Ken noticed that Sally was laying in the aisle at Liz’s feet. He wondered what the he-leopard would do if he ever came to understand how misnamed he was.
Maybe he’d like it. The world’s first transgender cougar.
Though that couldn’t be. Ken knew from visiting the zoo with the kids that Sally and his mate were trying to breed. He wondered if Sally knew that his female was gone. Maybe dead, but certainly out of reach.
Sally raised his head and looked at Ken as if to say, “You have worse things to worry about than my love life.”
Ken had to admit this was true. But knowing he was hiding from reality in a series of half-inane thoughts didn’t mean he could come back. He had to escape from the skittering, chittering roach children outside, if only for a moment.
Buck was sitting across from Maggie. Like Liz, Hope was asleep or unconscious. Lolling in the big man’s arms. One of her hands trailed down to Sally’s fur, and Ken saw her fingers clench reflexively.
Sally purred. Put his head down.
Aaron and Christopher were in the back of the bus, rooting through something.
“It’s like Christmas,” whispered Christopher.
Aaron looked at the young man. “I worry about you, boy.”
Ken didn’t have the mental capacity to worry about what would excite Christopher. Once the son of Idaho’s governor, the kid had saved them all many times over, usually by finding a way to set something on fire or blow something up – be it something small like a firecracker or something slightly larger like a skyscraper or a passenger jet.
Movement beyond the two men caught Ken’s eye.
The zombies that had almost killed the survivors were still running after them. He couldn’t hear the things’ growl over the thrum of the school bus diesel engine. But he could feel it. Could sense it digging into his mind like a wedge into a split tree trunk, widening a rift to the point where….
What?
What would happen when he split wide open?
He didn’t know.
He saw Derek. He remembered holding his son on a long night when the child had a double ear infection. Little Derek, only three and weeping, asking Daddy to make it stop, make it stop. And Ken held him and rocked him in a dingey second-or third-hand glider chair he and Maggie bought from the Deseret Industries Thrift Store. Singing “Hush, Little Baby” over and over, praying silently to God to take his son’s pain away.
God answered eventually. The next morning they found blood in Derek’s ears and realized his eardrums had burst. No lasting ill effects, but scary as hell to parents who lived and died on their children’s smiles and tears.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word….”
Ken realized he was singing under his breath. He looked at Maggie. She was looking at him. She was crying silently, twin tear-tracks painting platinum lines down her cheeks.
“… Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird….”
He fell silent. The boy-thing behind the bus wasn’t Derek. Not really. It was a liar, a deceiver. A devil come to steal the hope that remained to the survivors.
“… And if that mockingbird won’t sing….”
As if it heard the words, the Derek-thing shrieked. The sound made it through the harsh chug-thug-pant of the bus engine. Piercing the way only a small child’s scream could be. But grating and deep as well. Something under the child’s voice, a thing singularly alien and holding knowledge and evil beyond the grasp of any true child.
Ken felt dirty hearing it. He felt like washing his hands, scrubbing until the flesh bled then washing until the muscle and tendon was gone and only pure white bone remained.
And then washing some more.
Maggie cried out. Despair.
Hope and little Liz did not awake, but both girls moaned. That terrible moan of pleasure-pain. The moan of virtue offered up, of innocence stolen away.
The Derek-thing’s scream ended.
Ken couldn’t go to Maggie, couldn’t sit beside her or even touch her. Sally was in the way, and Ken sensed that the snow leopard’s presence was the only thing keeping the power of Derek’s screams from overwhelming –
(hurting changing stealing)
– his daughters.
Something whined. At first he thought it was another piece of the sound that the zombies were making. Then realized it was coming from the wrong direction. Coming from somewhere ahead of him.
He turned and saw their rescuer – the strangely-masked driver in the full-body armor – holding up a small box that was whining and shrieking.
The box screamed in time with Derek. Its pitch was different, but the thing spoke in syncopation with the thing that had once been his son.
“Who are you?” he said.
The driver put down the box.
Took off the mask.
Ken heard Christopher gasp behind him. “No frickin’ way,” said the kid.
7