This was how it had to be.
He used his foot to push Christopher back against the side of the thresher, then used the same thrust he had generated to lean forward. The momentum thus created traveled through his foot, his leg, his torso. Velocity increased as it traveled up his arm, then through the hose of the fire extinguisher.
The canister snaked out, then the forward momentum ended like the crack of a whip, turning forward to down in a tight arc.
The head of the zombie that had been pulling Christopher toward it disappeared in a spray of blood and bone. The thing danced. But Ken barely noticed the dance as he pushed it away. It was not Musashi’s dance, so he did not care.
It was not calm, so it did not deserve notice.
The fire extinguisher exploded as well, the impact separating tubing and handle and canister. It disappeared into the frenzy.
Ken let it go. He had no need for it.
The thresher lunged forward as the driver shifted gears.
The undead were suddenly left behind.
And all was silent.
All was…
… calm.
44
It didn’t last.
Nothing good could last, at least not now, not so soon after the change.
Perhaps not ever again.
Ken felt the calm that had captured him suddenly release him. He felt the pain in his back, his leg. The agony sprouting from absent fingers and sending tortured tendrils grinding their way through his left hand and arm.
He vomited on Christopher’s head.
It wasn’t much, just a thin gruel of storm water and the power bars that Ken had managed to choke down while lying in a semi-comatose state and then awake for far too short a time in the underground areas of Boise.
Still, it was enough to wring a shriek out of the younger man.
“Are you kidding me?” Christopher glared up, then averted his eyes in time to barely avoid getting a faceful of round two. More warm vomitus trailed around his ears and down the back of his shirt. He looked up, squinting to make sure he wasn’t going to get hit a third time, then unleashed a stream of invectives so enraged and inventive that Ken almost smiled.
Sometimes the universe sends us gifts.
Sometimes the gift is a calm to get us through an impossible moment.
Sometimes it is a faceful of puke, and the incredibly hilarious sight of a once-too-handsome-to-be-believed friend trying haplessly to clean himself off one-handed while clinging to a giant tractor that trundles through a dead city.
Christopher was still screaming, still raging.
The redheaded Theresa started laughing with Ken. Wheezing “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh” over and over, a phrase that seemed so innocent and out of place beside Christopher’s raging epithets that it just made Ken laugh all the more.
Another laugh joined theirs. Aaron, the old cowboy hanging off the side of the ladder, the arm threaded through the handrail and one foot on the ladder the only things keeping him on the vehicle. He was laughing so hard that he was crying, tears rolling down his weathered cheeks like streams cutting their way through long-dry beds.
They had all lost people. Had all found them in horrible ways. Ken sensed that Theresa, too, had been touched by the loss that was felt so keenly and quickly now.
Of course she has. It’s the World After. Everyone alive has lost someone. The lucky ones haven’t found them again.
The thought just made Ken laugh all the harder.
A moment later, Christopher laughed as well.
Hooting like maniacs, they rode the thresher through Boise.
45
The laughter petered out.
Aaron fell silent first, and Ken saw steel come back into the cowboy’s eyes. He began scanning: left, right, left right. Up, down. Left, right, left, right. Up, down. His eyes moved methodically and without ceasing. The other side of the thresher was a huge blind spot for the time being, but at least on this side nothing would get past the wary eye of the older man.
Ken looked around as well.
He saw nothing.
But he heard a cry. One of terror, one of fear.
And his heart almost jumped out of his body for happiness.
He climbed as quickly as he could toward the cabin. The grace and agility that had been endowed upon him like some Heavenly gift were gone, so it seemed to take forever. Forever in which he could bask in the sound.
It was Lizzie.
The sound of his daughter, crying. Not the sound of a tiny demon shrieking for help, not the sound of panting, of gasping, of –
(give up give in)
– growling that demanded despair. It was just the sound of a little girl hungry and tired and afraid.
It was music.
Ken pulled himself to the cabin and was almost hit by the door as it opened. It would have been a sort of cosmic irony, to survive all that he had only to get whacked in the face by the cab door and so thrown off and probably crushed to death by the blood-inked wheels of the thresher.
He threw himself back, barely missing the acrylic door.
“Ken!”