Only the weight of his son around his neck kept him going. Only his family kept him from giving up.
He glanced down as something hit the crane. Hundreds of the zombies were flinging themselves through the smoke that obscured the base of the massive machine. They erupted like demons from the worst parts of hell. Smoke clung to them like a garment, and some of the creatures were actually on fire.
They didn’t seem to notice or care.
More of the things clambered up the side of the building. Snarling, spitting, growling. Thousands and thousands coming at Ken and the other survivors. Hundreds more coming up the crane’s tower, leaping from bar to bar, from strut to strut.
He wondered if it was possible for too many people to be on a building; what would happen if too much weight fell against the already-stressed crane.
The things were fast. Faster than the survivors. Much faster.
There was a ripping sound. The crane had been hung up on the side of the Wells Fargo Center, stuck at an angle and clearly at least partially separated from whatever tethers had once kept it upright and stable.
Now it started to slip across the face of the building.
It started to fall.
23
The noise that came from the combination of metal scraping across concrete and the metal itself twisting and bending was by far the loudest thing Ken could remember hearing. Louder even than the explosions that had gone off nearby and – in some cases – right on top of him. It was loud enough that it even drowned out the sound of the throngs of zombies that were yanking themselves bodily up the crane and the sides of the high-rise toward him and the others.
The crane tipped. Vibrating as it shredded along the side of the building. And Ken couldn’t think about holding onto Derek, couldn’t think about Hope or Liz or Maggie. All he could think about was clamping his fingers around the nearest pieces of metal, circling his legs around the closest crossbars.
Praying.
The crane tilted. Shrieked. Stuttered to a stop. Shrieked and began tilting again. Moving toward 9th Street. Ken had been almost upright a moment ago, and now he was holding on at a seventy-degree angle. Still upright, still closer to vertical than horizontal, but being like this somehow made the crane seem like an even more precarious place to be.
It jerked and stopped moving.
Ken realized that Derek was still holding on to his neck, screaming in fear, the sudden movement of the thing that constituted their entire world wrenching terror shrieks from the boy.
But the screams were music. His boy was still here. Still safe. And maybe… maybe the shift had bought them some time.
He looked down. Hoping that some of the things had fallen, that they had lost speed at the very least.
They were still close. So close.
And then something above made a sound.
“Help!” Ken’s overwrought brain registered that it was Maggie, but only barely. He was running on empty – physically, emotionally, mentally. It seemed to take everything he had just to look up.
Just to crane his neck.
Just in time to see his wife fall.
24
“Maggie!”
She hung for a second, probably less. But time is one of the indicators that whoever is behind the universe is a madman. The entirety of Ken’s week-long honeymoon had only seemed to last minutes. The first years of his children’s lives had come and gone in an eyeblink.
But the time he had had an infected tooth in Chile and couldn’t find anyone to take care of it… three days that had lasted years. The night that Hope had had a fever that hit one hundred and five degrees before doctors managed to get her temperature under control… a lifetime.
And now, watching for the half-second before his wife let go, he felt himself grow old and die five times, ten times, a thousand times.
Then the eternal second finally – mercifully – ended. Her hands let go of the crossbar that they had been holding onto.
She fell.
Not straight down. The crane was at an angle, and she didn’t plummet between the massive support beams that the survivors had been using as a ladder. Instead she slid down, falling past Ken and Christopher with a scream, twisting –
(Protecting the baby, she’s falling on her back to protect the baby but now she can’t grab onto anything, dear God, Mags, turn around!)
– so she was face-up, reaching for Ken as she slid past him. He reached for her. Too slow.
Christopher tried to grab her as well. Missed. Hope screamed, “Mommeeeeee!” the final syllable seeming to trail after the little girl’s mother as Maggie plummeted downward.
She careened past Dorcas, who was watching with an agonized look on her face, clearly wishing she could do something. But the older woman could barely hold herself onto the steel frame that had become so ephemeral beneath them, let alone grab another person.
Then….
“Oof!”