Genesis (19 page)

Ken did not like to race.  It was one of the reasons he enjoyed the martial arts: there was no running.  At least, not to see who could get to the finish line first.  His body type was just a bit on the thick side to be effective as a sprinter.  Not that he was fat, but he didn’t have that long, lithe form that enabled people to knife through a hundred-yard dash in record time.

Now he was running the most important ten feet of his life.  Down stairs, in pitch black, to a finish line that might or might not hold the hoped-for door.  And even if there
was
a door, what if it was warped in its frame, like the elevator doors had been?  Or what if something was blocking it from the other side?

He ran like Maggie was on the other side of the door – the door that he hoped was there.

He heard the growling, the tramping of more feet than he could count.  His pulse thundered in his ears, but did not take away the sounds of the things coming straight at him.

Forget about them.  Think of Maggie.

She’s dead, you know.

Maggie.  In her bathing suit, like she was in Kauai
.

Like she was in your dream.  Dead and pulled to pieces
.

He slammed into the wall.  His whole body hit at once, nose and groin and knees and toes.  He groaned.

The growls seemed to orient on the sound.  He felt a hot hand on his arm, a hand slick and wet and lacerated.

A gust of warm air as something moved past him.  He heard a grunt – a reassuringly human sound.  The thud of flesh on flesh.  Then Aaron bellowed, “Get the door open!” from just to Ken’s side.

Down
the stairs, in the midst of
them
.

Ken tried to yank his wits back into place, one hand reaching out to fumble around on cool concrete, the other moving around his face of its own accord, as though he was worried he might find that parts of him had fallen off with the impact.

There was another thud.  A screech that disappeared into nothing.  One of the zombies must have fallen – or been thrown – over the stairwell.  Not that there could be far to fall – the decapitated building only went down to the street level thirty feet below.  But the screech cut off with a wet smack as the thing hit whatever rubble and wreckage served as the non-building’s foundation.

Not that it mattered.  There were probably a hundred – a thousand, ten thousand – more of the things.  A single one falling wouldn’t make a difference to the survivors’ chances.

Ken’s fingers found a seam.  A steal plate that probably covered a locking mechanism.

A doorknob.  His hand closed around it at the same time
Dorcas
’ did.  They both twisted.  The doorknob rattled…

…
but
didn’t turn.

“No, no, no!” screamed
Dorcas
.

Another zombie shrieked and fell.  Aaron was silent, and Ken wondered how he was functioning in the darkness.  How he was fighting.  How long the man could survive.

The cowboy screamed.

Dorcas
screamed, too, and pulled away from the door.  Her hand got tangled in Ken’s, and that’s how they found out that the door was locked, but not locked
shut
.  The knob wouldn’t turn, but when she pulled away and her hand knocked into his arm, he pulled back automatically without letting go of the doorknob… and the door just swung open.

He grabbed
Dorcas
, who was lunging toward Aaron, by the back of her tank top.  Yanked her backward.  She screamed, reaching for the cowboy.

Aaron had his right hand clutched to his chest.  His left circled the neck of a zombie.  The cowboy slammed the beast’s neck into the stairway railing, hard enough that the crunch of the thing’s windpipe collapsing was audible over the roar of the hundred-plus other zombies that were pushing up the stairs.

“Aaron!” Ken called, backpedaling frantically through the open door.

Aaron followed, kicking and punching so fast that Ken almost couldn’t see the movements.  Ken was a decent fighter.  But he wouldn’t have wanted to face off against the old cowboy.

Aaron threw another flurry of punches with his good hand, then turned and threw himself through the fire door.  Ken slammed the door shut, looking around for some way to barricade it.

Something battered at the door from the other side.  Hard enough that Ken bounced a foot off the door before pushing back.  But he couldn’t get the door to meet the jam.  It was a full four inches away from meeting that safety point.

Hands – big and small, light and dark, whole and mangled – curled around the door.  Reaching for him.  He shrank from them, but couldn’t move too far or he would give up the frail leverage that was letting him hold the door this close.

“Help!” he screamed.  The scream came from somewhere deep within, from a place in his soul so dark and profound that it had never before been given to light.  More than panic, more than terror.  It was a lust to hang on, a need to
live
, to
continue
.  “Help me, dammit, someone help me!”

Aaron launched himself at the door.  The cowboy’s strength stopped it from opening any further, but didn’t get it closed.  And even if it had, Ken didn’t know what they’d do to
keep
it closed: the thing was unlocked, and he didn’t see a locking mechanism on this side.

Dorcas
was nowhere to be seen.  Ken wondered if “the right thing to do” had finally been to run away.

Aaron’s face was pale.  The old cowboy still held his right hand against his chest.  The fingers of that hand were curled and twisted, broken in too many places to count.  The thumb hung loose, sprung free from its socket and wagging grotesquely with every movement Aaron made.

One of the zombies’ hands snaked out from behind the door and grabbed a hank of Ken’s hair.  He screamed as the thing pulled him toward the edge of the door.  Toward the darkness beyond.

He gritted his teeth and pulled back.  Felt wads of hair separating from his already bruised and bloodied scalp.  But the thing’s hand was too strong, and had too good of a grip on his hair.  It pulled Ken closer.  He couldn’t get away.

He heard the moaning growl of the zombies, only inches away.

The chittering click of teeth, snapping toward him.

Felt hot breath on his skin.

Closed his eyes.

“
MOVE!
”

Ken’s eyes snapped open.  He reacted instinctively, a final surge of adrenaline enabling him to yank his head a few inches to one side.

“
Close your eyes!
”

Again he acted instantly, conscious thought an interloper that would only have gotten in the way.  His eyes shut again, even as he registered that the shouting voice did not belong to Aaron or to
Dorcas
.  It sounded young, the voice of a teen or a man in his early twenties.

The world caught fire.

Even through closed eyes, pink blooms of flame burst across Ken’s vision, burnt his retinas and made him feel like he’d just stepped face-first into a laser show at a rock concert.

There was an explosion, then a scream.  Another sparkling fireball, another explosion.

The wet hand that had been pulling at his hair shook suddenly, then let go.  The door fell shut behind him.  Something that sounded like a stampede was happening beyond the steel fire door.

Ken opened his eyes.

It
was
a kid.  Ken guessed he was eighteen.  Good looking in the way that only the rich can be: well-scrubbed, well-coifed,
well
-dressed.  A visual triple threat and a danger to any woman within ten years of his age.  Unlike Ken,
Dorcas
, and Aaron, the kid had somehow avoided getting his clothes trashed.  He looked like he had just happened along in between college classes.  Or during a break at his fashion photo shoot.  As though the impending end of the world was something that probably inconvenienced him, but not to the point that he would leave without doing his hair.

The kid held up three colorful cardboard tubes, each over a foot long and several inches wide.  Blue-gray smoke curled out of their blackened edges.  The pungent smell of gunpowder – almost a perfume compared to the ever-present scent of death that had so consumed the world – pricked Ken’s nostrils.

“My dad always buys too many fireworks on the Fourth of July,” the kid said with a lopsided smile.

The growling beyond the door started again.  So did the horrible, hacking coughing.

The kid’s smile dissipated but didn’t disappear.  “I think we should vamoose,” he said.

The kid spun around, revealing a backpack crammed full of lumps that Ken assumed were more fireworks.  The kid ran down the hall, toward a shattered window where
Dorcas
was waiting.  The older woman looked on the verge of a heart attack.  She must have gone to look for some way to block the door… and found a strange, pyrotechnic guardian angel instead.

Ken pushed away from the door.  He helped Aaron stand as well.  The cowboy nodded thanks, then the two of them ran after the kid.

They joined
Dorcas
at the window.  It was a hard run: unlike the lower floor, this one had not escaped the destruction of being flung a block over and two hundred feet down.  The floor was uneven, gutted.  It creaked and groaned under Ken’s feet, and at one point Aaron’s right leg fell through completely.  His leg just disappeared up to the knee.

He didn’t make a sound.  But his white face grew several shades paler.

Ken helped him pull himself free.  Hard because he didn’t even dare touch the walls on either side of the corridor.  They looked on the verge of collapsing, and he suddenly felt like he was in some strange above-ground mineshaft that might simply disintegrate around them at any moment.

He helped Aaron up.  The cowboy’s leg came out of the floor, and as it did the entire structure shuddered.  As though Aaron had loosened some hidden keystone that the architects had put just under
this
particular spot with instructions never
never
ever to touch it or the entire thing would come down.

He and Aaron both froze.  The rational part of him realized that if three entire stories of a skyscraper were about to come down around you, the
last
thing you wanted to do was freeze.  But rationality wasn’t always the commanding impetus.  Sometimes instinct ruled.  Sometimes we stood still in the face of danger.  We played dead in the hopes that the destroying angel would pass us by.

The building stopped shifting.

But now Ken thought he heard the rattle of something reaching for the doorknob of the stairway door they had just left behind.  He and Aaron looked at one another.

They ran again.

They reached
Dorcas
, who was still waiting at the end of the corridor.  The hall turned into an L-intersection, branching to the left, a solid wall hiding a bank of what Ken assumed were offices to the right.

The kid was gone from view, but Ken heard him scrabbling around the side of the broken floor-to-ceiling window.  Ken leaned out and felt his jaw fall open.

Each window of the One Capital Center was taller than a man, and several of them hung together in floor-to-ceiling sheets.  Every six windows, a thick concrete mullion separated the next set of windows.  Most of the windows were gone, or at most holding a few razor shards like angry teeth grimacing at the unfairness of what had happened to this once impervious-seeming structure.

The kid had moved out of the window the hall faced, shimmied onto the outer sill, and then moved right across the outer face of the building, clinging to the
muntins
that remained – many little more than jagged bits of metal and
weatherstripping
– and then slipping past the concrete mullion to the next bank of windows.

He showed no inclination to go inside the building.  When he saw Ken gawking at him, he grinned.  He still looked like a cover model for a teen magazine, and Ken suddenly hated him just a little bit.

Irrational, but then, so was the fact that the young guy looked so nice in the middle of disaster.

“Come on,” shouted the kid.  “Safer out here.”

Ken didn’t like it.  But then, he liked the idea of staying in the hall even less.  Especially since he heard the sound of growling behind them.  The things in the stairwell sounded like they had regained their composure.  They were coming.

He looked at
Dorcas
.  Arm still in a sling.  At Aaron, his good right hand looking like a spider that had been squashed by a steel-toed boot.

“Can you guys make it?” he said.

“We’ll have to,” said Aaron.  His face was still white, but he looked less like he was going to fall over than he had a moment before.

“We stay in here and they get us for sure,” agreed
Dorcas
.  “Nowhere to go.”

“You first,” said Ken, gesturing for
Dorcas
to go ahead of him.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

He didn’t have time to argue the finer points of chivalry.  He climbed out the broken window frame.  Glass crunched as he stepped onto the outer sill.  His body seized up automatically as his eyes tried to convince his mind that he was walking out the thirteenth floor of a high rise.

“I’m not that high up,” he said to himself.  Trying to persuade himself that a fall wouldn’t kill him.  The fall out of the school earlier hadn’t killed him, had it?

He looked down.  Searching for a way to convince his recalcitrant body that stepping outside the building was the right thing to do.

He looked down.

And that was a huge mistake.