Genesis (14 page)

“I can’t make it,” shouted
Dorcas
.

“You’ll make it.”

“I can’t hang on.”

“You won’t have to.”

He was at the end of the ladder.  It crackled as though nervous.  Something pinged and one of the beasts clambering up its length behind them toppled off, still holding one of the ladder rungs, and was swallowed up by the swelling host below.

Ken stood up, balanced precariously on the last rung of the ladder.  He thought a stiff breeze might blow him off.  He tried not to think of what was below.

He turned to face
Dorcas
.  Saw her.  Saw the ten man-beasts only a few feet behind.  Seven on the other side of the fence.  Three on this side.

The ladder started to buckle.

Ken nudged himself up onto his toes.

Tipped himself back like a diver doing a reverse swan…

“
NO!
”
Dorcas
screamed

…
and
fell.

Two things happened almost at the same moment.

Ken felt his blindly reaching hands slap against the rough concrete lip of the freeway behind him.

And the ladder gave out a shuddering scream and started to bend, folding over the top of the fence like it had grown suddenly exhausted by its efforts and just needed to relax.

Dorcas
screamed.  Hitched up on her knees and reached with her good arm.

Ken flipped his toes from their position atop the last rung, jamming them under the rung, then knifing his toes up over the top of the ladder’s support columns.  The full weight of the ladder and the occupants on this side of the fence came down on his shins, his feet,
his
hands.

Ken screamed.  Felt the skin peel off his shins as the ladder pulled on him.

But the ladder didn’t fall.

“Climb!” he shouted through gritted teeth.

Dorcas
got to her feet, leaping across the last few feet to the end of the ladder.

The three zombies on this side of the fence started
growling
louder, as though sensing that they were in danger of losing their meal.  They skittered on hands and feet across the final yards of the ladder.

Dorcas
pulled herself one-handed up Ken’s body.  Planted a foot on his leg, another fell right into his crotch.  He shouted in pain.  A memory flashed through his mind: Derek’s first year, when he had started crawling and then walking.  His favorite thing to do was crawl or walk from one end of the couch to another, clearly enjoying the bounce of the cushions.

If Ken was sitting on the couch, it was an even bigger treat.  Like a small mountain to be climbed.  A fun obstacle for the infant.

And every time –
every single time
– the kid crossed over, he managed to put a surprisingly hard baby foot in Ken’s crotch.

When Hope came, Ken joked with his wife that he was surprised his sperm count had survived the continuing assault of Derek’s climbing trips.

He wondered if this was going to be his last memory.  His little boy slamming him in the nuts on at least a daily basis.

There are worse ways to go
.

And he would have paid
Dorcas
back.

The back end of the ladder, the part beyond the fence, cracked in two with a sound like a rifle shot.  The seven monsters crawling its length fell with a scream.

The three on this side were still coming, held up by the fence and by Ken’s rapidly tearing tendons and muscles.

Dorcas
’ weight left him.

Her voice came from above.  She sounded like an angel.

“Let go,” she said.  “I’m here, let go!”

Ken almost let his hands relax.  A move that would have been suicide since
Dorcas
wasn’t holding onto him; and even if she had been, it wasn’t likely she could haul his body weight up and over the edge of the freeway shoulder.  Then he realized what she meant. 

 The closest of the three zombies still on the ladder leaped at him.

Ken relaxed his feet.

The ladder fell with a clang and a wet thud as the weight of two full-grown men drove it into the pile of bodies below.

The thing that had jumped for Ken was still in the air.  Snarling.  Mouth open.

Its fingers brushed Ken’s chest.

Ken swung back in a short arc as his feet – which had been anchoring him as much as the ladder – let go.  Just out of reach of the monster, which fell close enough that Ken could smell its breath, dark and damp and rotten, as it fell past him and was swallowed up in the monstrous swirl thirty feet below.

Ken swung backward into the concrete freeway footing.  His feet and legs hit hard, further abrading the torn and lacerated flesh there.

He felt himself slipping.

He had originally intended to flip himself into a pull-up position, but now realized that was going to be impossible.  He didn’t have the leverage for it, since he was essentially reaching
behind
himself at this point.

“Hold on!” he heard
Dorcas
screaming.

Sure.  No problem
.

He felt numb.  Everywhere but his head, which throbbed.

Something smacked him on the nose.

“Sorry,” said a gruff voice.  He didn’t recognize it, only realized that it
certainly
did not belong to
Dorcas
.

He realized that he had been hit by a belt buckle.  One of the kind that were almost the size of a salad plate and could only be worn by ironic hipsters or deadly-serious cowboys.

A hand grabbed his arm, arresting his slow downward slide.  The voice spoke again, sounding very much the opposite of an ironic hipster.  “Grab it, boy.”

For a moment Ken couldn’t peel the fingers of his free hand away from the concrete.  Now that he was
supposed
to let go, he couldn’t.

Then his fingers came away.  He swore he heard a wet ripping, like the sound of Saran Wrap pulling off itself.  He swung into space for a dizzy second, his body only anchored at one point, before managing to grab the belt.

The things below screamed.  Piled up, piled up, piled up,
still
looking like some huge version of rabid ants.

Ken couldn’t climb.  He was done.  All he could do was clench his hand around the well-worn strip of leather.  He couldn’t pull himself up.

He didn’t have to.

He heard a grunt, then started to rise, pulled at a slow but steady pace.  He heard
Dorcas
say, “You got him?”

“Yup,” said the unseen gruff non-hipster.

The hand that had been holding Ken’s other hand trapped to the side of the freeway footing let go.  And another hand – larger, matching the roughness of the voice it belonged to – wrapped itself around that hand a second later.

A third hand –
Dorcas
’, he figured – grabbed him under the armpit.

And together they hauled him up.

Ken’s bare back scraped something metal.  A moment later he could see that it was the small fence beside the freeway.  Just strips of sheet metal with reflective stickers to warn motorists not to drive off the side of the freeway.  They were sharp as knives.

And the pain as they bit into Ken’s back was probably the greatest feeling he had ever experienced.

It meant he was still alive.

They pulled him over. 
Dorcas
and another someone Ken still hadn’t seen.  He fell full-length to the ground, the hot pavement biting at his raw back.  Smiling.

“We safe?” said Ken.

Dorcas
grinned back.  “For the moment.”

“Good.”

He meant to thank the mysterious benefactor who had saved them, but passed out instead.

Music.  Boisterous and bright.

Click. 
Bzzzzz
.

Click.  Silence.

Click. 
Micky
Mouse talking.

Click.  Two kids arguing.  One of them said something snarky and a crowd of people laughed.

Click.  Silence again.  Then… the growl.

Ken’s eyes fluttered.  He jerked into semi-wakefulness.  His body slammed upright, registering only peripherally that he was laying on something cold and very hard.

It was dark.  Everything was dark.  He felt like he’d been blinded.  The only illumination came from one of the
things
.  Not three feet away.

He screamed.

The thing looked at him.  Its face was creased and blood-stained.  Its eyes glinted like those of a wolf.

It opened its mouth.

“Easy, partner,” it said.

And it turned its gaze from Ken.

Ken felt his mouth slam shut, the scream cutting off abruptly.

A hand touched his forehead, and he almost screamed again before he realized it was
Dorcas
.  “You’re hot,” she said.  “We’ll have to find you some meds.”

“I’m fine,” he mumbled.  He looked at the thing again.  The glowing figure.  Only now it seemed his eyes were working better, because he could see that it wasn’t a thing, and it wasn’t glowing.  It was a man, hunched over a box that seemed at once familiar and alien, a relic of a world already ten times removed from Ken’s reality.

A television.

The man was sturdy and squat, with relaxed features and a weathered face that spoke of a life spent outdoors.  He looked, Ken thought, like one of those men you ran into who “
wrassled
” things – things like bears, gators, and small countries – for a living.  Men who had an ageless quality about them.  Beards flecked with gray, as this man’s beard was, but whose hands and arms were the hands and arms of a man in his prime.

He looked like – and probably was – a cowboy.  The real kind.  Not a poser, the kind who bought hundred-dollar blue jeans and rode horses on weekends, but the kind of man who was as much at home on a horse as off, and whose jeans were designed for one purpose only: to take as much punishment as possible and keep on going.

“That’s Aaron,” said
Dorcas
.  “He’s the one who rescued us.”

“Lucky us,” said Ken.

“Luck nothing,” said
Dorcas
.  “He said he’d been watching from the freeway, trying to figure out a way to help us.”

“You obliged by coming to
me
, so thanks for that,” said Aaron.  His gaze didn’t waver from the television.  The TV was turned away from Ken, so he couldn’t tell what the other man was watching.  But he still heard the growl that had awakened him.  The sound of at least one of those things.

“What are you watching?” he said.  “Where are we?”

He tried to stand up.  “Maybe you should –”
Dorcas
began, but he waved her off.  She sighed and put an arm under one of his.  Helped him stand.

He realized
Dorcas
’ arm was bunched under fabric, not just slapping against his bare skin.  In the strange, flickering light he could see he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt said, “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of
the CLAP
).”

He looked at
Dorcas
.  She grimaced.  “We didn’t think you should just go around
nekkid
for the rest of your life.  Don’t ask where we got it.”

The back of Ken’s head felt strange.  Taut, like a drum that had been tightened too zealously.  He touched it and felt something hard and knotted there.

“You were banged up pretty bad,” said
Dorcas
.  “Aaron found some superglue and just glued you back together.”  She glanced at the cowboy.  “He’s handy.”

Ken noticed that
Dorcas
’ broken arm had been set, her forearm duct-taped to a ruler and then hung from a sling made from an oversized handkerchief.

“Looks like he
is
handy,” said Ken.  He took a few steps toward the older man, who still hadn’t looked away from the television.

The sound of Ken’s shoes echoed strangely and he looked around for the first time.  The flickering light of the TV bounced off four walls that seemed to be made of burnished metal with tiny knobs set every few inches along their surfaces.  The ceiling had the same reflective quality, a long expanse with a small vent set into the middle.

“Bank vault,” said
Dorcas
.

Ken thought of Maggie and the kids.  The Wells Fargo Center.  Could it be possible he’d made it there in his sleep – or unconsciousness?

Even in the dim light of the television set,
Dorcas
must have seen the hope on his face.  She shook her head.  “We got as far as 11th Street when we saw another one of those… hordes… coming at us.  We were carrying you so we had to get away as fast as we could.”  She nodded toward Aaron, who was still glued to the TV set like it was final seconds of an epic
Superbowl
.  “He was the one who thought of getting to the bank.”

“What bank?” asked
Ken.
  He tried to stand on his own.  His head started throbbing again, but he didn’t want to throw up.  Progress.

“Bank of the
Falls
,” said Aaron.

Ken’s stomach plunged.  They had actually gone backward.  The Bank of the
Falls
was several blocks north and west of where they had been, nowhere near where Ken wanted to be.

Dorcas
touched his shoulder.  “We’re doing our best,” she whispered.

Ken realized his face must be an extremely open book.  “Sorry,” he mumbled.  “Just worried.”

The sounds coming from the television got louder.  The growl.  Ken felt like he should have been elated at the fact that there was still power in at least some parts of the city: the world couldn’t have ended yet if you could still watch a show; could still microwave a burrito, right?  But instead he just felt dread at the sound of that enraged snarl.

He moved toward the TV.  He remembered the feeling he had had when he first saw the bugs on his classroom window: that feeling of not
wanting
to see, but
needing
to know.

He worried that kind of thing would kill him.

But he worried more that not knowing would kill him faster.

He joined Aaron in front of the television.