Christopher stepped out of the elevator cab.
He looked to his left and right, and Ken saw him grow pale.
“What?” said Ken.
Christopher turned around. Fast. Like he didn’t want Ken coming out.
“Maybe you shouldn’t –” he began.
Ken stepped out of the elevator.
And felt a scream tear loose from his throat.
Aaron’s good hand clamped over Ken’s mouth, stopping the scream before more than a whimper came out. Then the cowboy leaned over and retched. None of them had eaten since this all started, since the world ended. There was nothing in the man’s stomach. But he dry-heaved as though his body was trying to expel the very memory of what he was seeing at either end of the corridor, only about twenty feet away from the elevators.
Two solid walls. Not of brick and mortar, not of plaster or wood.
Bodies.
It looked like every single person on this floor had run for the elevator at the same time. And every single person had fallen prey to whatever had turned the world upside down.
The hall was blocked at either end by a solid plug of corpses, bodies and body parts ripped limb from limb and then piled atop each other haphazardly like a madman’s version of an Erector set. Heads, arms, legs, trunks. Entire bodies shredded and then stuffed into place.
“What…?” Dorcas’ voice was soft. So soft, like the vision of death in the still-lit corridor had somehow stolen away the very years she had lived. Had turned her into a little girl, shying away from thunder and whimpering at the vision of lightning in the sky.
Humanity’s defenses had been stripped off. All pretenses of civilization pulled away, and not even their dead were sacrosanct. Even humanity’s holiest objects had been rendered profane. The monsters had come for them.
“What do we do?” said Christopher.
No one spoke. The lights above them flickered, and Ken wondered what would happen if the lights failed – as they would have to do eventually – while they were stuck here between the bodies of the dead.
He was shaking. His head ached, his back hurt where he had twisted it earlier, the bones of his left leg felt like white-hot pincers were clamped against them every few inches.
His absent fingers, the ones he had hacked off himself, ached. He missed his wedding ring.
He walked toward the wall of bodies on his right.
He reached out and grabbed a stiff hand. Pulled it away from the wall of the dead.
A moment later Dorcas and Christopher joined him and they started to dig through the bodies.
Aaron waited a moment. He had been standing halfway in the elevator cab, and now he looked around and spotted something in the hall: a small aluminum trash can. He stomped it flat, then wedged it in the track of the elevator. Ken saw Christopher eyeing the older man.
“We don’t want anything surprising us from behind,” said the cowboy. “And better to have the elevator available when we want it.”
Christopher nodded and resumed digging.
They pulled bodies and dismembered bits away. Piled them along the corners of the hall. Ken tried very hard not to think about what he was doing. And failed miserably.
He wondered what he would do if one of the hands he touched turned out to be small. Soft. The hand of a child. A hand he recognized.
He kept digging.
Slow going.
It was harder than Ken would have thought. Partly because it was just emotionally taxing to grab ahold of a piece of what had once been a person, to pull it out of a pile of other pieces. To drag it behind you and try not to think of what you were doing, of the reality of what was happening.
Part of it was because everyone stopped every minute or so. Just stopped as one, no words spoken. Listening. Trying to hear the sound of thunder that would indicate one of the hordes of thousands of once-human killers that now ruled the world. Or perhaps listening for the growl, that otherworldly sound that the things made. As a single voice it was disquieting, a sound like someone gargling a mixture of gravel and razor blades. In a large chorus it had a strange power, a psychic effect that encouraged you to just give up, to give in and die.
But there was also something else at work. Something making their job more difficult. At first Ken thought it was his imagination, this last obstacle – a literal wall of gore between him and a goal that he didn’t even know for sure still existed – just pushing him over the edge and making everything seem harder than it really was.
Until Dorcas grunted. “What the…?” she said. As with all words in this place that was bookended by death, the words were whispered. And as with all the words thus far, even whispered they seemed far too loud. Ken felt like they were screaming in a church. Any life here had become an obscenity.
The dead ruled this place. The living were interlopers. Were profane.