The bee stopped moving. It stopped right in front of Ken, humming with a strangely rhythmic thud-chug-thud-chug that also touched memories of times before the world fell to its knees.
Ken stared at the bee’s black lines. Vaguely aware that the monstrous insect had slammed into the zombies, but that they were regrouping. Would come again.
The ones in the tunnel were still coming.
He didn’t move. Just looked at the stripes on the bee’s sides. Two black lines. The words Boise City Public School District sandwiched neatly between them.
There was another hydraulic hiss, this time smaller. The school bus had hugged up so tightly to the wall where the storm drain access door was that when bus door folded open Ken felt the wind of it on his face.
A voice punched out. Raspy and jagged as a saw with broken teeth, and there was something else beneath it. Something Ken couldn’t quite place….
“Get in,” said the driver. “Two seconds and I leave.”
The bus engine gunned, and Ken knew the owner of the voice was not bluffing.
4
Ken used to sing a song to Derek. Not always. Only when he was a baby, and then only when the baby was so colicky it seemed death was imminent. Not his death, not the baby’s. The parents’. Ken’s and Maggie’s. On those occasions, Ken picked up the little ball of writhing arms and legs and bunched him up so tight that movement was all but impossible and sang about wheels on the bus that spun around and around and around. He sang and sang, and sooner or later Derek always calmed.
The wheels on this bus were not spinning. They weren’t black, either. They were gray from dust, red from blood, brown from where the two came together to form a mud-blood-mess of dirt and death.
One of the wheels had a hand on it, holding tight to the lug nuts and the gaps in the heavy duty rim.
No arm, no body. Just a hand. Torn raggedly apart mid-forearm, stump crusted over with the waxy substance that built and healed.
The hand twitched. The pad of a finger ran over the edge of the rim, like it was questing for something. It probably was. Ken had been grabbed by a similarly disembodied hand a few days earlier; had seen a head with no body crying windless screams.
The zombies didn’t stop.
“Move! Ken, move!”
Aaron punctuated his shout with a yank. He’d been half-dragging Ken thus far, propping up Ken’s broken body with his own strength, even though he was far from untouched by the chaos himself.
Ken stepped into the bus.
He thought about the wheels on the bus.
He saw Derek. Not the baby Derek, not the child he rocked until sleep stole the pain. Not even the older Derek, who was a real person, on his way to becoming a real man.
Not even the Derek who had saved his mother by taking the bite meant for her.
No, this was the new Derek. Not the kind Derek-that-was but the broken (though rapidly unshattering as that yellow shit pushed out of his pores and coated his broken bones and flesh) and hungry Derek-of-now-and-forevermore. The boy was standing next to piles of zombies that had been plowed to the side by the massive weight of the bus.
The wheels on the bus.
Babies crying.
Derek’s lips pulled back from his teeth. Some of them had shattered away, probably when he fell from the crane. Not a gap-toothed grin the way kids had had before the world fell down in ashes –
(ashes we all fall down like he fell down
DIE
run daddy)
– around them, but with the serrated grin of a saw blade. Rusty, spattered with darkness that might be blood. Hungry.
Ken felt the clank of feet on metal. He realized they were his.
He was getting on the bus.
He wondered where the wheels on the bus would take him.
Derek ran toward the bus.
Beside him, the black/white monster and the creature that had once been Dorcas did the same.
Ken looked at the driver. According to the song the driver would tell him –
“MOVE YOUR ASS!”
5
Ken didn’t move. He just stared. A mental stopwatch clicked past the two seconds they’d been allotted, but the driver didn’t start the bus moving. Ken didn’t know if that was because they weren’t all on yet or because they were half on and the guy didn’t want to scrape anyone on the side of the wall beside which the bus had shuddered to a halt.
So he stared. Not long. Maybe a second.
Too long for what was going on outside. Not nearly long enough to understand what he was seeing.
“Holy shit, we’re being rescued by Darth Vader!” said Christopher. Ever the most emotionally-resilient of the group, he said it as a joke and his tone almost sold it as such. He could have been poking fun of a friend at a party. Though this would have been a very strange friend indeed, and a completely terrible party.
“Language!” snapped Maggie in a tone that made it clear she was speaking out of habit more than sincere remonstration. In the next instant she pushed onto the bus and said, “Holy fu –“ She managed to stop herself.
Buck rammed his way down the aisle with Hope in his arms. Ken’s oldest daughter was screaming, reaching for the side of the bus.