull and pinning her to the junk pile that had somehow melded itself to her.

Her mouth opened again.  This time blood drooled out. The old woman’s body was broken.  Bent in too many ways to count, probably shattered a hundred different ways inside.

“Help… me…,” she whispered.

Growling erupted behind them.

Ken looked back.  The things that had been following them up the crane were now running down the jib.  They
coated
it, swarming over the gangplank, climbing along the outside supports, even hanging like rabid monkeys from underneath it.  He couldn’t even see the metal.

“Come on,” he said, and started to move.  One hand holding Maggie’s hand, the other still shielding Hope’s face.

Buck spoke, the man’s voice much different now than it had been before.  It had lost its haughtiness, its entitlement.  Humility had been forced upon him.  “Wait,” he said.  “We can’t leave her.”

Ken was saved from having to respond by Aaron.  The cowboy was gruff, direct.  And honest.  “She’s dead already.  And we have to leave.”

“Don’t… don’t… leave… me….”  The woman’s voice was a gurgling whisper, a brook burning away to lifelessness under a relentless sun.

Buck looked at the others.  “Will they let her die?” he asked.

Ken didn’t know.  And he could tell that the others didn’t know, either.

Buck dissolved into tears.  He buried his face in his mother’s chest, and looked for all the world like a child after a hard day at school.

Aaron slung Dorcas’ arm around his shoulders, and they moved toward the other end of the area, where there was a hole that might once have been an exit.  Ken couldn’t tell if the cowboy was supporting Dorcas, or if she was supporting him.  He supposed they probably didn’t know, either.

“I can’t let them turn her!” shouted Buck.

Christopher followed after Dorcas and Aaron.

“I can’t!”  Buck was shrieking now.  His voice a piercing, whining whistle.

Ken took Maggie and Hope and limped after the others.

The growl of the horde close behind.  The sobs of the grown man-child even closer.

33

Ken followed the others into the hole.  There was nowhere else to go: all else was collapsed wreckage, destruction, and behind them an empty area that was sure to be swarming with zombies soon.  So he walked into darkness, still hearing the sounds of Buck sobbing behind.

He almost ran into Aaron.  The older man was moving back toward the area they had just left, Dorcas pulling on his arm.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Ain’t right to leave her like that,” he said.

“There’s no time,” she said, her voice caught halfway between a whisper and a cry.

“Don’t matter.”

Aaron moved past Ken and his family.

Ken looked at Dorcas.  “Is he…?”

She nodded.

A moment later, there was a muffled snap.  A sigh.