“You’re nuts,” said Dorcas. Ken couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or Buck or herself.
“Not much choice,” he said.
A grunt sounded behind them. Aaron. He squeezed into the small area of the floor that still remained intact and then slammed the door shut. “Go,” he spat.
Dorcas sighed. She sounded beyond tired. Weary. Losing hope.
How much longer before we just stop? Before dying becomes preferable?
But that wasn’t really the question. If death had been the stake, then Ken suspected they would have given up long before this. It wasn’t just death, though. It was whatever waited at the end of a bite. Whatever cross between madness and oblivion would claim them.
Not just death, but damnation.
Dorcas helped Ken lower himself to a seated position, then sat behind him, her arms clasped around him and supporting most of his weight. He remembered doing this with Liz and Hope and Derek, all of them sitting in a long train on the slide at the local park, sliding down and laughing and then laughing harder when their combined mass inevitably caused them to stall halfway down. “Daddy’s Choo-choo” they called it.
“Choo-choo time,” he muttered. Tears came to his eyes. Derek would never ride the slide again. Not even if they had playgrounds in Heaven. Because he hadn’t simply died. Nothing so kind. Nothing so merciful.
Ken thought he might lose it. He had seen his own students pull each others’ guts apart, had cut his own fingers off to survive, had somehow waded through a city full of the living dead. And now he was going to be done in by the memory of a little boy laughing as he went down a slide.
“What?” said Dorcas. She glanced back at the door with eyes clearly expecting it to be flung open at any moment.
“Nothing.” Ken leaned forward. Tilting into darkness, but away from memory.
He slid down the broken floor. Dorcas came with him. He moved faster than he expected – a lot faster than the green plastic slide at the park – and started to panic when he realized he was going to roll off the edge of the floor and into a pile of broken shelving that featured several stake-like pieces of wood and metal.
Christopher snagged him, reaching out and stopping his forward momentum with a low, “Oof.” A similar noise nearby indicated that Buck and Maggie had stopped Dorcas.
Christopher helped Ken to his feet as Aaron came sliding down. The cowboy somehow ended the slide on his feet, not needing any help but seeming to just step off and start walking forward, gesturing for the others to follow.
Dorcas resumed her position under Ken’s arm. He glanced at Maggie as she did so, wondering – hoping – if his wife would try to take the older woman’s place.
Maggie didn’t. She didn’t even look at him.
Just turned her back and followed Aaron as he picked his way through the rubble.
78
This room was a large interior room of the building. No outside windows, so the only illumination was still Christopher’s light. A light that did little to brighten, and less to cheer. It served to highlight large objects in their path, but not much else.
Aaron was still in the lead, but Christopher was right beside him. Buck and Maggie followed them, the kids in their arms.
And Dorcas and Ken were left in back. With the noises.
At first Ken thought that the things had found them already. Strange sounds assaulted him at every step. And every time he heard something it registered as more than noise. It was a blow to the base of his spine, a pounding that ran the length of his already-pained left leg, then up to his back and through to the bottom of his skull before rattling around in his head like a bell clapper.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dorcas whispered, and Ken realized his entire face had pulled tight as a miser’s purse string, his mouth puckered and his jaw clenched. He tried to relax, but then heard another noise and his muscles contracted of their own accord.
“The noise,” he said.
Dorcas kept moving forward, but cocked her head. “I don’t hear anything.”
Ken gritted his teeth as the sound – now a combination of the zombies’ growl, sheet metal bending, and nails scraping plates – sounded again. “You’re not hearing that?” he said.
Dorcas shook her head. Her expression changed. And suddenly she didn’t look like the friendly, selfless woman who had risked herself time and again for Ken and the others. Now she looked like one of them. The skin seemed to fall from her flesh, the bones peeked out from her cheeks.
“What?”
Ken blinked. The zombie was gone. Dorcas was back. Back and she wasn’t hearing what he was hearing.
“Dorcas, I think I’m in trouble,” he whispered. His feet felt funny, too. He looked down and realized that he was leaving a steady trail of blood behind him, though he couldn’t tell what part of him it was coming from.