This time the pause barely lasted ten seconds. And when it was over something different happened. Something new. And new was always bad.
The zombies shook their heads. Not like a person might do upon waking from a pleasant nap. No, they whipped their heads back and forth so violently it was like they were trying to shake their skulls free. Several of them started slamming their faces into the nearest walls, hitting so hard that the brittle crunch of breaking bones could be heard.
Ken braced for the madness that came whenever one of the beasts suffered head injury. It didn’t come. The things all stopped moving again. Simultaneously. Completely. Ken wondered if the things everywhere in the city, the state – the world – were similarly silent.
Then they moved. They went back to rebuilding their structure of bodies as though nothing had happened, vomiting up the glue-like substance and sticking pieces of what had once been people together in a wall that crept ever higher.
“I don’t think we should be here when they finish,” said Aaron.
“Yeah,” said Christopher.
They walked the rest of the way down the hall. It ended in a T-intersection, allowing them to move to the right or the left.
“Which way?” said Dorcas.
Ken looked around. He didn’t know.
Then he heard the scream.
There is no way to explain some things. No way to explain what it feels like to hold a new baby in your arms. No way to explain the joy of a new life.
There is also no way to explain the ache that takes hold of your heart when you hear one of your children cry in pain.
Derek broke his elbow when he was five. Nothing critical, just the typical little kid things that happen to everyone. Just a wrong move on a new bicycle. A moment in time that divided perfection from pain. One moment he was smiling, the next he was screaming.
Ken was home. It was summer. He saw it happen, and all he could think when it happened was how much he wished he had been working. Because the look on his boy’s face was too much to bear. The look of pain – of real pain for the first time – coupled with the unspoken question, “Daddy, why did this happen? Why did you let this happen?”
Ken would rather have broken his own elbow than suffered through that moment for another instant.
Derek forgot about it. He was up riding his bike again the next day, trundling along in a bright purple cast that he seemed to pick precisely because it clashed with his red bike helmet. But Ken didn’t forget. That scream became something that he heard in his dreams. The thing that signified the dangers of parenthood, the moments when you found that your children were vulnerable to the world.
It was that scream that told Ken that his children were as mortal as he. That they could be hurt. Could be killed.
It was the scream he heard now.
He ran to the right. The others pounded down the hall after him, but he was in the lead. And that was right. It was the way it had to be.
He had to get there first.
He was the daddy.
There were doors on either side of the hall. Some were closed, others were open. A few were missing: ripped off their moorings by hands far more powerful than they should have been. Blood stained the walls, but there were no bodies anywhere: all the corpses seemed to have been moved to the area near the elevators.
Ken ran past everything. The scream didn’t repeat, but he ran without question for the door at the end of the hall. It had to be that one.
That was the one that was sealed. Not by locks or bolts.
No, it was covered by a thick curtain of that same tacky secretion. That yellow wax that the things in the halls were using.
Another scream.
Ken’s child. Alive. Beyond the door.
And in pain.
10
Ken’s own injuries and agonies disappeared.
There was nothing but the sound.
Before, when the zombies had come together in masses, their growls had made him and the others want to lay down and quit. To give up and die. He had thought that was the most devastating thing he would ever hear.
He was wrong.
The high-pitched trill of Derek’s scream was worse. The scream of a little boy in extremis tore Ken’s own aches and pains away in an instant. He bounded down the hall and was at the doorway full seconds ahead of the others. Pounding against the waxy substance with his hands, even the handkerchief-bound hand that ended in three fingers instead of five. Slamming at the tacky, glue-like secretion all over the door.
He left red streaks behind. He knew he should feel it, should feel the pain of one more attack against an already overburdened system. But he felt nothing.
“Derek!” he screamed.
“Daddy!” The call came back even higher than before. As though hearing his father’s voice had not provided peace, but rather an increase of terror.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!”
But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t get a purchase on the slick wall of waxy mucus left behind by the monsters that had God-knew-what planned for his children.
Whump.