No, the zombie was a new arrival. Had to be.
The things were like cockroaches, sliding into any available crack or crevice, squeezing in to search for food.
Ken held his breath. He continued letting the cord reel through his hand, praying that Hope would remain silent.
He realized the area was starting to brighten. What had been a pitch black mystery had turned into a thick gray fog.
He looked up.
The star had returned to the sky.
The light was coming down.
Ken looked over.
And saw the zombie clinging to the wall of the shaft directly across from him.
42
The thing was facing away from him, hanging to the wall. Ken couldn’t tell what it was clinging to: in the brightening light he could see that parts of the shaft were wrecked, huge pieces of concrete barely hanging to their moorings. Other areas looked smooth and unmarred.
The part of the shaft where the thing was climbing looked relatively whole, and Ken couldn’t tell if it was holding to something as a man would, or if it was somehow adhering to the smooth surface of the shaft.
He could see the thing’s head was tilted back, though, and it was easy enough to observe that it was tracking the light above them both.
Hope inhaled. She was going to scream. When she did, it was over. The thing would notice them. Would come for them. Would leap to them and knock them into the void, or would simply pull them to pieces right there on the cable.
Or it would bite them. Would change them.
A scuttling noise aborted the little girl’s scream mid-breath. Ken looked over and saw another zombie pull itself through a crack in the side of the shaft. The crack was too small for something its size, too small by far. The zombie didn’t care. It yanked itself through the crevasse, seeming to shed what remained of its clothing and the skin below it like a snake, and when it came into the shaft it was bleeding along its entire length and breadth. Impossible to tell if it was even a man or woman. Just a growling, chittering length of pulpy blood. A thing that stuck impossibly to the slick interior of the shaft.
Twenty feet away from Ken and his daughter. Empty air the only thing separating them.
It hadn’t seen them yet.
Yet.
The two things scuttled along the wall of the shaft. Drawn to the light that was still dropping closer, closer. They climbed upward, and as they did Ken realized he could hear a subtle popping noise every time they moved their hands. It sounded like the noise you might hear pulling your foot out of a wet bog. A suction seal breaking.
They were moving toward Dorcas. He could see her now, dropping toward them. He didn’t know if she was aware of them. He doubted it.
He didn’t know what to do, either. Did he call to her? If he did, he would draw their attention. And die.
What would that gain the group?
He pulled Hope tighter. So tight he thought he heard her bones creak.
The two zombies, ever clearer as the star of brightness dropped closer and closer, climbed. Chittered. Growled.
Dorcas stopped her descent.
She must have seen them.
One of the zombies shrieked. That trilling call that Ken thought was meant to summon others.
Sure enough, a moment later another one of the things began pushing itself through that same crack. Peeling off its outer layers of clothing and skin on the jagged edges of the concrete rift as it yanked its way into the shaft.
And then another.
Another.
Another.
He heard something skitter behind him. Trilling.
He turned his head.
There were more of the things behind him.
They were everywhere.
43
For some reason, Ken was less frightened than he was disturbed. As though his fear had been short-circuited by some internal sense that what he was seeing was not just horrifying but wrong.
Humans should not be able to scale sheer, unblemished walls.
They should not be able to do what these things were doing.
They moved strangely in the pseudo-illumination of the small light above. Seemed to jump from place to place. One moment in one position, then Ken blinked and when he opened his eyes their configuration had changed.
There were more and more of them, too. At first just five or six, then ten, then a dozen, then twenty. Then the walls of the shaft started to disappear under a shifting blanket of torn and bleeding flesh.
Many of the things had the same tumorous growths that he had seen on the zombies that exploded out of the webbing in the attorneys’ offices in the other building. Dark masses that were covered in thick hairs and looked strong as armor plating. They appeared in random blotches all over the things’ bodies, and for some reason they, too, struck Ken as deeply, innately wrong. They made his skin crawl, made acid creep up into the back of his throat.