The gray man knelt before his mother. The old lady’s mouth was working, opening and closing and opening and closing as though she had been caught in the grips of the world’s worst indecision.
She looked at the others. Only her eyes moved. Her head did not shift. It couldn’t. A thin shaft of metal – perhaps a piece of a cabinet, maybe the support bar of a desk organizer – jutted out of her cheekbone, disappearing into her skull and pinning her to the junk pile that had somehow melded itself to her.
Her mouth opened again. This time blood drooled out. The old woman’s body was broken. Bent in too many ways to count, probably shattered a hundred different ways inside.
“Help… me…,” she whispered.
Growling erupted behind them.
Ken looked back. The things that had been following them up the crane were now running down the jib. They coated it, swarming over the gangplank, climbing along the outside supports, even hanging like rabid monkeys from underneath it. He couldn’t even see the metal.
“Come on,” he said, and started to move. One hand holding Maggie’s hand, the other still shielding Hope’s face.
Buck spoke, the man’s voice much different now than it had been before. It had lost its haughtiness, its entitlement. Humility had been forced upon him. “Wait,” he said. “We can’t leave her.”
Ken was saved from having to respond by Aaron. The cowboy was gruff, direct. And honest. “She’s dead already. And we have to leave.”
“Don’t… don’t… leave… me….” The woman’s voice was a gurgling whisper, a brook burning away to lifelessness under a relentless sun.
Buck looked at the others. “Will they let her die?” he asked.
Ken didn’t know. And he could tell that the others didn’t know, either.
Buck dissolved into tears. He buried his face in his mother’s chest, and looked for all the world like a child after a hard day at school.
Aaron slung Dorcas’ arm around his shoulders, and they moved toward the other end of the area, where there was a hole that might once have been an exit. Ken couldn’t tell if the cowboy was supporting Dorcas, or if she was supporting him. He supposed they probably didn’t know, either.
“I can’t let them turn her!” shouted Buck.
Christopher followed after Dorcas and Aaron.
“I can’t!” Buck was shrieking now. His voice a piercing, whining whistle.
Ken took Maggie and Hope and limped after the others.
The growl of the horde close behind. The sobs of the grown man-child even closer.
33
Ken followed the others into the hole. There was nowhere else to go: all else was collapsed wreckage, destruction, and behind them an empty area that was sure to be swarming with zombies soon. So he walked into darkness, still hearing the sounds of Buck sobbing behind.
He almost ran into Aaron. The older man was moving back toward the area they had just left, Dorcas pulling on his arm.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Ain’t right to leave her like that,” he said.
“There’s no time,” she said, her voice caught halfway between a whisper and a cry.
“Don’t matter.”
Aaron moved past Ken and his family.
Ken looked at Dorcas. “Is he…?”
She nodded.
A moment later, there was a muffled snap. A sigh.
And then Aaron came back, this time with Buck under his arm. The balding man’s eyes were teary, but he seemed aware. As they came out of the light, he moved Aaron’s arm away.
“Thank you,” said Buck. “I couldn’t. I just… I couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t if it’d been my mother, either,” said Aaron.
Buck nodded.
Something cracked outside. The building shuddered.
“What was that?” said Maggie.
Aaron looked through the faux door into the area they had just left. He glanced through furtively, as though looking around a doorway where he suspected armed enemies might be hiding.
While he was looking, Maggie whispered in Ken’s ear, “Did he kill that old woman?”
Ken nodded. Maggie put a hand over her mouth. Ken looked at her, trying to tell her to stay quiet. Now was not a good time to have a conversation about the ethics of mercy-killing.
It worked. Sort of. She didn’t say anything, but she looked at Aaron with an expression of supreme distaste.
She doesn’t know him. She’s been asleep. She doesn’t understand what’s been happening.
But Ken wondered if that was true. He hoped it was. But he couldn’t deny that Maggie also seemed to be looking at him strangely. As though he was not only a part to the mercy-killing, but a party to murder.
She’s reeling. From all this.
She’s going to blame you.
He was saved from that line of thinking by Aaron as the cowboy drew back into the room. “Crane just tipped.”
“It fell over?” Christopher said. He was smiling hopefully.
Aaron shook his head and gave a strange half-shrug. “Not all the way. Looks like it tipped and hit the building a floor or two down.”
Silence.
“What does that mean?” said Maggie.
“It means they’re below us,” said Ken. “And we’ve got to figure out a way past them.”