Christopher shouted. Ken looked over. The younger man had stepped forward into the waiting area, and tripped over what looked like a thick mound of silk. The webbing had sheared apart, though, revealing a white face. Not a mound of silk, but a wrapped-over body.
Something hissed. This time it was Aaron who screamed, the cowboy permitting a rare showing of emotion as something moved behind him. What had been wall a moment before now shifted.
Not wall. Not wall at all.
It was a zombie. Encased in silk, spun into a cocoon-like shell. Standing silently right behind Aaron. Now it tore forth, ripping out of the threads that held it.
It went to the body that Christopher had revealed. Leaned over. Tore into its cheek and began to feed on it.
“Daddy, please help!”
Ken turned away. For whatever reason, the zombie wasn’t bothering them. He had a child calling him.
One thing at a time.
He walked through the lobby area, shivering as the trails of silky material trailed over his bare skin. He felt like vomiting.
“Derek,” he shouted, trying to keep his voice calm. Strong. And failing. “Where are you?”
“In here,” said the voice.
Ken followed his son’s voice. Derek still sounded hurt. And in this world where so many new kinds of pain had recently erupted into being, Ken hesitated to think of what that might mean.
He passed several offices. Barely glanced into them. Still, it was enough to show him nightmare visions, silk-wrapped sheets of once-life. Bulky objects that were once desks and bookshelves and filing cabinets and phones and people.
Some of the corpses had been ripped open and torn to pieces.
Others were still whole and unmoving in their cocoons.
Ken wondered what he would find when he finally located his son. Derek had said his mother wasn’t moving. So would Maggie be dead? What about Hope? What about the baby?
“Kiddo?” he said. Soft footsteps behind him, the sounds of shoes treading lightly on carpet sheathed by an alien secretion.
“In here,” said the voice.
Ken found the office.
He saw his son.
15
It was the fifth office. Not really an office, in fact – more of a conference room. A large table sat in the middle, the kind of thing around which high-powered attorneys haggled over even higher-powered deals, or glared at one another while deposing white-collar criminals. To one side of it, a long coffee table ran along the wall. Beyond that, a couch sat along a back wall, underneath a square that could be a flat screen TV or framed art. Impossible to tell, because everything was covered in the same sticky gobs of black and gray threads.
The monstrous excretions made everything look dirty and foul. Even the light: they covered the windows on the far wall in thick drapery-like sheets, shrouding the room in a depressed twilight that weighed on the eyes and on the mind.
Derek was on the conference table.
At first Ken was sure that his son was hurt. Nearly every inch of his skin was covered in webbing, but his face was still open to the air. Still uncovered. His eyes glistened with barely-contained terror.
“Mommy,” said the boy. “Save Mommy, save Hope, save Liz!” He started crying, tears that he had clearly been containing – perhaps for hours – spilling out over his cheeks.
The depth of the boy’s pain nearly brought Ken up short. So did the realization that Derek probably wasn’t hurt at all. That the pain Ken had heard in his son’s voice wasn’t his own, but merely the pain he felt for his loved ones. Derek had always been that way. Had always been more apt to cry for others than for himself.
One time Derek accidentally knocked Hope into a tree while the two were riding their bikes. Hope cried. Derek screamed, terrified he had hurt her. And even when she stopped crying, he went into the house and couldn’t be coaxed back onto his bike for days.
“They won’t move,” he whimpered now. “They won’t move, they won’t move!”
Ken looked at his son. Followed Derek’s gaze.
Ken’s breath caught in his throat. He saw Maggie’s face, her eyes closed. Her form pinned against what looked like a filing cabinet, anchored there by millions upon millions of silken strands. Liz’s face seemed to sprout from Maggie’s chest, like she was giving birth to the two-year-old in a particularly gruesome way. But it was just an illusion, the little girl glued directly to her mother’s chest by the same webbing that covered everything else.
Hope was next to them. Another caterpillar. Her beautiful, dark hair stark against her too-pale skin. Hope had always been tan. She had inherited her coloring from Ken’s dad. But now she looked like a ghost of herself. A specter.
Was she dead?
“Daddy,” whimpered Derek. “Daddy, wake them up.”
Ken looked at the others. Everyone else had crammed into the doorway of the office, as though leery to join him in this strange place. As though peering into a mass grave.
He locked eyes with Christopher, the only member of their party who still had use of both hands. “Can you get this crap off my son?” he said.