Velocity by Michaelbrent Collings
1
Since it first acquired the ability to think, humanity has obsessed over a single question:
What happens next?
What happens after?
What happens when we die?
Ken stared at the answer. And, staring, wanted to scream. Not in victory, not in joy. He felt none of the ecstasy reported by seers and prophets through the ages, only a black madness that threatened to break over him like a tidal wave. To carry him off into depths so profound that he drown in them. And, drowning, would suffer forever. Because this wave brought death. And death had ceased to be a cipher and transformed to terror.
Ken stared at his dead son.
His dead son stared back. And growled.
No. It’s not him. It’s not Derek.
But it was. Even bent and broken from his hundred-foot fall off the side of a construction crane, even with one eye covered by scabrous growths, there was no denying that it was his boy. His brave, beautiful boy who had sacrificed himself so that his mother – and perhaps all of them – might live.
Derek –
(not Derek, not really, this is once-Derek, false-Derek, a Derek-of-lies, not my boy, oh, please, God, NOT MY BOY)
– snarled. The sound had weight. It hit Ken like a fist. Not the give up give in of the snarls he had heard thus far, the low psychic vibration that had accompanied the cries of the zombies.
This was a shriek in his mind. Not give up give in but GIVE UP GIVE IN.
And he wanted to. Dear God, he wanted to.
GIVE UP GIVE IN.
GIVE UP GIVE IN.
(daddy no)
Ken realized he had stepped out of the storm drain access tunnel. Into the too-bright sunlight, into the clutches of the fifty or so zombies waiting there.
Why aren’t they attacking us? he wondered.
He also realized that the other zombies, the tiny child-monsters that had pushed themselves through even tinier holes to get to them, had halted. They were swaying and snarling, but their cries were muted. Lower than they had been. He could hear them –
give up.
give in.
– but the sound wasn’t as forceful. It was almost… worshipful. Like they were in the presence of deity.
Beside Derek stood a six-foot-plus monster. A zombie with perfectly white skin on one side of its body, utterly unblemished. Its left side. Its right side was charred and blackened by a trip through flame. It was an injury that would have killed a normal human, but the monster didn’t register pain, didn’t seem to notice it at all.
It stepped toward the group.
Ken realized that no one else was moving. His wife was screaming in terror, Maggie’s cries almost as loud as those of his no-longer-son. Aaron and Christopher stood mute, though whether from shock or terror or some other emotion Ken could not say.
Buck held Ken’s little girl. Hope was crying out, ecstatic screams that rose and fell in counterpoint to those of Liz, Ken’s baby who hung naked from a baby sling strapped to Maggie’s stomach. The screams fell into low moans at times, and Ken shuddered. They sounded nearly sexual, and were nothing he wanted to hear from his little girls.
Sally…. Ken glanced around. The snow leopard that had saved them from a zombie attack was standing still. The cat’s fur spiked to attention, even its tail held erect. It looked like it was fighting something.
GIVE UP.
GIVE IN.
Derek stopped snarling.
GIVE U –
(run, daddy)
derek stepped forward. So did the half-burnt monster beside him, the unholy retainer at the right hand of a slight-figured god-child. At Derek’s left, Dorcas – good and kind Dorcas, Dorcas whose eyes had shone with selflessness and bravery and whose gaze now flared with hunger and need – stepped forward as well. Like an unholy godhead, a trinity that served darkness instead of light.
(daddy, please run, plea –)
It was only when the tiny voice in his mind cut off that Ken realized it had ever been there. And with the realization he was forced to question its appearance. A thing defined not by itself but by the shadows that surrounded it.
Had the voice been there?
Was it real?
Or did he merely wish it to be so? Did he simply hope Derek was still in there?
Derek opened his mouth wide. Dark ichor welled out. His legs crackled, shifting as he stood.
The once-boy – once-child, once-bright star of their little family – shrieked, and the sound drove spikes into Ken’s mind.
GIVE UP.
GIVE IN.
DIE!
The other zombies ran forward as one. Inside the drain tunnel Ken heard the tiny scratches of child-things scrabbling forward.
Nowhere to run.
DIE!
2
They were all screaming.
Maggie, shouting in terror. Making noises he hadn’t even heard on the days and nights she gave birth to their children – two of those times completely without anesthetic.