He looked at Maggie. She was white-faced, braced tightly into her own seat like she had found herself in a strange and particularly unpleasant carnival ride, but both she and Liz looked fine. As fine as the circumstances permitted. She nodded. Tried to smile.
He turned farther around so he could see Buck. The big man was looking at Hope, dangling silently in his arms. His big hands roved her body, not in a perverse way but in a way that clearly bespoke his concern and terror. Not for himself, but for her, worried that he would find evidence of broken bones or swelling that might indicate internal trauma. Buck didn’t look at Ken, but apparently sensed his attention because he pushed a big thumb into the air. “We’re okay,” he said. His too-high voice was pitched a bit higher than usual, fear strangling his vocal cords.
Ken glanced at Aaron and Christopher to make sure they were okay as well. Christopher was still holding the axe, and Aaron had an honest-to-god broadsword clutched in his one good hand. Ken wondered what kind of girl this “Cass” had been. Interesting, that’s for sure. And the world was the poorer for her loss.
Both Aaron and Christopher nodded, guy-speak for “We’re good.”
Ken nodded back. Turned to the driver.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
The driver glanced at him in the mirror above her head. She couldn’t look at him long, still wending between cars and debris that littered the road; occasionally slamming right through smaller items. But she looked like she was about to answer.
Then the bus bounced.
And again.
And he heard something skitter. Not on top of the bus, not beside it.
Beneath it.
And he remembered the tiny bodies that had flowed out of the storm drain. The things that had fled from the light.
He thought of the zombies, loping away from the vehicles they had pushed together in ambush.
The noise below sounded like it could be large or small. Could be anything. A child-thing, an adult-thing.
But not human.
Something coughed below the bus.
“What now?” said Christopher.
The redhead was still looking at Ken.
She looked terrified.
So, Ken suspected, did he.
9
Ken wondered for a moment why the coughing sound should scare him so badly. There was no question that something was below them, below the bus, but it was more than that.
It was….
He didn’t have a chance to complete the thought.
There was a high-pitched whine. Something that reminded Ken of a dentist’s drill, only with the unpleasantness of that tool notched up times fifty. Then it stopped.
“What…?” said Christopher.
Sally was suddenly on his feet, the snow leopard standing with legs outstretched, almost braced against the seat supports on either side of the center aisle. The leopard’s fur was standing on end and its head was lowered to an attack position. Its teeth were bared.
Liz and Hope didn’t wake up. They didn’t even move when Sally got up. Just slept on.
The cough came again, and Ken placed it. He had heard it first while hanging from the side of the top three stories of a building. A zombie had made that sound, right before it vomited acid all over itself.
But that couldn’t be happening now, could it? Sure, the things had somehow gained an ability to cling to sheer vertical surfaces, but even that was very different from holding fast to the undercarriage of a school bus bouncing through a warzone of a neighborhood. And the zombies’ acid melted their own flesh. So if there was something down there, if it puked acid the stuff would just hurt it, not the bus.
The cough again.
And Ken realized he had heard it other times, too. Like in the elevator shaft, crawling down.
Then the whine came again.
The sound grew higher and higher. Then it changed in tone, sounding almost like….
“It’s sawing through!” Buck shouted the words and then rammed back, jamming himself against the wall, pushing as far away from the center of the aisle as possible.
Ken looked and saw the big man was right: what looked like a circular saw was biting through the steel floor of the bus.
A moment later Ken changed his mind. What the thing actually was he couldn’t say, but it was not a saw. It was moving so quickly that he couldn’t get a good look at it, but for some reason it brought to mind the Remington rotary-style electric razor Maggie had gotten for him a few years back. As a functional razor it had been something of a bust: Ken’s beard was so thick and coarse that he quickly discovered the three “precision” razors actually just yanked the hair out of his face as often as they cut it.
But he did enjoy looking at the thing. It was sleek and somehow felt cooler than the disposable Bic razors he typically used.
The high-pitched sound returned, louder now. Sparks began flying from the portion of the bus that the whatever-it-was was working on.
Ken realized – belatedly – that it was coming through only inches from Sally.