For Derek.
There was a gentle tap, just the tiniest shifting of the bus. The only sound of a snow leopard hopping on board.
“You’re shitting me,” said the driver.
“You should talk,” said Christopher.
They were all inside.
The folding doors extended. Closed.
5
The driver faced forward. It didn’t matter. Ken was still anchored to the spot by surprise. He had seen a lot of things on buses just like this: kids groping each other, kids chewing tobacco, kids getting into fistfights they apparently hoped would go unnoticed.
He had never seen someone dressed in blood-crusted full-body armor with the words “Boise Police” across the back, a pair of machetes strapped to his back, and a gasmask that looked like it had stepped through a wormhole from World War II.
“Siddown.”
That was how the driver said it: one quick word. Not “sit down” or even “sit the hell down” but rather the most efficient distillation of the words: “Siddown.”
It was still enough for Ken to hear what he had missed in the first moments after the seven-ton bee smashed right through the throng of zombies. Still enough for a small surprise to find its way through the madness.
Ken wondered if the others had heard it. Had noticed.
He turned to the back of the bus. Aaron was already gone, and Ken hadn’t even noticed. But the cowboy must have guided Ken to a support rail because that was what he was now holding onto. The vertical rod was bolted to a seat, welded to ceiling and floor.
Ken felt his grip twist across blood and fear-slick sweat as he caught a glimpse of what was outside, what was now behind them.
Derek, running over the crushed bodies – all of them still moving, still twitching, some of them struggling to stand on feet and legs that corkscrewed around to point behind them.
Dorcas, snarling and shrieking as she did the same. She and the black/white zombie were running a strange kind of interference for Derek, pushing the wounded out of the way. Not that Ken’s boy – his once-boy – noticed. He ran across the pavement, the dead, the blood, the innards with equal abandon.
And the tunnel. The access door.
Tiny fingers circled the jamb. Tiny hands appeared.
Tiny bodies came to light.
6
Ken hadn’t seen them yet.
He saw their fingers, saw their eyes glimmering behind him as they caught what light there was and threw it back at him. Saw eyes blinded by armored scabs, others reflective as those of a hyena come to tear at a carcass in the night.
But what he had seen had been too little to sink in. Or maybe it had been enough, but his mind had rejected it. Had refused to acknowledge what it was seeing.
Now, in the harsh light of day, under a sun as bright as this, he had no choice but to see, to believe.
Even if he didn’t understand.
The things that crawled out around the doorframe like roaches running out of a strangely vertical drain were tiny. Not just children like Ken had thought, but most of them babies. Toddlers at best. They had pushed into the tunnel, the tiniest of them looking barely big enough to have fought their way into this world in the first place.
Ken was struck with a horrific thought: what if they hadn’t? Half of humanity had changed in a period of ten minutes. What if one of the Changed had been pregnant?
What if one of the Changed had yet to leave the womb?
He shuddered.
Shuddered again as he saw what the tiny creatures did when they came into the light. They blinked, and he saw –
(It’s not possible, Ken, not possible
What of this is possible?)
– that most of them did not have scabbed-over eyes; rather, their eyes were enormous. Perhaps half the surface area of their faces. They were black and shiny as wet obsidian, though some of them had mottled crusts beginning to creep over the dark orbs: the scabs that were appearing on more and more of the creatures.
Some of the scabs seemed to be growing right out of the centers of the eyes. Not the skin surrounding the dark orbs, the scabs erupted like volcanic islands from the dark seas of the eyes themselves.
As he watched, the things blinked and cringed. He couldn’t see what they were cringing from, but then they scampered back into the tunnel, again seeming more roach-like than human.
The light. They couldn’t stand it.
He turned away. He didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about babies changing to something so deadly and bloodthirsty and alien and ugly.
What if that’s what’s happening to little Lizzy?
What if it’s something worse?
He had no answers to that. He looked at Maggie. She was sitting on one of the puke-green seats that were required fixtures in school buses worldwide, cradling Liz’s head. Liz’s eyes were closed.
Maggie met Ken’s eyes. “She’s asleep,” she said.