Genesis (10 page)

At first he didn’t see anything.  Just a wall of windows with “Brooke Gale, CPA,” and “Got Taxes?” and “Se
habla
español
” written across them in large white letters.

He recognized the signs.  He’d never been in the office – never had a need to, since the kind of money he made as a teacher generally insured that his taxes could be figured out on the side of a cereal box and squared by sending Uncle Sam a roll of shiny nickels – but he drove past it every day.

It was a quarter-mile from the school.

A quarter-mile closer to the Wells Fargo Center.

A quarter-mile closer to Maggie and the kids.

“How did we get here?” he said.

Dorcas
favored him with a look that made it clear she thought the question an exquisitely stupid one.  “I brought you,” she said.

“How?”

She grimaced.  “I was fixing a flat on the side of the road when everything started to fall apart.  Couple cars crashed, couple more stopped and the people in ‘
em
came after me.”

“How’d you…?”  Ken’s voice drifted away.  He didn’t need to ask.  “That’s quite some tire iron you’ve got.”

“Yeah,” she hefted it in both hands for a moment like a star hitter about to go on deck.  “My ex-husband made this for me.  He was a walking penis, but good with tools.  I think it was his way of letting me know he didn’t actually want to have to be around to help me with anything ever.”

Ken was saved from having to figure out how to respond to that by the fact that several figures ran by the windows. 
Dorcas
grabbed him and hauled him a bit lower, so they could barely see over the top of the reception desk.

The figures ran lithely, with a grace and speed that Ken normally associated with professional athletes.  But one of them looked like a soccer mom and the other two were dressed in fast food uniforms.  All three were spattered with blood.  The soccer mom was holding onto something that looked like a human spine.

They were gone as fast as they came.  Just a few streaks of red across the glass.

“How
did
you get me here?” asked Ken.  He was speaking to speak, he knew.  Talking to keep his mind off what had just happened, off the pain that was still roaring through his body.

“I found you by the high school.  You looked pretty bad, but alive.”  Her eyes never wavered from the front of the office.  She looked like a hunter, eyes ready for any sign that would lead her to what she sought.  Ken had been invited to go hunting several times over the years, but had never gone.  He was regretting that fact now.  Something told him it might have offered him a few useful skills.

“Anyway,”
Dorcas
continued a moment later, “there had been some kind of explosion, looked like –”

“An SUV blew up.”

Dorcas
nodded.  “Yeah, but it looked like maybe more than that.  Maybe hit a gas main or something as well.  Wasn’t a whole lot left of that side of the
school.
”

“What?”  He was dumbfounded.  Somehow the idea that the school had fallen prey to whatever sickness – attack?
infestation
? –
that
had altered everyone was easier for him to deal with than the concept of the building suffering a gas explosion.

All those
kids
dead, he thought.

Then he thought: they were
already
dead.

Of course, he didn’t know that.  He didn’t know
anything
.  He was just guessing.  And guessing was a terrible way to go about making life and death decisions.

Dorcas
was nodding slowly.  “
Yuh
,” she said.  “Good thing for you, too, ‘
cause
I don’t think these whatever-they-
ares
would have left you alone if you’d fallen over in the middle of anywhere else.  You being in the middle of a big
ol
’
kaboom
is what saved you.”

Another one of the things ran by. 
Dorcas
waited until it was gone, her hands tightening on the lug wrench to the point that Ken worried the thing beyond the windows would see her knuckles glowing.

It didn’t, though it stayed at the windows for a very long time, smelling along the glass like a two-legged bloodhound.  Ken looked around for something to use as a weapon.  The receptionist’s desk was clean to the point of being irritating.  The only things on it were a few post-it notes, a pencil, and some letters.  Ken thought about opening the drawers, but he didn’t know how well-developed the things’ hearing might be.

After another few breathless moments, the thing ran off.  Ken noted that it looked less sure on its feet than had the first three, though he didn’t know why.  It hadn’t appeared injured.  He filed away the information.

“So anyways,”
Dorcas
continued, as though they had been interrupted by nothing more than a minor annoyance, a glitch in the day’s proceedings, “even though you hadn’t been torn to itty-bitty bits, I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to leave you there, so I grabbed you and brought you here.”

“But how?  No offense, but I’m a bit too big for you to pick up.”

A cloud of smoke drifted by the window, as though to underline his question.

Dorcas
grimaced.  “Yeah, I had to drag
ya
.  You’ll probably find a fair amount of gravel in the back of your head, legs, and ass tonight.  Sorry.”

Ken tried not to gawk at her.  She had dragged him for a quarter-mile?  She had to have done it one-handed, too, or she wouldn’t have been able to retain her XXL lug wrench.  And she was
apologizing
?

“Why?” he said.  And even as the word escaped him, he wasn’t sure what he meant by it.  Why had she cared to stop for him in the first place?  Why would she apologize when she’d done nothing to warrant an apology?  Why had he survived when so many had not?

Why was any of this happening?

Dorcas
lavished another one of her “my, aren’t we the idiot?” looks on him.  “It was the right thing to do,” she said.  “Jesus said ‘Do unto others.’”  Her eyes flashed to the side.  “You’re head’s bleeding again.”

Ken touched his temple.  His fingers came away red.  The sight of his blood made him woozy.  Or maybe it wasn’t the sight, but the fact that he’d probably lost so much of it.  Either way, he once again found himself riding a Tilt-a-Whirl that nobody had bothered to ask him if he wanted a turn on.

Dorcas
put a hand on his shoulder.  “You should lay back down.”

“Can’t.”  He closed his eyes, willing the vertigo to stop.  It didn’t.  He opened his eyes and concentrated on seeing
through
his dizziness.  He seemed to have better luck with that, if only marginally.  “My family’s out there.”

Dorcas
’ face tightened.  “Where?”

“Wells Fargo Center.”

She nodded.  “Well, we best get to it, then.”

“To what?”

“To them.”

She started moving toward the front doors.  Ken moved after her, pausing only a fraction of a second.  He didn’t have to ask her why.  He knew what she would answer.

“It’s the right thing to do.”

The Wells Fargo Center was less than two miles away.  Less than a half hour’s hard walk under normal circumstances.

But then, these were hardly normal circumstances.  Now, with the world spiraling into a maelstrom of chaos and violence, two miles could take a day.  Longer.  There was no way to know.

Ken took a moment to search the receptionist’s desk.  It yielded little more helpful than the pencil he had already seen.  Just a ruler too flimsy to use as a weapon, and a plastic stapler that would probably fall apart if he tried to use it for anything more strenuous than attaching one sheet of paper to another.

Welcome to the world of disposable living
.

Looked like he would be leaving the office as empty-handed as he came in.  At least he was still alive.

Dorcas
led the way out, creeping on cat-feet to the front of the drab room.  She unlatched the door, and Ken was amazed anew at the woman.  Not only had she rescued him, not only had she dragged him a quarter-mile through decidedly hostile territory, she had had the presence of mind to lock the front door when she came inside.

The tax preparation office was in the middle of a small line of businesses.  One of the little groupings of buildings that would grow a few stories every block or so until they became the dozen or so high rises at the center of downtown Boise.

Ken looked around.  Smoke clouded the air, turning day into a half-lit twilight.  It was hard not to cough.  Pits of brightness peeked through the air in every direction as dozens of fires burned unchecked, as though Hell itself was forcing its way through to a higher plane – or dragging this plane lower.  Cars lay askew in the streets, some crumpled into each other, some crumpled into buildings, others simply abandoned.  There would be no driving anywhere within city limits, not in the permanent gridlock that had fallen upon Boise.

Ken could also hear the sounds of chaos.  The crackle of flames.  Glass tinkling.  Sounds of concrete and shearing off in the distance, and steel bending under some unimaginable forces.

Car alarms chirped all around him, a cacophony of noise that mixed and mingled and could almost hide the other sounds.

Almost.

But the electronic screams of the car alarms could not quite mask the flesh and blood shrieks of people being maimed and dismembered and killed.

And turned.

“Have you seen anyone get bitten and not turn?” he whispered.

“Turn?  What’re you talking about?” 
she
looked up and down the walkway.  Ken followed her gaze.  There were four cars in the small parking lot.  Two of them had their doors hanging open, their own alarms blaring and adding to the bedlam.  But no one could be seen.

There was some blood on the sidewalk below his feet.  Nothing like it had been at the school, but more than you could write off as a passing nosebleed.

“Turn.  Into one of… one of them.”

Dorcas
swiveled to stare at him with wide eyes.  “You mean if you get bit you turn into one of these crazies?”

Ken nodded.  “It happened to one of my
studen
– I saw it happen,” he amended, trying not to think about Stu, screaming as blood streamed through the bite on his shoulder, staining his letterman jacket even as his eyes drained of their humanity.  It was an impossible thing to try.  Ken suspected that moment would be present in every moment he experienced for the rest of his life, like a horrible stained glass window through which he viewed the world.

“So they’re zombies,” said
Dorcas
.

“What?”

But she was already moving away, almost dancing down the sidewalk, hugging the walls of the building as long as she could.  She looked like she’d trained for this.  Maybe she had.  Ken again regretted not going hunting.

He also wondered at what she’d said.  Zombies?

He was a history teacher.  He believed in facts and events, in what actually happened.

But he also knew that much of history was a lot closer to fiction than to fact.  Often “history” was simply what the winners of major conflicts got to call their propaganda.

So… zombies.

Zombies – at least in the movies and stories he knew of – were mindless.  
That
certainly matched up with the things that had taken over Boise.  The trouble they obviously had with doors seemed to bear that out, as did their lack of speech and their incapacity for fear – the ones that had come out the window with him hadn’t been afraid, just angry.

Zombies were hard to kill.  Ditto the things here.  They had been bashed, blown up, pulled to pieces.  And still they kept coming.

So how did you kill a zombie?  Ken tried to remember the few zombie movies he’d watched.  He preferred light comedies or straight action to horror films.  But he thought it was shooting them in the head.  Major brain trauma.

And that
didn’t
jibe.  When Becca hit her head she went berserk.  When Ken kicked Joe
Picarelli’s
skull bones back into his brain, the gym coach rampaged throughout the hall of the school.  Neither died.  They just went even crazier.

So no.  Not zombies.  Or if they were zombies, then the stories had gotten some things very wrong.

He realized that
Dorcas
was holding up her hand, motioning for him to stop.  He skidded to a halt, instinctively drawing as close to the nearest wall as he could.  It was an ice cream shop.  Baskin Robbins.  The neon sign that usually bragged about its “Thirty-
OneDerful
Flavors” was dark.

Come to think of it, Ken realized that the lights had been off in the accounting office where
Dorcas
had taken refuge.

Were lights on anywhere in Boise?

In Idaho?

How far did this go?

Dorcas
spun around.  “Go!”
she
whisper-shouted.  “Go, go,
go
gogogogogo
!”

She looked terrified.  Ken would have bet she could play a game of high-stakes poker against a room full of Bond villains.  He had no wish to see what had scared her.

So he ran.