She smiled regardless. Ken remembered the diamond tears she had wept. Wondered what had happened when the RPGs flew. What she had lost.
Christopher was lower than Theresa. He wasn’t using his feet to kick at pursuers. Feet were more powerful, and safer to use than anything else.
But Christopher had abandoned safety some time ago. He must have dropped the medieval style axe at some point, and now he was simply punching the zombies. Wild swings as he shrieked wordless screams of pain that nearly turned to pleasure each time his knuckles connected with a face, a body. He was crying in his rapturous rage. Ken wondered if he was attacking the things that had changed his baby, or if he saw himself in the things, and was murdering the father that had left a baby behind.
Never mind that it wasn’t true in the slightest. It was the lie that good parents saw when they lost a child. The what if that haunted them. That would haunt Ken.
It happened. Christopher’s recklessness caught him. One of the undead grabbed his arm. Pulled it toward him.
Christopher almost fell off the side of the thresher. He would have been killed outright if that had happened.
But he managed to hold on.
Pulling away from the mouth.
Always the mouth.
Always the terror of Change. Fear of loss that even a man torn to nothing by grief could understand.
42
Ken looked automatically to Aaron. The cowboy was busy. Pummeling his own attacker, his arm still threaded through the handrail, still trying to stay on the still-crawling thresher while stopping the undead –
(are there more of them there are where are they coming from how long will they come how long can we hold off how long can we hold out?)
– from climbing on and taking them all down. Theresa was still doing her homicidal Tarzan move.
No one could help.
Ken ran up the stairs. Using both hands for speed, even though gripping with his three-fingered left was agony.
He jumped to the thin strip of metal by the cabin.
The driver looked at him. A look that said, “We can’t stop, you can’t come in.”
Ken shook his head. He didn’t want in.
43
Christopher was screaming. Not the homicidal scream of a man born to the edge of madness. It was fear. Not fear of pain or death, but fear of something worse. This was damnation, pure and simple: condemnation to a mindless life of wandering and serving. No choice, no self. Just existence, and heeding the call to rise and destroy.
Ken tried to blank out the cries, or at least to blank out the terror that they carried. The fear that tried to force itself into his own mind.
One of his martial arts instructors, a barrel-chested Persian with scarred knuckles and a smile broader than a crescent moon, had always quoted Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, a seminal book on sword fighting written in the 1600s.
“Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined through calm,” Master Arman would say. The words would come as a whisper, usually during the last pushup after a grueling sparring session. Musashi’s wisdom moving through the centuries to remind Ken to focus not on the struggle to survive what – at the time – had seemed like the hardest thing he would do, but rather to focus on the calm that underlay the struggle.
He wondered what had happened to Master Arman. If his old teacher had survived the Change. He hoped so.
“Be determined through calm.” The swordsman’s words.
He took what he wanted from the side of the cab.
Christopher was still screaming.
Ken felt the calm that he had always sought, the calm that had always eluded him. Not the feeling that everything would work out the way he hoped, but the sudden realization that, live or die, he was trying. That, live or die, everything would turn out the way it should; the way it must.
Determined through calm.
Musashi had been a ronin. A samurai whose lord had fallen.
Ken had no master. His world had fallen, and all that was left were his friends.
Through calm.
His family.
Calm.
He plucked the cherry red fire extinguisher off the side of the cab. It was held in place by a clamp designed to be stiff enough that the extinguisher wouldn’t come off during the normal jouncing of the machine’s operation.
In Ken’s –
(calm)
– hands it fell open like the arms of a long-lost friend.
Christopher was still shrieking.
Ken eschewed the handle or the shell. He pulled the hose assembly, throwing the red canister over his shoulder like some strange scuba gear.
Then dancing down. Dancing like a swordsman. Like the calm Musashi in his Five Rings, moving from prologue to epilogue. Inevitable start to inescapable end.
He used his bad hand to grab a bracket similar to the one Theresa was still using. Then he stepped on Christopher’s shoulder. The younger man screamed again, terrified anew at what was happening. But Ken could not help that.
He was calm.