Genesis (22 page)

At first Ken thought Christopher had just chosen an outrageously extravagant way to commit suicide: rather than face the end of the world, he’d find a few struggling survivors, con them by pretending he could save them from a conveniently placed pair of zombie hordes, blow up half a building to do so, then convince them to throw themselves into the equivalent of a thirty foot tall pile of knives and broken glass.

In the next moment Ken changed his mind.  The kid wasn’t a suicide, he was a
magician
.  Christopher slid down the mountain about seven feet, narrowly missing hitting the same jutting rebar that had skewered the still-jittering, still-
melting
zombie… and then he disappeared.

“What the…?” said
Dorcas
.

Christopher’s head popped into view.  It seemed like it just appeared out of nowhere, the world’s largest groundhog taking stock of the apocalyptic winter the world had spun itself into.  “Come on!” he shouted.

Ken shimmied over a few feet.  Moved quickly.  He didn’t give himself a lot of time to think about what he was doing.

When he was a senior, he and some high school friends had found a pair of thick pads that the wrestling team left out.  They dared each other to greater and greater gymnastic attempts.  One of Ken’s buddies bet him a crisp ten-dollar bill that he couldn’t do a backflip.

Ken stood on the pad.  Flipped.  Earned himself ten bucks.

Another friend asked him to do it again.  Awestruck and disbelieving at Ken’s athletic prowess.

Ken, more than a little surprised himself, stood on the mat.  But he wasn’t worried – he’d just done it five seconds before, so no big deal, right?

And not only did he fail to land the backflip, this time he was completely incapable of even moving.  The other guys jeered him about it, riding him mercilessly about his complete lack of balls for most of the year, apparently forgetting that he had knocked their socks off moments before.

Ken couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.  Couldn’t figure out why he could do it the first time, the time he didn’t know what he was doing, but not the second time, when he
did
.

It wasn’t until reading about World War II landing invasions in college that he realized what had happened.  Reading about them, reading how the first wave guys weren’t the bravest: it was the second wave soldiers.  The soldiers who
knew
what was going to happen.  What
waited.
  The enemy, the bullets, the death.

His body and mind had realized what could happen.  That he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and could have broken his neck.  He got lucky once, but they weren’t about to let him risk it again.

Sometimes reckless action was the best way to proceed.  Sometimes it was the only way things could possibly work out.

Ken jumped.

He realized he hadn’t bothered looking up, and hoped none of the rooftop zombies had chosen that moment to come lurching down after him.

Reckless action saved him.  He hit the concrete mountain untouched.  His feet slipped in dust and pulverized concrete.  They went out from under him and he slid headfirst toward Christopher’s still-waiting head.

He passed the spiked zombie.  It seemed to be wilting.  The black acid it had vomited had melted most of its front, and Ken’s nose twitched as something that smelled like vinegar seared his nostrils.

He looked back at Christopher.  At the kid’s grinning, disembodied-looking head.

The head disappeared.

A moment later, Ken did, too.

Ken fell into strong arms, and immediately lashed out.  He knew it was zombies.  Because what else could it be?  What other thing would there be in this place, in this new earth, that would hold him?

“Easy, man.”

The arms righted him.  Held him until his feet found purchase on solid ground.  Then shoved him away.  Ken wheeled his arms as something dark slid between him and the silhouette he recognized as belonging to Christopher.  He heard
Dorcas
hiss as the kid caught her as well, probably knocking her broken arm painfully.

Aaron fell down into their hidey-space a moment later, not needing Christopher to steady him but landing gracefully as a cat with the barest of sounds as his cowboy boots hit the dusty material underfoot.

“Where are we?” Ken said.

Christopher didn’t answer right away.  He reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief that he handed to Ken, gesturing to him to wrap his hand.  Ken did, grimacing as the pain of his missing fingers – both of which were still spitting blood out of stubs that ended just past his knuckles – hit him anew.

He also thought it strange that a kid this age should have a pocket handkerchief.  Even before the world came tumbling down, that would have been weird.

Aaron reached over and tied a quick and efficient field bandage around Ken’s hand, knotting the handkerchief so tightly it ached.  Ken tried not to groan.  Mostly because Aaron didn’t make a sound about his own mangled fingers, using his one good hand and his teeth to tie the handkerchief and moving so quickly it seemed he had been born doing so.

“We’ll have to deal with this soon,” said Aaron, looking at the already-reddening fabric on Ken’s hand.

“Sure, we’ll just stop at St. Luke’s on the way downtown,” said Ken.  He meant it as a joke.  It came out thin and pallid, almost hopeless-sounding.

Aaron nodded as though taking Ken’s statement seriously.  And Ken suspected that if anyone could find a working hospital in this mess of a world, it might be the cowboy.

“Come on,” said Christopher.  He pulled a small flashlight out of his back pocket and started leading Ken and the others into a narrow passageway.  On all sides were bits of cement, metal, glass, wood.  Everyday life reduced to formless nothing.  Reality crushed by forces it had been neither designed nor prepared to meet.

“I saw some people come out of this
hole
a few hours ago, so I explored it,” said Christopher.  For a moment Ken didn’t understand what the kid was saying, then he realized he was responding to Ken’s earlier question regarding where they were.

“Why would you do that?” said
Dorcas
.  She sounded winded, but Ken was amazed at the woman’s stamina.

“Why not?”  Ken didn’t have to see Christopher’s face to know the kid was smiling.  “Not much else to do, other than stay alive.”

Ken didn’t know whether he was hearing sublime wisdom or utter stupidity.  On the one hand, it sounded like Christopher was handling the collapse of humanity better than anyone here.  On the other hand, Ken thought he would have found something better to do than just go exploring.  Hell, he
was
doing something better.

“What happened to the people?” asked
Dorcas
.

“Some of the creeps got ‘
em
.”

“The what?”

“The things.”

“So you went in to explore?”  Incredulity spiked
Dorcas
’ voice.

Christopher didn’t sound offended when he replied.  “Sure.  Lucky for you I was doing it, too.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted you guys getting into trouble and wouldn’t have been able to do my Knight in Shining Armor act.”

“You were all alone?  Where’s your family?” said Ken.  He wanted to slap himself as soon as he said it.  It was the kind of thing you asked about before.  Not now.

Christopher sighed.  “Lucky us, we were all together when it happened.  Dad killed Mom, she took him down as she died.”

“I’m sorry,” said
Dorcas
.

Christopher’s shoulders bounced up and down.  “I think they’d been wanting to do it for a while.  The only reason we were together was for a photo op.  The marriage was mostly for electoral purposes, you know?”

Behind Ken, Aaron chuckled.  “Thought I recognized you.  Your Elgin’s kid.”

“Guilty as charged.”

Ken kept following the kid – the
young man
, he corrected; he now knew that “the kid” was in fact twenty-two years old – but his footsteps stuttered a bit.

“You’re Bud Elgin’s son?  Governor Elgin?”

Christopher didn’t answer.  He clicked off his light, but Ken could still see enough to make his way through the fissure in the ruined building.  Light clawed at them from somewhere ahead.

There was a huge rumble, then a thud that shook Ken’s teeth in his jaw.  He fell into the side of the narrow passage, leaning against what looked like a desktop that had been thrown sideways and embedded in a wall of gravel.  He kept his wounded hand buried against his chest, but even the vibrations of the collapse that made it through to his absent fingers wrung a cry from him.

He looked back at
Dorcas
and Aaron.  Aaron had his feet planted wide, his mangled hand clutched to his chest but otherwise looking fine. 
Dorcas
had fallen down.

“I think we left that building just in time,” said Aaron as he helped
Dorcas
to her feet.  Her face tautened, but Aaron just looked like he was providing basic information:
it’s
eighty degrees out, today’s a Tuesday, and… oh, yes, the world’s ending and the building we were in just collapsed.

Ken turned back to Christopher.  The young man was making his way toward the light.  “I’m not the Governor’s son,” he said.  “There is no governor.  In case you hadn’t noticed, the United States disappeared a few hours ago.”

“Sorry about leaving you guys on the side up there, but I saw the floor looked like it was collapsing, and figured if you were hanging out there as bait none of the creeps would notice me sneaking in and dropping off a care package.”

Ken focused on Christopher.  The young man walked effortlessly, as though pulling himself through a wrecked passage in the middle of a collapsed building was something he did every day.  Ken kept slipping and sliding in dust and wreckage.  He could hear
Dorcas
doing the same behind him, and even Aaron cursed under his breath every once in a while.

“You
meant
for that to happen?” said
Dorcas
, breath huffing out between the words.  “How’d you learn to blow up buildings?”

Christopher laughed sheepishly.  “I didn’t mean
that
to happen.  I figured I’d knock a hole in the floor, knock back the creeps –”

“Zombies,” said Ken without thinking.

“Huh?” said Christopher, then nodded almost immediately.  “Yeah, they are kind of zombie-
esque
, I guess.  Anyway, the building coming down was definitely outside the scope of my plans.”  He chuckled.  “Still, dream big, right?”

Ken could see what he assumed to be their exit ahead: a crack that seemed like it was hanging in gray space.  A moment later he followed Christopher out a rift in the side of the ruined, sagging building.  His fingers throbbed – strange, because they weren’t there.  Stranger still, he could feel his wedding ring, even though it was clamped around his dismembered finger and wedged between stones in a destroyed building far behind him.  The ring wasn’t touching him, but it felt too tight.  It hurt.  A lot.

His wedding ring had never bothered him before.  Not since the first moment that Maggie slipped it on his finger.  He always loved wearing it.  But now it hurt.

He hoped that wasn’t an omen.

The passageway exited at a rickety metal stairwell midway up the slumped over pile of rubble and junk that had been a fully functioning building only a few hours before.  Ken couldn’t tell if it the stairwell was a fire escape or simply metal stairs to the second level businesses.  It was bent and twisted, a blasted mockery of itself.  Black metal peeked out from a heavy layer of gray dust and dark soot that coated this side of the structure.

Ken recognized this area.  They were facing south on 9th Street.  He didn’t know how that was possible, since he was sure they had been a block north of here.  Either the rubble they had climbed through had covered several blocks, or the top part of the One Capital Center building through which they had escaped had lain at a strange angle, so when they jumped off of it they were on a different block than he had calculated.

Either way… he looked to his right.  And there it was.  The Wells Fargo Center.

“So,” said Christopher, reaching out a hand to help
Dorcas
onto the stairwell landing, “do you guys have a plan or – hey!”

Ken barely heard the last.  Barely heard the others shouting for him to stop.  All he could see was the building where his family had been when this happened.  All he could hear was his wife calling him in his mind, his children crying out, screaming for Daddy.

He forgot everything but his family.  Forgot the zombies, forgot the pain in his phantom fingers and in the rest of his body.  He forgot his new friends.

He ran down the stairs and was on the street in the dust and smoke in seconds.  The others were racing after him, and he heard Christopher saying, “What’s going on?  What’d I miss?” over and over.

The street was covered in debris and blood and bodies.  But the bodies were of the normally horrific variety.  None of them were moving, they were dead and dead to stay – at least, until the universe flipped on its axis again and once more rewrote the rules of mortality.

No zombies.  There had been tens of thousands crowding up against the head of the One Capital Center building.  Where were they now?

It didn’t matter.  Maybe the shattering of the building had scared them off, maybe they had found new prey,
maybe
they were late for a mass hairdresser’s appointment.  Ken didn’t care.  All that he cared about was the clear sightline between him and the Wells Fargo Center.

It was a little more than a block away.  It took him less than a minute to run it.  The smoke grew thicker as he approached, and he remembered what seemed a lifetime ago, seeing something explode at the base of the huge crane next to the Wells Fargo building, seeing the crane tilt sideways against the structure.  He looked up and saw the massive crane, almost at the corner of the building, leaning at an angle against the northeast face.

He ran below it.  He could hear the metal creaking far above him.

Below him, he heard something like dead leaves.  He looked down and saw a thick blanket of insects.  All dead.  Not bees, not what had attacked him and
Dorcas
before.  These looked like millions upon millions of ants.

He ran over the dead bugs.  He did not slip.  Nor did he much care what had killed them.  He was too close to the end of his search to care.

The Wells Fargo Center was shaped like a right triangle, and at the square of it there was an entrance, a bank of glass doors.  The middle two were revolving doors, and both of them were grotesquely jammed shut, dead bodies tangled within them like clots in the building’s ventricles.

On either side of the revolving doors were simple hinged doors.  One of them was whole, the other had been knocked out and was only a metal frame holding nothing but air.

Ken ran for the empty door.  He didn’t care at that moment what dangers might lay beyond that dark hole.  Only that his family could be there.  Must be there.

Sometimes, reckless action was the only available substitute for hope.