Ken nodded minutely. He knew what the cowboy was saying, what he was asking.
Aaron turned to Dorcas. He smiled to her. “Don’t worry,” he said. His voice was soft. Not just quiet, but soft. The cowboy sounded like a father saying good night to a sick child. Like a husband saying goodbye to a beloved wife.
He clicked back the hammer.
Dorcas pulled her gaze away from the approaching beasts long enough to see what Aaron had in his hands. To see what he had in his mind.
Ken saw her shake her head.
Then the motion turned to a nod. Acceptance. Better to die than to become one of the things.
Aaron pointed the gun at her.
Ken wondered who would get the last of the two remaining bullets. He supposed it would be Christopher. He thought that was what Aaron’s look had meant: an old-fashioned request to let the women and children go free. Even if the children were simply the young men, and the only freedom available was the promise of quick death.
Dorcas closed her eyes. A trace of a smile played along her lips. She looked at peace.
Aaron’s trigger finger clenched.
“Wait!”
The voice spun Ken around like a top. He expected to hear the deafening blast of Aaron’s gun discharging, the sound of Dorcas’ brains exploding through the already-defiled hallway.
But there was nothing. No sound. Aaron must have caught himself. Waited on Christopher’s shouted word.
One of the things had reached the kid. It had leaned in. Its teeth were chittering, snapping as though attacking the air itself. Christopher held so still he almost appeared to be a statue.
The zombie before him – a woman in a skirt and blouse that were so bright red they seemed offensively out of place – leaned in even closer.
And did not bite him.
She bent over. Picked up a dismembered leg. She coughed. The last time Ken had heard that ugly, gagging cough, the zombie doing it had vomited a black acid that had melted concrete. He tensed, waiting for Christopher to be splashed with the tarry substance, waiting for the young man to start screaming.
It didn’t happen.
Instead, the red-garbed monster vomited up a slick yellow substance. Ken realized that the thing had it all over the front of her clothes. Just like the first one they had found in the corridor. And, he saw, just like the other zombies that had crowded into this space.
The woman rubbed the end of the leg in the yellowy bile and then lay it on the floor before turning away, looking for another gory building block.
Ken realized that the yellow was some kind of biological mortar.
The things were building.
But what?
And why weren’t they attacking him and his friends?
“We should go,” said Christopher.
Ken was torn. He needed to find his family.
But there was bravery… and there was suicide.
He turned back to the elevator. Dorcas turned with him. They both stepped together, as synchronized as the monsters all around them.
And the zombies growled.
Ken froze. He looked behind him. The original monster, the one in the gray suit, was now staring right at him and Dorcas. Eyes looking at and through them both. Madness and rage battling for supremacy in its gaze. Ken waited for it to attack.
A moment later, it returned its gaze to the body it was trying to pull back into place.
Ken took another step toward the elevator.
Another growl. He looked back again. This time it wasn’t just the gray-suited zombie, but more than half of the things that had crammed their way into the hall.
“I don’t think they want us to leave,” said Christopher.
Christopher waved, gesturing for the others to follow him as he began walking down the corridor, threading his way between the eleven zombies that were now hiccupping and puking that waxy substance all over the place, using it as an adhesive to begin rebuilding the wall that Ken and the others had torn down.
After walking a few feet, Ken realized that the beasts had shifted subtly. Before, they had been simply working to rebuild the wall of corpses. They were still doing so, but had moved down the hall toward the elevator. Building so the wall would be between the survivors and the elevator.
Cutting them off.
Ken caught Dorcas’ eye. Her jaw was clenched. No longer whimpering, back under control like the tough farm girl he had always taken her to be, but clearly unhappy about this new development.
The things kept working. Every so often one of them would make that weird chirping sound. Ken couldn’t tell if it was an unconscious noise or a communication.
Then the beasts all stopped moving.
The survivors halted as well, as though their muscles had been intertwined with those of the beasts in the hallway.
The zombies raised their faces heavenward. Their mouths opened and they started breathing in time, panting.
In-out-in-out-in-out….
Ken had seen this, too. Each time it got shorter. Like a countdown.