Then she noticed the things below. She cooed. Cooed, like she was a baby again and had just received a shiny new toy, or had just seen her mother after a long absence. And then she was reaching not up, but down.
More appropriate, Ken thought, because if this was some strange god, then surely it was a god of darkness, of abyssal regions too black to contemplate.
The mass below them was larger than the one above. It was impossible to tell how many of the zombies were clinging to the side wall of the elevator shaft, and to each other. Ken couldn’t tell where each ended, where each began. There was just a massive agglomeration of oozing arms and legs, of dripping trunks and heads partially covered by black, cancerous growths.
He couldn’t see individual monsters.
But he did see the hand that reached out and grabbed the cable.
Surprisingly, the thing didn’t haul itself onto the line. Didn’t pull itself up to where Ken and Hope and Dorcas waited, easy spoils.
It just held.
And Ken realized that the thing didn’t want to grab them itself. That wasn’t its job. It wasn’t its place.
Ken looked at the bridge of bodies. Saw a half-dozen things scampering across the span. And knew that these were the hunters. The killers. The beasts that would end his life.
Half would go up to kill him and Dorcas and Aaron and Christopher.
The others would go down and finish Maggie and Liz and Buck.
The things were not only working together now, they were strategizing.
Thinking.
The first of the things was halfway across the bridge.
It had those same plate-like growths on its face. Its cheeks were pocked with them, its forehead partially obscured. Its eyes were completely covered. Bristling growths had either enclosed them, or replaced them.
Ken expected the thing to fall blindly off the roiling mass of bodies under it. But it bounded along on hands and feet with the sure movements of a spider in its web. Roaring. Growling.
Blind, it has to be blind.
Why doesn’t it fall?
The blind zombie roared. And looked with eyeless eyes right at Ken and Hope.
The rest of the zombies in the shaft – the ones that had formed themselves into a bridge, the ones that still skittered like bloody roaches across the walls, all of them – shrieked as well.
50
The sound of the monsters was so loud, so deafening, so nearly complete, that Ken almost didn’t hear… the other signals.
Almost didn’t hear the low thud.
Almost didn’t hear the wrenching crack.
Almost didn’t hear the whistle.
But he must have heard them all. Must have, at least on some subliminal level.
He looked up.
Something was falling.
Something big.
Huge.
His first thought was that something new was happening. And new was bad. New was always bad, new was just this world’s way of trying to kill them with more variety. Evolution was speeding up, and had focused on one task: the complete eradication of humanity.
They’re growing. They’re already invincible and spewing acid and they climb walls and now they’re growing, dammit!
The thing fell from above, plummeting through the shaft like a piece of the night sky.
Invincible. Acid-puke. Stick to walls. Growing. What next?
And then a voice forced itself into his fragmented, panicked thoughts. Christopher: “Timmmberrrrr!”
Ken’s fingers clenched even tighter around the cable, his arm pulled Hope so close to his chest that he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her bones creak and crack.
The whistling increased in intensity. So did the growling.
Then….
BOOM.
The falling mass hit the fleshy bridge that had built itself across the shaft above Ken and Dorcas. The zombies screeched and then seemed to shatter into ten thousand fragments. Bodies and body parts exploded in every direction. They fell past Ken.
He saw a disembodied hand, fingers still opening and closing, and he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t reaching for him. That it wasn’t trying to grab Hope as it passed her.
But he failed. Because he was certain that the hand was doing just that. No brain, completely disconnected. But still reaching. Still trying to kill.
Then in the next instant he saw a huge piece of what looked like rock – the mass that had plowed through the bridge above them – rocket past.
It hit the zombie with the growths covering its eyes. The thing had time for a single abortive shriek before the gray block went right through it. Then the massive chunk continued through the bridge, tearing it apart as violently as any explosive could have done.
“Look out below!” screamed Christopher, his voice still coming from the dim light far above. Ken thought wildly that this must be what it was like to talk to an angel. To hear a voice from the light of Heaven.
Sure. If God sent angels who had weird senses of humor and dropped bricks on monsters’ heads.
But that was what had happened. Christopher must have somehow managed to climb up and loosen some of the wreckage around the sides of the shaft.
He had saved them. Again.