Genesis (21 page)

They all stayed as close to the building as they could, trying to be at one with it, even as it shimmied and fractured within.  Ken would have gone inside again if there had been an inside to go
to
.  But the entirety of the office they faced was gone, slanting away to an anemone-like pile of rebar, wiring, and building materials.

In the darkness of the hole beyond the windows, Ken thought he saw some of the pieces of the pile moving.  Buried bodies, crushed forms that could not be alive but were somehow still animate.

He looked away.  Concentrated on sliding a foot at a time toward the corner.  On ignoring the bodies casting themselves from on high like angels determined to fall to Hell as fast and as hard as possible.

Dorcas
shouted.

“You okay?” called Christopher.  He didn’t look back, though.  He was almost at the corner.

“I will be if you move faster,” she snapped.

Christopher made a noise that sounded strangely like a chuckle.  Ken couldn’t be sure – it was such an out of place sound that cognitive dissonance set in and insisted that it couldn’t be laughter or any of its subsets.

The growling below was so close.  Calling them.  Insisting without words that Ken just let go and drop down.  Each handhold became harder to maintain, each time he slid a foot it got a bit tougher to care if the spot he chose was a good one.

Christopher slipped.  Almost went down into the massive tumor below them.  Ken wondered if the kid was still smiling.

He didn’t think so.

The kid pulled himself back up.  And then he was gone, disappeared around the corner of the building.  A moment later, Ken began to move around the corner as well.  It would have been an impossible move under normal circumstances – there were no real hand- or footholds, and the windows on either side were too far apart to simply reach around and grab hold.  But the building was shifting every second now, and the quoin stones on the corner had pulled apart enough to allow easy movement around the edge of the building.

Ken took a step, moving blind.  The corner was actually
inverted
, jutting into the building and then out again before becoming the adjoining face of the structure.  He couldn’t see Christopher, and had no idea what the kid had planned – if anything.  He hoped there was something good, though, because the things below were close enough to smell.  Blood, sweat.  Voided bowels.  Desperate madness and a hunger that was beyond alien.

He shimmed across the first angle of the corner.  Reached across to the next face of the corner.  Put his left hand in a crack between the huge stones of the building.  Put his left foot between another.

Dorcas
started coming into the recess as well.

The building heaved suddenly.  Metal sheared off inside the structure.  Another pitch and roll.  Aaron shouted.

Then pain.  Agonizing, white-hot.

Ken screamed.  He looked at his left hand.

The crack he had wedged his hand into had fallen shut.  The stones had rejoined, lonely lovers too long apart.

He was stuck fast.

And he felt a hand caress his foot.

“What is it?  What happened?”

Ken heard the words, but couldn’t answer.  Everything he had, everything he
was
, was focused on the nova of pain at the end of his left arm.

“What happened?”  Same words, different tone.  The first time it was
Dorcas
, asking him.  This time it was Aaron, leaning around and asking
her
.

“He’s caught,” she said.  She kicked down.  Something snarled.

Ken felt something touching the ragged bottom hem of his pant leg.  Didn’t care.

He was whispering.  Holding fast to the stones of the building with his right hand, stuck via his left.  Whispering.

“Give up, give up, give up, fall down, we all fall down.”

Dorcas
smacked him.  A quick, almost light slap across the back of the head.  It reminded Ken of all his other aches and pains, made him aware that he hurt
all over
.

And it was perfect.

He stopped whispering.  Kicked at the thing below him.  Aaron and
Dorcas
were talking in low tones.  Aaron handed her something.  She passed it to Ken.

A knife.

Ken stared at it.  He didn’t realize what he was supposed to do with it for a moment.

“You’re not gonna die here,” said
Dorcas
.  “You have a family waiting for you.”

“I can’t,” said Ken.  He looked at the knife; knew that it must have come from the cowboy.  About four inches long, one side a curved razor-edge, the other a serrated saw blade.

“I can’t,” he whispered again.

The hands grabbed his legs.

“You have to,” she said.  “We can’t get by you, so you have to or we’ll all die.”

He took the knife.

Ken realized that he wasn’t completely trapped.  He realized the crack hadn’t completely sealed around his hand.  He realized only his left pinky and ring fingers were pinned.    He realized that he couldn’t even feel them.

He realized none of that mattered.  Cutting off a part of your body – any part – was not something the human race was equipped for.

Something scraped at his lacerated legs.

“Move it, boy,” said Aaron.  The cowboy sounded composed as always, but Ken heard terror seeping in around the edges of the calm tones.

He leaned into the wall.  He wiggled the knife blade between the two stones that had clamped him in place.  He couldn’t just take a swing at himself – the angle was bad, there was no way he’d do it right.  He’d end up bleeding to death and
still
be pinned there on the side of the wall.

Instead, he pushed the knife blade under his fingers.  Using the knife hilt as a fulcrum and the blade as a bar, he levered the knife upward just behind the point where the fingers disappeared.

The pain bit him hard and deep.  He screamed.  Leaned down harder on the knife.  He couldn’t even saw.  Just had to use his body weight to drive the knife upward, parting flesh and tendon and bone a millimeter at a time.

Warmth trickled out of the gap between the stones.  The things below seemed to delight in the life raining on them.  They raked at his legs.  He had to stop, his fingers half-severed, and step to higher footholds.

Three shadows fell from above. 
Dorcas
screamed.  She fell back but Aaron grabbed her and managed somehow to yank her back to safety.  They both climbed a bit higher.

Ken leaned on the knife again.

The last bits of tissue separated.  The knife blade flew upward as resistance disappeared, and the knuckles of Ken’s right hand scraped against the stone below as the hilt went down.

He realized at that instant that his wedding ring was still attached to his dismembered finger.  The gold circle crushed between stones.  He would never see it again.  That fact hurt almost as badly as the physical pain.

Then he felt himself falling.  He let go of the knife so he could grab onto the wall.  His entire soul ached at the idea of putting his right hand – his remaining good hand – in another gap, but he had no choice.

He pushed his bleeding left hand against his chest.  He felt the pain, but it was cloaked, like a fire under a blanket.  It was there, it would consume the blanket and be all the brighter for it in a moment.  But for now it was only a hint of itself.

Ken moved quickly.  He didn’t know how long he would be able to keep climbing.

He moved across the rest of the span of the inverted corner.  He reached around to the adjoining face of the building.  He could hear
Dorcas
and Aaron, grunting and shouting almost nonstop now as they fought off the waxing tide of zombies that were reaching for them.

Ken pulled himself around the corner.

The growling fell away the second Ken turned the corner.

It was still there, but so much less.  The weight of the sound, of the call to lay down and die or become one with the horde, fell off Ken’s shoulders and suddenly he felt like he could get through this.  The fact that he was in a very real sense less than he had been a moment ago was something to be considered and dealt with… but it
could
be dealt with.

He also realized that the scrabbling, grabbing hands that had been reaching for him an instant before were no longer doing so.  His legs hurt, and it seemed likely they always would, but the pain was less an immediate thing.  More a memory than a now.  Something that had receded into the background wall of noise, not a tidal wave but merely storm surf crashing nearby.

Ken looked down.  This face of the One Capital Center building rested on the rubble that had once been the northeast side of this portion of Idaho Street.  The mountain of debris was covered in jagged forests of rebar and concrete, glittering glasswork shrubberies.  The zombies crowded behind Ken, but they clearly couldn’t climb it.  At least, not as fast as they had climbed each other and the smoother sides of the decapitated skyscraper.

Nor could the zombies above reach them: the ones that threw themselves off the roof or the floor above were impaled on rebar, or shattered on concrete pieces, or simply fell brokenly down the mountain that had once been a monument to human industry.  A few stayed close, but they seemed hurt badly enough that they couldn’t move quickly, couldn’t grab at their prey or bite them.

A reprieve.

“Come on!”

Ken looked over and saw Christopher, waiting about twenty feet down the side of the building.  He was holding tight to a mullion, pulled in close so as not to be grabbed by any of the falling creatures.  But he was still grinning.  Just a walk in the park.

Ken pulled himself toward the kid.  The building kept shaking, and he wondered what came next.  They couldn’t keep going around the skyscraper indefinitely – even if there hadn’t been zombies on the front and back, he didn’t think the thing was going to last much longer.  Especially not if more and more zombies were climbing into the stressed structure, which seemed likely given their single-minded pursuit of anything human.

It struck him that he had started to think of himself as human, and them as something else.  Not simply human and once-human, but human and
other
.  Human and
alien
.  Human and
less
.

He slid over the last few feet to Christopher.  The numbness in his left hand was starting to recede, that blanket starting to be consumed by the underlying pain.

“What now?” he asked.  He heard the muffled sounds of
Dorcas
and Aaron behind him.  Realized with macabre amusement that all three of them were operating one-handed.  Only Christopher looked fine, like he had rolled out of bed, gotten ready for the day, and then decided to hang on the side of a beheaded skyscraper rather than go to the mall or become a movie star.

Christopher looked up.  Another zombie fell, shrieking, and just missed pulling the kid over the slope of the rubble and glass mountain.

“You kinda gotta time this right,” he said.  “And I can’t really come back to show you twice, so be careful, okay?”

A zombie flew past them.  Rolled over the piles of glass and steel.  Impaled itself on a long spike of rebar, the metal going through its face and out the back of its skull.  It didn’t die, just as the other zombies that Ken had seen suffer major head trauma had failed to expire.  That viscous pink fluid spurted, and the zombie began screaming and dancing a strange dance on the side of the mountain, madness on chaos.

Then the zombie did something new.  The rebar spike entered its face through its cheek, emerging just above the thing’s hairline in back.  It couldn’t get off, but it stopped shrieking and twitching.  Its jaw opened, dropping down while its upper head remained pinned in place by the rebar.

It coughed, the same coughing that Ken had heard in the dark stairwell minutes before.  A strange noise, one that sounded like pieces of gravel were grinding together in the zombie’s throat.

The thing vomited, expelling ropy strands of bile.  Some of the fluid splashed against the concrete that held the rebar in place, and on the rebar itself.  Black smoke poured upward from the concrete and steel, and even from this distance Ken could hear the acid hiss of materials being broken down.

“Good God,” said
Dorcas
.

They were all transfixed by the sight for a moment.  But only a moment.  Another zombie pitched itself off the top of the building, sliding away to oblivion – but only after nearly grabbing Aaron on the way down.

“Time to skedaddle,” said Christopher, tearing his eyes away from the zombie.  Its flesh was now smoking, whatever acid it had expelled eating away at its own skin and bone as it screamed.

“Watch close,” said the kid.  “Remember: no second chances.” 

And he jumped off the side of the building.