Genesis (9 page)

Ken tried to stand.  Made it to his knees before pitching forward face-first into the lawn.  The grass was soft enough to save him from serious injury, but still felt bone-shatteringly hard as it ground his lips into his teeth.

He pushed himself up again.  Blood and spit oozed out of his mouth.  He saw a tooth, bright white in the sunlight, sitting naked on the grass.

Whose tooth is that?

The growling behind him was louder.  Much louder.  Like more than one voice, too.

Ken forced himself up.  He felt sick to his stomach, felt like dying might not just be inevitable but
welcome
.  The only thing that kept him going was a sense that he had to be somewhere.  Was supposed to meet someone.

Where am I supposed to be?

He took several lurching steps.  Vomited on himself but managed to remain upright.  He seemed to recall that puking was a sign that a concussion wasn’t too bad.  Or was it the opposite?  Was he dying?

Focus
.

One foot ahead of another.

He stayed vertical, but knew he was moving too slow.  The
things
were out here.  He could hear them.

He risked a glance over his shoulder, even though it made his already-spinning world start to whirl that much faster, like a carnival ride that hadn’t had a government safety check in decades.

There were three of them.  Four.  Now five.  Coming out of the school’s side door.  They looked confused, like they weren’t sure how they had gone from indoors to outside; like doors taxed their suddenly-altered mental states.

They wandered in tight circles just past the still-burning vehicle that had plowed into the school.  Their movements were jittery, but somehow familiar.  They looked like something Ken had seen before.  He sensed it might be important, but didn’t have a chance to dissect the thought.

Because that was when they stopped being awed by the outside world; stopped being amazed by the magic portal that had brought them beyond the walls of the high school.

They saw Ken.

They might have seen him before, but forgotten him in the strangeness of the outside world.  He didn’t know.  But now he saw them clearly zeroing in on him.  He heard that strange, animalistic growl coming from all of them, that ratcheting cry that screamed of hunger, of rage, of
need
.

They ran for him.

He turned away and did his best to run as well.  Not easy when the world felt like a Slip ‘n Slide coated in motor oil.  His legs kept lurching in opposite directions, like his brain wasn’t sure which side should be dominant.

There was no way this was going to work.

He looked over his shoulder.

Four things that looked like they had once been students, and one that was vaguely recognizable as one of the front office staff.  They had already halved the distance between him and them.  They traveled in a tight group, coordinated as any group of special ops soldiers, within inches of each other yet never getting in one another’s way.

They were at the burning SUV.  Maybe fifteen feet from him.

Fshhh-woosh
.

It sounded at first like a giant inhaling.  Then breathing out.  Then….

Boom
.

The SUV exploded.

The fireball went up twenty feet in the air.  It hit the bodies of the two things tangled on the outside of the building and Ken heard them shriek in pain as their skin curled and sloughed away from their bones.

More important, the explosion also rocketed
outward
, completely engulfing the five monsters chasing him.  They didn’t shriek.  They didn’t make a single sound.  Just disappeared in the high-intensity explosion.

Ken had an instant to smile, then the heat reached him.  It felt like it seared all the hair off the back of his head, felt like it burned the shirt off his back.  Instant sunburn.

The shockwave came next, knocking him off his feet again, back down to his hands and knees.  He heard a voice in the dark hollows of his mind – a voice that sounded suspiciously like his own – complaining petulantly about that fact.

Hey!  I just managed to get
up
!

Then Ken heard something new.  His mind, shocked, bruised, tossed, concussed, had trouble figuring out what it was.

Thwap
.

He looked over and realized that a half-melted SUV door had just landed a few inches from his head.

He was in the debris field.

He started to lurch to his feet.  Only one thought in his mind: to get away from the fallout of the explosion.  What had just saved his life might still kill him.

He got as far as a half-squat before something hit him in the back of the head.

Ken’s head tilted forward instantly.  He felt sticky wetness running down the back of his burned neck.

Darkness wrapped a shroud around his sight, and his last thought was, No fair, I just got
up
!

“Stay with me.  Stay with me.”

Ken heard the words, but they made no sense to him.  Not where he was, floating in the blue-green water of Kauai.  It was his honeymoon.  He and Maggie were floating, drifting.  Everything was perfect.  Perfect….

Except for the damn sunburn.

He must have been laying on his stomach too long.  His back felt positively blistered.

He turned over on the raft, flipping over so that he could give his chest an equal chance to bake.  He’d never been one to tan – he wore sunscreen with the same SPF level as lead paint and still ended up looking like a lobster – but at least he could embrace the burn.

He looked over at Maggie.  Floating there in a two-piece bathing suit on her own inflatable raft.  A local kid had let them borrow the rafts when Ken told him they were newlyweds.  “Just float, man,” said the kid, with the mellow tones of an island-born.  “Just float, feel the ocean.  Let it carry you a while.”  Then his deeply tanned face seemed to split in two, cleaved by a smile so bright it rivaled the perfect sand underfoot.  “Just don’t do the nasty on my rafts, man.  My sister uses these things.”

Then he was gone, apparently trusting in two strangers to find him and return his property when they were done.

So Ken and Maggie floated.  Drifted.  And he stole glances at his new wife and wondered how serious the kid had been about his injunction against nasty-
doin
’ on his rafts.

Maggie didn’t look at him.  But apparently she had some special sense that women had when in the presence of overblown hormones.  “Cool down, Don Juan.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ve had sex, like, sixteen times today.”

“Not more than twelve.”

“You’re going to have to find an entire rhino horn and grind it up in a gallon of Gatorade.”

“Totally worth it.”

“You sure?  You could just dry up and blow away.”

“I’ll chance it.”

He paddled over to her.  She still had her eyes closed, but her smile rivaled that of the kid who gave them the raft.

He reached for her.

Whoomp
.

Something exploded in the distance.  He looked over his shoulder, but all he saw was surf and shore, leaves and the too-green-seeming plants that he was still trying to convince himself weren’t some kind of Hollywood special effect.

He shrugged and looked back at Maggie.  She was still smiling, but now her face was wrong.  It took him a moment to realize what it was about her, but then put his finger on it: her lower face was missing.  The bottom half of her jaw was gone.  Her tongue wagged freely against her chest.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, though suddenly he didn’t feel so okay.

“
C’mere
.”

He leaned in to kiss her.

Another muffled explosion sounded.  He looked at the beach again.  The boy who had loaned them the rafts was there.  He was on fire, waving at them and shouting.

“Go with the flow, man!”  Then he turned to ash and glowing embers, a solid outline of what had once been flesh.  “Just give up!”

Ken turned back to Maggie.  She shook her head.  “Stay with me,” she said.  But now she didn’t sound like his wife.  She sounded old, used up.  Spent.

He blinked.  And where Maggie had been, now there was someone else.  A woman he’d never seen before, looking down at him –

(Down
at me?  I was on top of the raft, on top of
her
.  How can she be looking
down
at me?
)

–
through
eyes that peered at him with concern.  The eyes seemed to shine, and it took Ken a second to realize that it wasn’t so much that they were bright as that the rest of the woman’s skin was so dark.  Dirty.

No.  Not dirt.

Blood.

His lips moved.

“What’s… what’s happening?” he said.

“
Shh
,” she hissed.  She looked up and away as though waiting for something to pass.  Then she looked back at him.  “End of the world, sonny.”

End of the world.

End of the world.

End of the world.  Apocalypse.  Go directly to jail, and definitely do not collect two hundred dollars.

Ken blinked slowly as the words danced an electrified jitterbug through his mind.

It felt like his eyelids had gained weight.  He didn’t remember blinking being this hard before.

Before
what
?

And then it snapped back.  Images of Becca clawing at her torn throat, of Stu with his blank stare, of Matt flipping out the window.  Joe
Picarelli
pulling looping coils of guts out of a student.

Falling.

The SUV exploding.

He looked at the woman above him.  She was crouching, her palm parallel to the floor in the universal sign for “shut-the-hell-up-bad-shit-is-happening.”  Ken didn’t say anything, just studied her.

She looked like she was in her late fifties, maybe early sixties.  It was hard to tell through the blood and dirt that coated her skin and clothing.  The only real clues were the hints of gray that peeked through her matted hair, and the wrinkles on her face that had caught thick streaks of gore.

Ken’s gaze moved from her body to her hands.  One was still outstretched, still signaling quiet.  The other held what looked like an L-shaped lug wrench, though it was much longer than any other such tool Ken had ever seen: nearly four feet of solid metal.  The socket end looked clotted with blood and hair, and the other end terminated in a flat, blade-like apparatus that was probably supposed to be used for wedging tires off of rims.  It was bloody as well.

The woman looked down at him.  “They’re gone.”

“Where are we?” said Ken.  He tried to sit up.  Pain sprinted from the base of his spine through the top of his head.  He winced.

The woman squatted beside him.  “Easy,” she said.  “We’re in some tax office.  H&R Block or something.”

“Tax office?”  Ken couldn’t quite make sense of the words.  He looked around.  All he saw was beige ceilings, a beige wall, and some sort of desk/reception setup that hid everything else from view.

His benefactress seemed to think he was challenging her choice of refuge.  “It was open and it was empty,” she said.  “Not like I had a lot of choices,
draggin
’ your ass.”

“No, I….”  Ken shut his mouth.  Tried to order his thoughts.  “Thank you.  For whatever you did.  I just don’t understand what exactly that
was
.”

She smiled then, as though he had said something tremendously funny.  “Understanding went out the window about an hour ago, kiddo.”

He smiled back.  “I’m Ken,” he said.  It felt weird to say it.  He was laying on his back, possibly badly hurt, looking up at a woman who looked like she followed the Countess
Bathory
bathing regimen, and he felt compelled by some sense of good manners to introduce himself.  He laughed.

She laughed, too.

“I’m
Dorcas
,” she answered.  She shook the lug wrench at him at the same time.  “And if you make fun of my name, I
will
brain you.”  She was smiling as she said it.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”  He held up a hand.  “You mind helping me up?”

She nodded, and her free hand clasped his.  She had a very strong grip.  A lot of the women in the area worked farms, and Ken guessed
Dorcas
was one of them.  She certainly had the attitude of a woman accustomed not just to rowing her own boat, but chopping down the tree and making the damn thing in the first place.

He got halfway up, proud of himself for not vomiting all over the desk, and then was stopped by
Dorcas
’ hand on his shoulder.  “Slow up,” she said.  “It’s not smart to be in full view.”

Ken straightened a few more inches.  Just enough to see over the reception desk.  He wanted to see where in the world he was.

What
his world had become.