“What is it?” said Christopher. Even his ever-present smile had waned in the gory environment, though he had somehow managed to keep his clothing less spattered with filth than should be possible.
Dorcas hesitated. Then she held out the piece of former humanity – now reduced to so much ghastly masonry – that she had yanked out of the crumbling wall of death. “What is this stuff?” she said.
The others moved closer. Ken wanted to keep pulling at the bodies at this end of the corridor. He knew that taking a break was a bad idea; that if he stopped, getting started again would be that much harder.
But he did stop. He looked with the rest.
Dorcas was holding an arm. It looked like it had once belonged to a woman. The long, elegant arm of a woman in her twenties or thirties. Thin and beautiful. Fingers with several rings. Arm covered in a once-tailored suit sleeve that had been shredded.
The shoulder ended in a stump. It glistened. But not with blood. A pus-yellow substance coated the end of the arm, the flickering lights above them reflecting dully off the waxy patina.
Christopher reached out to touch it. Aaron stopped him. Grabbed the kid’s hand. “Don’t,” said the cowboy.
“What?” said Christopher. “It might be important.”
“So you’re just going to stick your finger in it?” said Aaron. “You remember that thing that puked acid before we came up here?”
Christopher stopped. But only for a moment. Then he poked the yellow substance. Dorcas yipped in sympathy, as though expecting his finger to melt off.
Christopher grinned. “Nothing ventured.” He removed his finger, touching it with his thumb. “Tacky,” he said. “Feels like….” He searched for the words. “Wet Play-Doh?”
“What do you think it’s for?” asked Dorcas.
Aaron shrugged. The older man turned around and grabbed the next piece of the wall of body parts. Another hand.
And he screamed, a strange scream that he bit off, muffled it the way they were all learning to do, the way they were learning they had to do in order to survive.
But the rest of the survivors heard.
They turned.
Ken saw what had scared the normally imperturbable cowboy.
Saw the hand that Aaron had grabbed.
The hand that was moving.
Ken stumbled back from the movement, falling into Dorcas and Christopher even as Aaron backpedaled as well.
And what remained of the wall of the dead collapsed.
There was a crackling sound that reminded Ken of ice crunching underfoot on a winter day, and then the bodies that had been so hard to pull apart only a moment ago just seemed to… drift like so many snowflakes caught in a windstorm.
All that was left was the hand. Still moving. Attached to a middle-aged man who stood in the place just beyond the wall. The man was dressed in the ragged remains of a gray business suit. Expensive-looking glasses hung askew from his blue face.
His chest and arms were coated in the waxy substance that Dorcas had just found.
He looked at the survivors. And even without seeing the bite marks that seemed to glow like brands along his neck and the right part of his jaw, Ken would have been able to tell from the look in the thing’s eyes.
It wasn’t a man at all. Not anymore.
The four survivors froze. Running for the elevator was out of the question: even if they got inside, there was no way they could get the doors closed and get the thing moving before the zombie was on them. And a single bite would end the struggle.
“Think we can take it?” whispered Christopher. Ken didn’t look, but suspected the kid was still smiling. Only this would be a death-grin, the kind of smile worn by a man about to kill or be killed.
“Let’s hope so,” said Aaron. “There’s just one.”
The thing in the suit held up its arms. It made a strange sound. Not the growl that Ken was used to. More of a cross between a dentist’s drill and something you might hear during a recording of exotic birds. Loud and thoroughly unpleasant.
An instant later, ten more of the things shuffled into the hall.
All of them pushed into the corridor, the flickering lights making them appear at once ghostly and all-too-solid. Six men and four women joined the original business-suited thing.
They all made that same strange chirping.
Dorcas started whimpering. A noise that Ken didn’t expect from her, not from the woman who had saved his butt repeatedly. But then, she’d never been pushed up against a wall of corpses, facing certain death – or worse – like this.
The things stepped toward them. As with other groups of the things, these moved in a coordinated fashion. Not lockstep or synchronized, but they never bumped into each other either. They seemed to be aware on some level beyond sight or sound where each of their fellows were and would be.
Aaron pulled out his gun. A .357 Magnum with two bullets. The draw was a bit awkward since he had to pull it with his left hand and it was set for a right-handed draw.
Aaron looked at Ken, and Ken saw in his eyes the question: “Are you brave enough to face them?”