But the fact that the thing below them was integrating something as synthetic as a diaper was more disturbing than Ken cared to admit, even to himself.
As though to highlight the strangeness, another section of floor fell away. Aaron ran to the new hole and swung his sword.
It clanged off the metal edge of the floor. Something coughed. The sword started to smoke, and when Aaron brought it back it was sagging from the mid-point to the tip. The thing must have vomited that acid on it.
Ken remembered Derek, Derek in a diaper that rested on the outside and not on the inside, vomiting as a baby. Puking so hard from a stomach virus that Ken swore the kid had to be absolutely hollow. Just a baby-shell filled from toes to fontanelle with twenty pounds of puke.
That had been bad. Always bad when your children suffered. Always terrible.
This was worse.
Aaron dropped the sword with a curse. It disappeared below the bus.
“Let me,” said Christopher. He took position over the nearest hole, looking for all the world like a lumberjack who has decided to use his axe for ice-fishing.
A hand appeared. Tiny, curling around the denticulated edges the thing’s jaws had left in the floor.
The fingers were longer than they should have been. The nails were grotesquely hooked, and Ken knew somehow that this change – just as the change from lovely, kissable lips to organic chainsaw – had been wrought for the sole purpose of creating a killing machine out of something that had once been the pinnacle of innocence.
A plastic band, the kind issued upon admission to hospitals, circled the thing’s wrist. Just behind it, another strip of material circled the wrist. This one looked homemade, a lanyard or some other kind of bracelet a kid would make for his baby brother or sister.
Christopher reacted instantly at the sight of the thing’s hand and wrist, moving so fast it had to be an unconscious motion: no thought, only instinct.
He swung the axe.
The thing below squealed.
And at the same moment, someone screamed. A shriek of sudden terror and pain. No, more than simple pain. This was agony.
It wasn’t the thing below the bus. Not the infant-creature.
It was someone above.
Someone in the bus.
It was Christopher.
21
Christopher slumped. Ken thought the young man would have fallen right through the hole in the floor before him, but Aaron grabbed the neck of his shirt and yanked him backward. Aaron’s left hand had been crushed during a zombie attack – the fingers all broken or sprained, some so badly Ken wondered if they would ever completely heal – but his right was strong enough to haul the younger man back from the abyss. It was a struggle, though, and for a moment Ken was sure Christopher would pitch forward and disappear below the wheels of the bus –
(wheels of the bus or wheels on the bus? which is it and when does this song end?)
– as had the beast the young man just dispatched.
As soon as it became obvious that he wasn’t going to fall through the floor, Christopher turned to the cowboy. Aaron was a good five or six inches shorter, but Christopher folded into him like a little boy, sobbing. “Cass” fell from his hands, the axe clattering to the floor.
The blade was stained with blood and ichor.
All this happened in the space of a breath, an instant. And in the next moment Ken saw a small form flung out from beneath and behind the bus. The size of a beach ball, a bloody semi-sphere, the thing rolled for twenty or thirty feet and then came to a stop. Barely visible in the dust that coated the road behind the bus.
But barely was enough. Enough to see the quad-jaws, the still-twitching limbs.
It got up. Started a loping run after the bus, a run that was all the worse for the fact that it was being done by a body that under other circumstances barely would have learned to walk.
Fast though it was, the thing couldn’t possibly catch up to the bus. But it kept running. Like it wouldn’t give up –
(give in)
– until it had caught its prey.
Ken couldn’t look away, couldn’t tear his gaze from the aberration that was following the bus in a lopsided sprint.
It had no eyes to see their progress, but it followed them. There were other things with that sense of sight-unsight. Ken had seen them in an elevator shaft. But they were different. This was worse. An evolution that was a stage of magnitude beyond what they had already seen.
A large part of the thing’s shoulder was cleft, a wicked gash opened up by an axe coupled with Christopher’s near-inhuman reflexes. And as Ken watched the gash filled with yellow secretion and began to close.
They left it behind. Only rubble and debris and the bodies of the dead caught unaware and unready – as were they all – for the Change.
He stopped watching. Not only because there was nothing to see now, but because –
“Hold onto something!” screamed the driver.
Ken dropped to the nearest seat, spinning as he did, seeing….
22