Christopher, his cries waxing and waning so they sounded almost like laughter. But chilling. Terrifying.
Even Aaron screamed. Just a staccato yell, a pair of pistol pops to Christopher’s machine-gun cry. Still, it was more of an admission of fear than the cowboy-cum-rodeo-clown-cum-whatever-Aaron-actually-was usually made.
Buck screamed as well. Big man, high voice. He had sounded whiny when Ken first met him, but the sound he was making carried no trace of begging, no hint of complaint. It was pure terror, the kind that laced its way up your guts and then pulled tight and forced you to open your mouth and let it out because to keep it in would be to die.
The girls….
Hope and little Liz….
Hope was looking up. Staring at the sky. Mouth open. Breathing in time with…
… Liz. The toddler strapped to her mother’s chest. Her arms splayed out, fingers wide as though experiencing her first rain, her first snow. She was smiling.
Then laughing.
The laugh made Ken’s legs wobble. There was nothing of Liz in the laugh. Nothing of the little girl who ran to him and buried her face in the space between neck and shoulder and kissed him and giggled at the feel of his whispers. Nothing of Sesame Street and apple juice in sippies and mornings going in to little eyes staring over the top rail of the crib, eyes that lit up when you walked in because it was day and DADDY WAS HERE!
Liz was gone. Only –
(give up)
– hunger remained. Only hunger and –
(give in)
– hatred and –
(GIVE UP)
– NEED.
(GIVE IN.)
Sally was still. The leopard was male, had been adopted by and named so ridiculously by Hope. Ken suspected that the beast had adopted the girls as well. Certainly there was something about the animal that changed the effect the zombies had on his children. Lessened it.
But not now. The things’ call was too strong.
Derek was too strong. His son was in some strange but undeniable way the leader. His boy had come to kill him.
The zombies were rushing them.
Ken opened his arms. Just like little Liz. No agony, no ecstacy. Only welcoming. He was throwing himself to his boy. Even though his boy hated him, despised him, wanted only his death.
(daddy please run)
The voice was too small, or the growls of the beasts too loud. The urge to flight was lost in Ken’s mind.
The first of the zombies was only perhaps ten feet away.
The zombies in the tunnel behind them – small bodies wriggling through the flowing water in the storm drain, tiny hands and feet impossibly clinging to walls and ceilings – were reaching out.
Ken didn’t care.
He couldn’t.
He was giving up.
Giving in.
Gone.
3
The leading edge of the zombies reached out. Their hands – some whole and human-seeming, others bent bloody, still others covered in the waxy yellow substance that seemed to serve as both poultice and building material – reached for the survivors. Buck was closest to them. He would be taken first.
Ken wondered, briefly, whether they would turn him or just kill him.
He wondered what they would do to Hope, who was still in the big man’s arms.
The closest zombie was one of the whole creatures. A thing that had once been a boy with bright red hair and thick glasses that now hung askew from one ear, propped up on his nose in a way that looked impossible in the same way Escher drawings look impossible.
The redhead touched Buck.
Buck was still screaming.
All of them caught by the scream. By Derek.
Give UP.
Give IN.
Then the redhead’s hand was red. Red as something splashed it, and then an instant later it disappeared and Ken fell back into his own mind as the scream cut off.
He heard a series of thuds and thumps.
Yellow streaked past his vision. Yellow and black. Ken thought of bees, of the insects that first clustered around his class window, then the bees that tried to kill him and Dorcas –
(before she Changed)
– before dying en masse.
But… bees were small. Not bigger than an inch long. Certainly not twenty feet long. Thirty.
Something hissed, a sound Ken vaguely remembered from his past life, his life when he was a teacher and his biggest problem had been getting the kids to do homework, maybe discovering one of the seniors copping a feel off his girlfriend during passing period.
What is it?
Ken couldn’t focus. He kept thinking about Derek and bees and the laugh/scream/moans of his daughters.
And the thumps. The meat-smacks of bodies hitting something hard. The penny-smell of blood aerosolizing. Pink mist in the air.
He realized he couldn’t hear Liz or Hope anymore. Nor could he hear his son’s –
(no not Derek, not anymore, Derek’s gone)
– thoughts in his mind. He took a breath. Felt blood puff into his lungs.
Will that infect me?