“Help… me….”
Ken felt himself slipping backward. Downward. The dark figure moved toward him.
He finally realized who it was. It was Buck. The big man had caught Ken’s shirt sleeve. The shirt – the ridiculous long-sleeve thing that said “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP).” that Ken had gotten from a dead man – was not designed to bear a person’s body weight, and it was tearing. He could hear it ripping at the seams, pulling away from him.
And then what?
Ken grabbed for Buck’s shaded form. The other man grunted as Ken accidentally flailed and hit him a half-dozen times before finally managing to get a good grip on his arm. Buck backed up slowly, and Ken felt himself drawn back to the top of the elevator car.
He made it all of two steps before kicking something else and tripping. At least this time he tripped forward.
“Jesus,” snapped Buck. “Can’t you stand up straight?”
“Sorry,” Ken mumbled. Then he screamed as pain lanced through his ankle. Not nerve pain, not whatever was wrong with his back and left leg. In fact, this wasn’t his left leg at all.
It was his right leg. His right ankle.
He looked down.
And screamed again. Not merely in pain, not merely in horror. This time it was revulsion and a sense that right and wrong had abandoned themselves, that madness reigned supreme.
The zombies that had bridged to the cable had been shattered. They had been broken. But they had not been destroyed. And the proof was all around him. The proof was at his feet. The proof held tight to his foot.
A hand had somehow grabbed his ankle. The hand led to a forearm, but the forearm did not in turn lead to anything else. It simply ended.
Ken flashed to watching Thing on reruns of The Addams Family. The disembodied hand skittered around and caused mischief wherever it went. A ridiculous sight gag made even more ridiculous by what passed for special effects back then.
But what held onto Ken’s leg was no special effect. It was real. And holding so tightly he could already feel his foot going numb. Blood started to seep around the hand as the pressure of the grip started to shear Ken’s skin away from his flesh.
His knees buckled and he almost went down. Stopped himself.
Next to him was a head. A still-moving head. Eyes staring in rage. Mouth opening and closing.
What if he had fallen on it?
What if it bit him?
He reeled back. Felt gorge rising in his throat.
Buck grunted. He shuffled forward and punted the decapitated head like a football, kicking it off the side of the elevator before kneeling next to Ken and ripping the hand away in one brute motion. Ken yelled as the hand tore more skin from his already-lacerated flesh.
“Come on,” said Buck.
Ken nodded. Tried not to notice how much of the top of the elevator was moving.
Failed.
58
Ken only took a single step before he asked, “Where’s Maggie?”
“Who’s Maggie?”
A double-thud interrupted them. Ken saw two bodies, nearly intertwined, land on the elevator. Dorcas and Aaron. The cowboy still had his arm around Dorcas, and seemed hesitant to let go of her even when they had both feet on the solid platform of the elevator.
“Move, move, move!”
The light grew brighter around them. Ken looked up.
Christopher was a few feet above. Coming down fast.
And behind him, it looked like the darkness itself had come alive.
59
Ken had seen Christopher climb through places he would have thought were inaccessible. The kid was a born daredevil, a combination of adrenaline junky and natural ability.
But he was losing ground to the teeming mass of things that clambered over each other as they climbed down the cable behind him.
Ken looked at Buck. Even in the dim light of Christopher’s flashlight, he could see the big man pale visibly.
“Come on,” said Buck.
He yanked Ken – still stumbling – over the uneven mass of machinery and broken cables that comprised the top of the elevator car. And now that the light had grown a bit brighter, Ken could also see how close he had come to pitching off the side and into nothing. They were nowhere near the bottom of the shaft. It had to be at least another five or six floors to the ground, and who knew what that would even look like?
Buck had saved him.
And now the big man was leading him to a dark gap in the top of the elevator.
“Emergency hatch,” said Buck, seeming to key off Ken’s look.
Ken hesitated. When a horde of monsters was on your trail, going into a windowless box didn’t seem like the wisest course.
“Get in,” said Buck.
“Are you nuts?” said Aaron behind them.
Ken looked over his shoulder. The cowboy was casting about, looking for alternate escape routes.