The things clambered up and down the shaft. Some of them looked at him, others stared at Dorcas. Still others seemed to be focused higher and lower – no doubt putting their sights on the others who hung helpless on the cables in the shaft.
What would happen when they were ready to strike?
Ken had his answer a moment later.
One of the zombies screamed.
And jumped.
44
The things had jumped before. When Ken, Dorcas, Aaron, and Christopher had found themselves hanging off the side of a building the things had thrown themselves off higher floors in an effort to capture them. But that had been different. That had been almost as though the things had simply shambled to the edge of the floors above, then lobbed themselves over as though reaching for their prey and having no awareness of the fact that their floor space had run out.
Now, only a few hours later, the things were leaping at the survivors in a different way. No jumbled falls, these were bursts of uncoiling energy that brought to mind pouncing jungle cats.
Not only that, but the jumps were much farther than they should have been. The monsters bunched against the shaft walls, then shoved off into space, pushing out not a foot or two, but five or six or seven or ten feet into the nothing of the shaft before falling with a shriek.
And even as they fell, their fingers reached, struggling to grasp what they sought. They screamed, they clawed at the air.
Above Ken, Dorcas was screaming. Below him, he could hear Maggie doing the same. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear his wife calling out, screaming his name.
“I’m here, Maggie. Hold on!”
He didn’t know if she heard him. Not over the sound of her own screams and those of the shrieking, falling things everywhere around him.
Hope was suddenly, oddly silent.
He looked at his daughter. She was peering at the things that filled the air around them. Her eyes almost glittered, but not with fear. He couldn’t tell what the look was, but it wasn’t fear.
It scared him.
“Hope?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
That scared him, too.
It started to get dark.
He looked up. The star, the one bit of light in the darkness of the shaft, was disappearing. Going upward.
Soon all was black. All was starless, moonless night. A night unbroken by any illumination, filled only with the screams of hidden monsters throwing themselves at the survivors as they hung motionless in space.
45
There are many kinds of darkness.
There is silent darkness, in which you are left to wonder what may be around you, in which your mind is given free rein to improvise new nightmares and imagine new horrors. Then there is the kind of darkness where the nightmares have already been seen, and now are unseen. Where the nightmares are indisputably real, but cannot be found with any sense but that of sound and – for the most unlucky – touch.
Ken found himself in that latter darkness, holding tightly to the cable with one hand, to Hope with the other. His right leg was pinned straight down by the tension of the cable, his left leg stuck into space. He swung ever-so-slightly in the deep black nothing of the elevator shaft, and every so often he felt a breeze pass by him at the same time as he heard a zombie’s scream grow loud and then soft and knew that one of the things had tried to capture him.
He was safe. They couldn’t reach him.
The others were safe. The monsters couldn’t reach them, either.
The shaft was a good thirty feet square, with the survivors hanging pretty close to dead center of the space.
Brightness again.
“Move down!”
It was Christopher’s voice. That surprised Ken. He had thought it would be Aaron. But of course, the cowboy wouldn’t have been able to climb up, not with only one good hand. So Christopher must have volunteered to come last. Must have gone back up.
But for what?
It didn’t matter. He was crying out for everyone to get moving again.
Ken did, letting the cable he’d been holding onto with a death-grip start reeling out once more. He looked at Hope as the light bloomed around them again.
She still said nothing. She just watched as the zombies flung themselves into void in their rabid attempts to destroy what hung in the shaft.
Hope was mesmerized by the sight. She looked like Ken imagined a moth must look right before it threw itself headfirst into a candle, right before it erupted into a suicide of flame.
She actually started leaning away.
“No!” he shouted.
She reached for one of the things.
And it grabbed her hand.
46
Ken saw it unfold, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing he was going to be able to do. The thing was going to either rip Hope away from him, or it was going to use her as an anchor to climb up and tear both of them apart.
He honestly didn’t know which would be worse.
A sound tore through the artificial night of the shaft. A tearing, rending noise. It sounded like a combination of thread unspooling on a sewing machine and meat being torn apart.