Dorcas’ eyes were closed, her face a mass of blood and bruising. Aaron used his right sleeve to mop some of the blood from her face. “It’s okay,” he said again, his voice so low Ken could barely here it. “I gotcha, girl.”
Dorcas nodded. She was sobbing. But the sobs slowed a bit when Aaron put his arm around her. And slowed still more when he said, “Let’s get outta this damn place.”
It grew brighter as he spoke. Christopher was coming down.
“Did I miss anything?” he hollered.
Dorcas started laughing. Still crying, but laughing as well, as though refusing to let distress claim her completely. Refusing to be cowed.
“Not much,” she managed a second later. She looked down at Ken. “Don’t just hang there staring up my petticoats. Get a move on!”
Ken nodded. He started down again.
And tried not to think about the zombies he saw a few feet above Christopher, clinging to each other, clinging to the wall.
Building another bridge.
55
Hope stopped laughing.
“You okay, Hope?” Ken said. He didn’t stop descending. Just kept letting the cable slide through his grease-and blood-soaked palm. Kept letting himself drop foot by aching foot into the black.
Hope didn’t answer.
He spared a glance at her. She was staring up at nothing.
He didn’t know what to do for her. She hadn’t been bitten. She couldn’t have been. If she had been bitten, she would have changed already. She wouldn’t be Hope, she would be dead and gone, just a corpse that hadn’t been buried.
But something was happening to her.
And there’s nothing you can do about it now. So just move.
He dropped through infinity. Wondering if his descent would ever end, or if the change that had come over the earth had also changed the elevator shaft. What if it went on forever? What if it just kept going until Ken and the rest of the survivors found themselves in the deepest pits of Hell?
We’re already there.
And there was truth in that.
Derek was gone, after all. His son was gone. His wife was somewhere beyond his reach, his baby girl with her.
And his daughter… what was happening to Hope?
She was cooing again. And he felt something in the cable. A shiver. A tremble.
“Guys.” Christopher’s voice floated down from above, the tones of a strangely lighthearted oracle. “We should hurry.”
And the way he said it told Ken why Hope was cooing. She had sensed it before anyone.
The zombies had bridged to the cable again. And there was no way to knock more debris down on them.
The vibrations in the cable became more pronounced, and it wasn’t hard for Ken to imagine the hands and feet gripping the metal fibers, slipping down hand over hand. Skinless fingers feeling their way down in the dark, questing for helpless prey.
“Faster,” someone whispered from above. Ken couldn’t tell who it was.
He opened his grip on the cable. Opened it until he was nearly falling. Preferring to die on impact than be captured by the things above him.
The air whipped past his ears, whistling and whining.
But it couldn’t hide the sound of growls above.
Or the sound of his daughter sighing and giggling in his arms.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yessssss.”
56
Ken hit something. His left foot hit first, and a bolt of pain seared through his toes, his ankle, his shin, his thigh bone. His hip almost buckled under him.
He had fallen too many times today. He had twisted his back. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but there was something going wrong inside him.
He stumbled back, off-balance.
It registered – albeit dimly – that there was something to stumble back on. That he was on some kind of flooring. Terra firma.
Then his heel collided with something hard. His left heel, of course. New pain rocketed up to his back. He screamed.
Hope giggled.
He realized he had let go of the elevator cable. He probably would have let go of Hope, too, if she hadn’t been more or less attached to him with his belt.
He tripped over whatever it was, falling backward in a series of jumbled half-steps that took him away from the cable, away from the only tether he had had on location or direction.
His right foot went behind him, a reverse lunge step. Too far for comfort, and the agony in his back increased.
His foot came down on nothing. Nothing at all. Just dark, empty air.
Ken had a panicked moment to wonder what was happening. A terrified instant to realize that he must have reached the bottom of the elevator cable. To then understand that the logical thing at the bottom of an elevator cable would be the elevator itself.
And that he was about to fall off the side of it.
Hope clapped gleefully in the dark. Laughing as Ken pitched into nothing.
57
The fall was short.
Less than a few inches. And it came with a tearing sound.
Someone grunted.
“Help me, you idiot.”
Ken didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t one of the survivors, one of his people.
Then he saw the form in the darkness, huge and black. Fear rippled through him for a moment, joining the pain in his back and leg and creating a strangely discordant harmony of terror and agony.