Genesis (5 page)

Ken was dead.  There was nothing he could do.

Where before several decades of martial arts training had come to his rescue, now they seemed to have abandoned him.  He didn’t know what to do.  He didn’t know where to go.

He just watched as Stu – a tackle on the high school varsity football team – barreled at him.  Growling.  Teeth clicking together in obvious anticipation of ripping the flesh from Ken’s body.

And Ken stood there.  Just stood.

Goodbye,
Mags
.

A high-pitched shriek ripped Ken’s attention to the right.  He turned just in time to see a blur of motion pounce on Stu.  Stu roared, screeching in pain as something tore into him, ripping his ear off.

It was Laura.  The girl that had bitten Stu, the girl he had tossed into a desk.  She was still oozing that pink pulp from the side of a horribly misshapen head, and now Ken could actually see bone fragments dropping out of her skull.  She couldn’t be moving, couldn’t be
alive
.

But she was.  She was, and she had just saved Ken’s life, buying him time with her frenzied attack against the thing that had once been Stu.

Laura – the once-Laura – pushed her thumbs into Stu’s eyes.  He shrieked again as her thumbs went deep into his eye sockets.  The eyes seemed to both pop and wilt, almost disappearing under the pressure of her attack.  Gray matter dripped down his face.  He roared and threw Laura away from him.

Ken watched her body fly into a pile of other students who were rolling around in a mass of gore.  He thought she would return to finish Stu off, but she didn’t.  Just started fighting with whatever was in reach.

Ken turned back to Stu.  The teen’s face was a mass of blood and he was spinning back and forth, trying to orient on some unknown location.

Me.  He’s trying to find
me
.

Ken didn’t wait to see if he was right.  He ran for the door.

Threw it open.

And was nearly engulfed.

Ken knew it must have happened everywhere in the city –the fireballs, the tilting crane, the explosions had made that painfully obvious.  But knowing that hadn’t prepared him for the scene in the school hallway.

What had happened in his class must have happened in all of them.  And hundreds of kids must have run, fleeing for their lives and making it as far as the hallway before being taken down by the things that used to be their friends and classmates.

The walls were green and white.  Or they had been.  Now they were green and white and spattered with impressionistic splotches of red and black.  Ken’s first step into the hall almost ended in disaster as his foot came down in an inch-deep puddle of blood and he nearly skidded into three students locked into a life and death struggle near a bank of lockers.

The sound.  The screams rolled over him like a sonic tidal wave, nearly knocking him off his feet.  The growls and high-pitched whines of the students that had succumbed to whatever maddening impulses were even worse, a pulsing, pounding current that seemed to whisper madness into the deepest shadows of Ken’s own mind.

Just give up.  Just give in.

No. 
Mags
.  The kids.

They won’t notice.  They’re gone.

I don’t know that.

You do.  They’re gone.

No.

They’re dead.

NO!

And worst of all was the smell.  The smell of any indoor high school was a peculiar beast, a confluence of
b.o
. and aftershave applied by incompetent hands; of perfume put on in amounts that would embarrass a medieval French prostitute, mixed with the overriding smell of hormones on the brink of breaking free.  But this….

The desperate scent of terror, the tangy copper-smell of freshly spilled blood.  The pungent odor of bowels that had been purged in fear and death.

The smell brought Ken back from the edge of an abyss, reminded him that he was still alive.  Alive, and separated from the only things that made his life worth living.

He looked down the hall to his right, to his left.  Saw the same thing in either direction: teeming masses of
students
intent on killing or being killed.

And not just students.  Ken saw Joe
Picarelli
, the gym coach, kneeling over a young girl, yanking loops of entrails out of her stomach while making that same horrific growl.

Ken backed into a corner between the nearby bank of lockers and the doorway to his classroom.  He
snaked
out a hand and yanked the door closed, not sure if that would stop anyone from coming out but equally unsure what else to do.

He felt like curling up in a ball at the base of the lockers.  Felt like giving up.  That damn screaming pounded at him.

Give up.  Give in.  Give up.  Give in.

He turned and climbed.

He hoisted himself onto the top of the lockers.  There was no way to get out of the school via the hallway, not unless he was suddenly going to channel the ability of an Australian sheepdog to walk across the backs of the students roiling and rolling about on the floor like hyper-violent rioters.

So he went up on the lockers.

Ken didn’t have a plan.  Just knew that to stay still would be to die.  To remain would be to succumb to the pounding voice within him that counseled defeat.

He pulled himself onto the lockers.  There was about two feet of space between the tops of the lockers and the ceiling.  Not much room, just enough for him to crouch and observe the screaming chaos, the death everywhere.

One of the doors opened nearby and Emily Sumter, the English teacher, made a break for it.  Joe
Picarelli
jumped away from the now-still form of the girl whose innards he’d been yanking out and leapt on the older woman’s back.  Emily went down, screamed once, and then was silent as Joe grabbed her head in both hands and slammed her face repeatedly into the floor.

She was going to retire this year, Ken thought.  He had an insane moment where he realized he wouldn’t have to chip in the usual ten bucks for cake and a retirement gift.  Another insane moment where he was actually grateful, because Emily had always treated him like something you’d find underneath an abandoned refrigerator.

Then Joe
Picarelli
stopped slamming Emily’s face into the floor.  He looked up.

He saw Ken.

He howled.

And ran for the lockers.

Ken just reacted.  An all-but-buried part of him wondered how long that would keep him alive, how long instinct and dumb luck would suffice for survival.  But sitting back and drawing up plans was out of the question when you had a two-hundred-pound man with gobbets of flesh hanging from his outstretched hands rushing at you.

He had been crouched atop the bank of lockers, perched like the world’s strangest squirrel in the space between lockers and the ceiling.  Now he
scrabbled
to his feet and rammed his forearm through the ceiling tiles above him.  He stood, following his arm through the drop ceiling acoustical tiles, ramming his way into the plenum between the tiles and the structure of the building itself.

He felt a hand grab his ankle.  Felt fear shoot lightning bolts up and down his body.

He’s going to bite me.  I’m gonna get bitten
.

Ken froze, unable to move for a critical second, as though
hoping
on some level for the bite to come.  For this to end.

It didn’t happen.

A moment later he realized why.

“Too high,” he muttered, and with the words he kept punching his way into the space above the drop ceiling.

The lockers were almost six feet tall.  No way
Joe
Picarelli
could
bite him at that height.  He was safe.  For now.

The hand on his ankle clenched.  Ken had an instant to remember the superhuman strength of the kids he had battled in the past few minutes before Joe yanked his leg out from under him.  He almost tumbled down into the maelstrom of teeth and nails and flailing limbs and death and madness below.  Barely managed to grab onto some kind of ductwork in the ceiling plenum.

Ken felt himself pulled taut, like one of those Gumby dolls he had played with as a kid.

He remembered that he inevitably ended up pulling the legs off those toys.  The thought was not a comforting one.

He looked down, but couldn’t see anything.  His belly was pressed into the edges of one of the metal grids that held the acoustical ceiling tiles.  He couldn’t tell how close he was to having his feet or legs bitten by Joe or some other person.

He pulled, trying to muscle himself up and out of harm’s way.  Joe wouldn’t let go, though, and Ken felt himself tiring.  He was in good shape, for a teacher, but he was no match for whatever unnatural power was flooding the muscles of the gym coach.

Pain lanced through his calves.  He thought he’d been bitten; waited to change into whatever those things were.

The change didn’t happen.  Nothing came but more pain.  He felt his pants leg soak with blood.  Joe must be pulling his skin and muscle away from his leg with his fingers, yanking at him like Ken might work at a difficult chicken leg during a family barbecue.

Then he felt something else, a strange, mushy sensation that pushed its way through the pain.  Something moving around the soles of his shoes.  Pulling and pushing at once.

Ken realized that Joe had pulled him close enough that the gym coach was biting his feet.  Only the fact that Ken favored thick-soled Doc Martens shoes had kept him from being wounded.

Ken cried out, an inarticulate scream of pure terror as he realized that the span of his life and sanity could now be measured in centimeters.  He kicked out, felt the heavy soles of his shoes smash into Joe’s face.  He kicked again.  Again.  Crunches, strangely delicate, like wishbones popping.

Joe’s hands kept raking at Ken’s legs.  Ken kept kicking.  The crunches started to sound muffled, wrapped deeper and deeper in soft tissue.

The hands fell away abruptly.  Ken’s body went from taut to slack, and his lower half slammed painfully against the lockers as a shriek scraped against his eardrums.  He knew it was Joe.  Just like what had happened to Laura when she had tripped into the desk.

Ken yanked himself up until he was standing on the lockers again.  Then pulled himself into the formless black above the ceiling tiles.

It was dark.  The only sense of reality was provided by the hole he had come through and the rolling waves of sound from below, a pounding tsunami of rage and terror that threatened to drown him.

He moved forward.  Didn’t know where he was going, only that he had to keep moving.

Had to get to Maggie.  Had to get to the kids.

If they’re even alive.

What were the chances of a woman, with a nine-year old, a seven-year old, and a two-year old in tow, making it through what was happening?

He didn’t know.  And didn’t care.  He had to find them.  No matter what.

Light punched into the darkness.  A hand burst through the tiles in front of him.  A black outline pushed its way into the slightly greater darkness around them both.

Ken didn’t move.  He held his breath.  He couldn’t tell if the thing nearby was male or female, student or teacher.  And he certainly couldn’t tell if it was a normal person… or one of the crazy things that had somehow supplanted normality.

The dark form remained as still as Ken.  He could see its outline, lit by the flickering fluorescents in the hall below.  But no features.  Just a hunched, silent form.

Then it growled.