Genesis (4 page)

If you had asked Ken Strickland even ten minutes ago a question like, “Could you forget about a student having a seizure in your class?” he would have answered in the negative.  He would also have laughed and possibly asked if you needed a medication increase.

But that was before insanity pushed into his class.  Before the bugs, before planes bombing downtown, and before students started killing each other.

Now, he had forgotten about the boy suffering a grand mal seizure under his hands.  Had forgotten about Matt Anders.

But the growling reminded him.

That and the fact that Matt went suddenly and completely still.

Ken’s eyes were dragged to the silent form under his hands, like he was looking for a single bright spot of sanity in the black pit of madness that had swallowed his once-orderly classroom.  Like he was looking for some reason he could give himself that life still made sense – even if that reason was that at least normal things like seizures were still a possibility.

But even that was denied him.

He looked down and saw Matt, still drooling but no longer thrashing around.  The boy’s eyes were rolled back in his skull, his head oriented upward, like he was trying desperately to see something beyond the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles.

He was growling.  A low, abrasive noise that sounded like he was probably damaging his vocal cords.  It sent another round of shivers up and down Ken’s spine.

Then Matt’s eyes snapped back into place.  They didn’t roll, they actually
snapped
, like they had been jerked back into their moorings by some electromagnetic force.  The pupils were hugely dilated.

Matt’s gaze focused on Ken.  The growl turned even darker.

The boy launched himself upward.  His teeth gnashing.  His hands clenching.

Only the fact that Ken’s hands had already been on Matt’s shoulders saved him.  Only the fact that he had half-pinned the boy’s shoulders to the floor kept him from finding out what it felt like to have his jugular ripped out; to see his lifeblood spew across the slick killing floor that had once been a place of learning.

Even so, it was close.  Matt’s teeth came together with an audible clack inches from Ken’s neck, and Ken could hear the boy’s jaws grinding together with a terrible rasping noise as the kid strained to reach his neck, his face, his flesh.

“No!”

Ken didn’t know if he was screaming at Matt, or at the other kids in the class who had suddenly and unaccountably gone insane.  Most likely he was screaming at everything and everyone – at a world that would permit such madness.  Regardless, the word seemed to come with a burst of strength.  He pushed Matt away, and pushed himself back at the same time.

Matt felt like long cords of firewood under his fingers, muscles bunched so tightly they no longer felt human.  The boy was impossibly strong, impossibly fast.  Ken fell back, thinking he would have a moment to get some clearance between himself and the still mostly prone kid, but he hadn’t taken two steps before Matt was on his feet and rocketing straight at him.

The boy’s fingers were curled into hooks, and Matt knew without a doubt that if the kid got those hooks into him, it would be hard – impossible – for him to escape.

Time slowed down.  Ken had been operating in a different time zone than the rest of the class.  Now he seemed to be rejoining them, but in a way that slowed down the flow of their movements.

He heard a scream.  Had an impossible chance to look over.

It was Stu Clancy.  The big jock was gripping his shoulder where Laura Briscoe had bitten him.  His face was white and sweat was bursting from his pores.  But not normal sweat.  It looked like he was sweating
blood
, like his capillaries had burst under the pressure of some unimaginable distress.

Stu screamed again.  Then his eyes rolled back in his head.  His face tilted to the ceiling.

And then Ken had to look away from the terrible vision of the star football player.  Because Matt Anders was about to kill him.

A moment ago – less than a moment, a mere
instant
ago – Ken had been worried about Matt’s hands.  Now all he saw was the boy’s teeth.  Because what if he got bit?  What if being bit was some kind of death sentence?  What if being bit meant he would end up like the rest of them?  Like Stu?

All this went through Ken’s head in a flash.  Too quickly to come up with a plan.  He just reacted.

When Ken was fourteen he went to a week-long church camp.  He got there early, and was able to score a prime bunk by the door.  He put his stuff – mostly books he’d brought to pass the time – on the bed and went to check out the camp snack shack.

When he came back a half hour later, a kid named Adam was sitting on his bed.  Ken’s books and clothes were in a messy heap on the floor.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.  Ken, then a full head shorter than most of the kids his age, had started trembling with rage.

“That’s my stuff,” he finally managed.  “That’s my bed.”

Adam barely deigned to glance at him.  Just laced his fingers behind his head and studiously looked heavenward.  “What’re you going to do about it?”

Adam was a full six inches taller than Ken.  Probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.

The answer was obvious.  Ken gathered his stuff and went to another cabin.  He didn’t know anyone there.  He had a terrible time.

And as soon as he got home he withdrew every penny from his bank account – he’d been saving for a car when he turned sixteen – and paid in advance for a year’s worth of lessons at the first martial arts studio he found.  He didn’t kid himself.  It wasn’t about self-defense.  It wasn’t about “never letting it happen again.”

It was about a
goal
.

He wanted to go back to camp in one year’s time, and kick Adam’s ass.

In the next year he
absorbed
hapkido.  And while he only grew four inches – still short for his age – he did add fifty pounds of muscle to his frame.

Oddly, at the end of the year Adam’s attitude had done a complete one-eighty.  Maybe it was the fact that he’d heard Ken wanted to teach him new and exciting ways to die.  Maybe it was just that Ken had a lot more confidence and so wasn’t as easy a target.  Maybe it was just that both of them grew up enough to get over their insecurities.

Whatever it was, there was no end-of-the-year ass-kicking.  He and Adam ended up being best friends.

But Ken never quit martial arts.  It slowed down a bit when he got married.  A
lot
when the kids started coming.  But he still made time at least once a week to get out and do some forms, or some weapons practice or sparring.

So when Matt came at him and all he saw was teeth and all he thought about was turning into something less than himself, he just reacted.

He grabbed Matt’s hands, crushing them in his own fingers.  Matt kept barreling at him.  Teeth gnashing.  Spittle flying from his mouth.  That growl, that low, terrible growl.

Ken knew he couldn’t stop the kid.  Whatever had happened to his students had somehow made them stronger than they should be.  Had turned them from normal-level kids to high-level ‘
roid
freaks.

So he didn’t try to stop Matt.  Just let him come.  Let him come.  Actually
pulled
him.

Matt stumbled forward a bit.  And in the second that he was off-balance, in the instant that the kid’s feet left the floor and he was completely weightless, Ken fell back himself.  He rolled to his back, still holding onto Matt’s fingers, and used their joint momentum to yank the boy onto him.

This was the dangerous moment.  The time where if he screwed up, Ken knew he was dead.

He didn’t screw up.  His foot popped up perfectly, jamming into Matt’s gut hard enough that the boy’s breath exploded out of him.  Inertia transferred from downward motion to upward and backward motion as Ken’s foot kicked up like a piston, shooting Matt up and over him.

Ken let go of Matt’s hands.  The boy didn’t stop growling, and his claw-fingers grabbed for Ken’s face, nails dragging bleeding lines across Ken’s cheeks and temples.  He just missed gouging out Ken’s eyes.

There was a crash.

The growling stopped.

Ken followed through with the roll, so he ended up on his hands and knees, facing the direction he had started.  He spun around, positive that Matt would be rushing him from behind.

But Matt was gone.

Ken’s stomach felt at once tight and loose, a strange dichotomy that he didn’t understand.

He rushed to the broken window.  Looked down.

Matt’s body was there, three stories below.

Motionless.

Ken had just killed one of his students.

But he didn’t have time to think about it, to care about it.  Because the window let him see the city.

“Maggie,” he whispered.

Boise was a lovely city.  Ken had always thought it was the perfect mix of big-city life – movie theaters, malls, a few nightclubs – and small-town community.

But now he could not remember why he had ever thought anything positive about the place.  He could only see the black smoke rising in dozens of locations.  Could only see fire skittering over the surfaces of several of the buildings.

The Banner Bank building… was just
gone
.  Disappeared from Boise’s skyline.  Smoke and fire reached greedy fingers into the sky at the spot where it had once stood, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out where at least one of the crashing planes had gone down.

Then, as he watched, one of the huge industrial cranes that stood in the city center tilted drunkenly.

It was the one by the Wells Fargo Center.

“Maggie,” Ken said again.

The world had gone mad a moment ago.  Now it felt like it was ending.  The great crane, tall enough to loom over the eleven-story building, seemed to hang at an impossible angle for far too long.  A fireball bloomed from somewhere near its base, a great ball of orange and red that ballooned upward before disappearing into an ashy black and gray outline.

The crane fell.  It hit the Wells Fargo Center hard enough that Ken could hear it even miles away.  A sickening, lurching crunch of metal and glass and concrete shearing off.

Things fell from the side of the building.  He couldn’t tell if they were huge pieces of concrete or human beings.

The crane slid along the side of the skyscraper, gouging great furrows in the side of one of the largest landmarks in the city.  Then it slowed, stopped.  Still hung up on the side of the bank building.

The building where Maggie was.

Where the
kids
were.

He pulled away from the window.  Intending to turn and run.  To get to his car, to race to the bank where Maggie had been dealing with a re-fi of their house, and find her and the kids.

It saved his life.

One of the students – could they even be called students anymore? – had apparently taken advantage of his distraction.  Had run at him from behind.  When Ken pulled away from the window, the kid –

(
Kari Harper.
)

– missed jumping on his back by stupid, dumb luck.  Instead she impaled her throat on one of the jagged shards of glass left behind when Matt went through the window.  Blood ran over the piece of glass, staining it crimson in a way that was almost beautiful.  Kari twitched like a trout caught on a lure, yanking back and forth and only succeeding in shredding her throat further.

She grabbed the shard of glass and tried to pull herself off, but only succeeded in slashing her palms open.  She must have severed the tendons or nerves, because her fingers stopped working and she just batted at the glass ineffectually until she finally sagged, still pinned to the windowpane like the world’s largest and most grotesque insect on a science board.

Ken looked around.  The class was still a battleground.  But it seemed like the tide was turning.  Most of the kids still alive had that dead look in their eyes.

Only a matter of time before one of them took him down.  And it didn’t matter how much sparring he’d done, how many thousands of times he’d punched a heavy bag.  One bite and… what?

Didn’t matter.  He couldn’t let that happen.  He had to survive.  Had to get to Maggie and the kids.

As if to contradict him, a now-familiar growl drew his attention.

Stu.

Blood drizzled through the mangled bite on the jock’s shoulder, and his blood-crusted skin looked like it was scabbing over.

His eyes were dead.  Dead, but still focused on Ken.

The big kid rushed at him.