Genesis (18 page)

Two hundred thousand people in Boise.  Maybe twenty or thirty thousand more during the day, when people came in for work.

Half of them turned instantly.

Odds were that of the remaining half, most were killed in the first few minutes.  And the great majority of those that remained were turned.

So how many zombies roaming the streets?  A hundred fifty thousand?  A hundred eighty?

Ken did all these calculations in the instant it took to turn toward the tired-looking, decapitated chunk of the One Capital Center.

In the time it took to take
Dorcas
’ hand and get to where Aaron was waiting for them, the cowboy’s hand resting casually on one of the broken window frames of the building’s displaced twelfth floor, Ken did another calculation.

Maggie and the kids were dead.  Out of two hundred thousand people – and change – there was no chance they had survived.  The world had ended.  Skyscrapers had literally been cut to pieces.  A mother and her children alone had no chance.

“Come on,” said Aaron.  His voice was brisk, and Ken realized he had stopped in mid-step, halfway into the building that lay in the middle of the street.  As though pausing between one world and another, deciding which Hell he would prefer.

The thunder was joined by screams and growls.  He didn’t have to look to know the first zombies had caught sight of them.

How many thousands?  How long before they catch us?

The growls made him want to give up.  He realized it was some kind of psychic effect, just one more way they attacked.  But knowing it didn’t change its effectiveness.

Just give up
.

He looked at Aaron.  The cowboy nodded quietly, as though to say, “If you want to stay, I won’t stop you.  Man’s gotta choose his own path.”

Ken stepped into the building.

Aaron clapped him on the back, half encouragement, half propulsion.  Ken stumbled forward.

Into the darkness of a world destroyed.

Part of the reason Ken chose history as a profession was the outright strangeness of it.  He delighted in the twists and turns, the odd and unpredictable moments.  As a kind of testament to the strange, each year he told his senior students the tale of Royal Air Force Flight Sergeant Nicholas
Alkemade
. 

Alkemade
was a rear gunner in a bomber during World War II.  When his plane was attacked by German fighters, he discovered his parachute had malfunctioned.  Faced with the choice of staying in his plane and burning alive, or jumping and dying on impact, he chose the latter.

He fell eighteen thousand feet.  Slammed into pine trees and the snowy ground of the Third Reich.

And found he had not only survived the fall, but done so with nothing more than a sprained leg.  He was captured by the Gestapo, who, upon verifying his claims of falling almost four miles out of a plane with no chute, made him a prisoner of war… and treated him more or less like royalty.

Now, moving swiftly into the remains of the top of the One Capital Center, Ken wondered how those Germans would have reacted to an entire
building
plopping down apparently untouched in their midst.

The interior of the building was surprisingly intact.  Chairs had rolled around, papers were everywhere.  But a lot of the desks and filing cabinets appeared to be close to where they should be.

Some of the desks still had people sitting at them.

Bloody, broken.  But still there.  As though even death could not stop some of the more dedicated workers from running the rat race to the bitterest of ends.

The survivors moved through the outer office, which was mostly cubicles and secretary stations.  Through a door.

The screams behind them sounded muffled for a moment.  Ken remembered that the things at the high school seemed to have trouble with doors.  He hoped that was a problem shared by all of the zombies.

Aaron took the lead, breaking to the left in the hallway the door opened into.  The floor slanted subtly upward, creaking underfoot.  Ken wondered how much stress this piece of the building could take before just folding into itself like a hundred thousand ton house of cards.

The building shuddered.

“They’re inside,” whispered
Dorcas
.

“Yup,” said Aaron.

“Doors,” said Ken.

“What?” said
Aaron.

“They have trouble with doors.”

Then he heard the noise of a door swinging open.  The growl bounced its way into the hall.

“Apparently not anymore,” said Aaron.

“Run!”
Dorcas
screamed.

His feet pounded through the near-dark of the corridor, a place that had no business being here.  And Ken couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t belong, either.  That he had overstayed his welcome in a world that had changed so radically that he no longer understood it.

Not that he ever had.  Not really.  All he had ever been one hundred percent sure of was that Maggie loved him.  And that he loved her and the kids.  So if they were gone… what use sticking around?

He turned a corner.  Felt his depression lessen.  Realized it was that damn screaming.  That growling, that psychic attack.

They’re getting stronger.

That had to explain why they were barreling through the doors, too.  Ken had led the way, pushing through several fire doors in the halls of the dismembered structure, slamming each shut behind them.  It made no difference.  The zombies opened the doors just fine.

They’re getting
smarter
.

He looked behind him.  Couldn’t see their pursuers.  But he could hear them.  Slavering, growling, too many bodies crammed into too small a space.  But he knew that they wouldn’t be falling over one another like a human mob would do.  They would all know exactly where the others were, would move and adjust to make way when necessary.  Only when there was a need to climb atop their unnatural brothers and sisters – like when they had climbed to reach for Ken and
Dorcas
on top of the garage outside the homeless shelter – would they step in one another’s path.

Ken pushed himself to run faster.

The hall grew brighter.  Shattered windows ahead.  A way out.

He could see Idaho Street, littered by more refuse.  Something that looked like a plane fuselage.

And another screaming horde of zombies coming right at them.

“Ken,” said Aaron.  The cowboy still sounded so matter-of-fact it was creepy.

“I see them,” said Ken.  He did
not
sound matter-of-fact.

“Where do we go?” said
Dorcas
.  She was panting, and sounded as panicked as Ken did.  For some reason that made him feel a bit better.

Small consolation not to be the only terrified person when you get torn to pieces
.

“Up,” said Aaron.  He jerked his head to the side.

There was a small side branch to the corridor.  A dark sign that said “Exit” in what had probably once been brightly-lit green.  Now, in the darkness, it looked like it was written in frozen ichor.

They ran down the side hall.  Ken hoped they weren’t just running to an elevator – one that was probably still lodged somewhere in the rest of the One Capital Center, a block away.  Or that if they
were
heading toward a stairwell, that that stairwell was going to be usable: no guarantees the rest of the building’s upper levels would be in as good a shape as the part they had already passed through.

So many things to go wrong
.

Just run, Ken.  Worry later.

He ran.

The corridor ended in a bank of elevators.  One of the sets of steel doors was shut, the other featured doors that had been twisted and bent by the massive forces that had sent the building here.

“Shit,” said
Dorcas
.

“Here,” said Aaron at almost the same moment.  A small door they had already passed.  They had missed it in the near-darkness of this part of the building.

The zombies were behind them.  Ken could hear them in the darkness.  Moving slower, as though searching more carefully in the depths of the structure.

Something creaked.  The building lurched under their feet.  Ken shouted.

The zombies screamed as though in answer.

Lights in the darkness.  Ken realized he was seeing the zombies’ eyes.  They glinted like those of hyenas around a tribal fire.  Hungry.  Lapping up the light and holding it inside.

“Go!” Aaron cried.  He sounded nervous.  Ken did not feel at all happy about that fact.

The three survivors ran through the stairwell door.

The hall had been dark.

The stairwell was
black
.

Ken froze automatically.  As though the lack of visual input was a wall that he had walked into face first.  An immovable object met by a very stoppable force.

Then he heard the noises.  The things.

He reached out.  One hand feeling for a banister, the other for
Dorcas
.  He found both at the same moment.  “You guys with me?” he asked.

Dorcas
said, “Gotcha.”

Aaron grunted.  Ken took that for a yes.

He started up.  He had no way of knowing what lay before him.  He could be marching them straight at a sheer drop-off.  And worse than the sense of physical disorientation was the emotional vertigo.  A few hours ago he was part of the human race; a member of the top link on the food chain.

Now he was a blind grub, running through the torn remnants of humanity’s iron trees, blindly burrowing for shelter from the new apex predators.

He drew
Dorcas
and Aaron up, up, up.  Climbing – slipping, tripping – up unseen stairs toward an equally dark future.

Below them, the fire door opened.

Snarls.  Growls.  The unspoken imperative to
give up, give in, give up, GIVE IN
.

Ken kept pulling, kept climbing.

The banister twisted under his hands.  He thought it must have warped in its strange flight through the air.  Then realized it was just the turn at the landing.

The things below began climbing.  He could hear them, but it seemed like they were quieter.  His own labored breathing almost overpowered the noise of the throng pressing into the stairwell behind him and his new friends.

The near silence of the zombies scared him.  Badly.  Things were changing in the world.  And the changes were all for the worse.

One of the zombies coughed.  The sound seemed to be swallowed up by the stairwell.  But not before the others began making the same sound.  It wasn’t a normal cough, not the kind of thing Ken associated with a cold or a bit of dust gone down the windpipe.  It was hacking.  Painful.  It sounded like the things behind them were in the throes of some horrific ordeal.

Dorcas
’ hand crushed his knuckles.  He guessed she was trying to keep from screaming.  He knew
he
was.

He kept moving up.  Step after dark step, the blind literally leading the blind.

The coughing, chewing hack-sound remained below them.  Whatever was happening was keeping the zombies locked in their place.

Then the coughing stopped.

The growling started again.  And maybe it was just Ken’s imagination, but to him the sound was deeper now.  Stronger.

“
Faster
,” whispered Aaron.

Ken rounded another landing.  Stepped forward.  His foot slammed into something hard and unyielding.  It was his left foot, of course, the pain of the hit mixing with the pain he was already feeling in his left leg.  He almost yelped.  Bit his lip and swallowed the sound.

Dorcas
, moving quickly behind him, slammed into his back.  The momentum drove him forward, and then another, softer hit as Aaron hit
her
and pushed them
both
into whatever Ken had knocked into.

Ken pushed himself away from the thing.  Felt it with his free hand.  It felt like a file cabinet.  A big one, made of heavy sheet metal or maybe even steel.  Ken pushed it.  It didn’t budge.

“Back,” he whispered.

The growling below was closer.

He hoped that there was a door at the landing they had just passed.

He hoped that they could get to it before the zombies got to
them
.