Chapter 10: Home

 

The silence in the atrium is gut-wrenching. All eyes are on the barricades as desiccated fingers and broken nails scrabble and grope at the wood, the chittering of the undead climbing the walls akin to the chirp of so many insects. The hellish grating and scraping reminds Jarod of what an old man’s final breath might sound like, scratchy and coarse. A death rattle. It may as well be the Hive’s.

The first zombie clears the top of the barricade, then jerks unsteadily as it spills over and topples into the atrium, slamming against the tile. Bones break, and it stays still for a moment until some unholy fervor brings it to its feet, shambling along on ruined ankles. More zombies come over the top, falling and crashing into the atrium, hands outstretched, mouths slavering with spittle and ichor. Their baying seems to have stopped.

It seems as if every resident in the atrium can only look on in stunned terror, Jarod included. He uses what’s left of his wits and presence of mind to holster the gun again. Firing it in the atrium to save Robbie would have gone badly in itself, but firing in the midst of this, when the dead are pouring into the Hive itself? The carnage would be unprecedented.

A dozen of the things are in the atrium now, shambling or dragging themselves towards the center with their ruined bodies, smearing the dusty tile with blackened blood and fallen pieces of decaying matter. Their hands reach for the far wall, their glassy eyes focused on the boy bound in chains.

They’re coming for him.

“Finish him,” someone in the crowd says, their voice shaking. “Kill him and this is over.”

With shaking hands the hunter digs his knife further into Robbie’s throat, heavily enough that the flesh and the cartilage can’t mend fast enough. Blood burbles at Robbie’s mouth as he screams. As if in answer, one of the zombies throws its horrible head back and howls. The others pick up the call, and from outside, more dead, dry voices answer. The barricades start shaking anew.

“Stop this now,” Esther cries. The hunter with the knife looks about him uncertainly, the crowd around him restless, drawing into a tight huddle in the center of the atrium. The vengeance has drained from their bodies, leaving only terror. If they’re so afraid, why don’t they do something to help the Hive survive? Why don’t they fight?

Tyler’s voice cuts across the atrium, as if in answer. “What are you all doing? Fight them off.”

Jarod grips his golf club, meaning to break into a charge, but Gabriel holds him back. “Too many,” he says. “Let them come to us.” Jarod nods. Gabriel brandishes his bat, then stands at the ready.

But the fight doesn’t come to them. The zombies already in the atrium stir to the sound of Robbie’s agonized screaming, and they make a mad dash for the wall. Their sudden burst of speed takes the residents by surprise, and six, seven are cut down as dead claws scythe through their ranks.

Some of the zombies break off from the charge to feed on the fallen, fresh screams of pain and terror ringing through the atrium as their teeth sink into warm flesh. Jarod swallows his heart as it threatens to fight out of his throat. This is how it starts. It’s also how it ends.

“We can’t just let them die,” Jarod says, and he springs forth, smashing his golf club into one of the feeders. The thing falls to the side, its head cracking open as it hits the floor.

Even then it’s too late. The woman on the ground, an engineer, wails as she clutches her leg, the open wound on her shin black with Paragon’s ichor. Maybe it’ll take five minutes, maybe it’ll take more, but soon she’ll be on her back shaking as the life and blood leaks out of her, as the plague takes hold of her body, like a parasite slipping into its new host. Her insides will streak the atrium, and she’ll rise reborn, no longer human.

Her eyes flit from her wound, then up to meet Jarod’s gaze. Huge tears spill down her cheeks as she blubbers. “Kill me,” she wails. “I’m going to turn. Just kill me.”

It’s something Jarod never thought he would have to do, and with a macabre sort of relief he exhales when he catches the flash of metal singing straight for the woman’s neck. Her hair billows as it’s ruffled by the wind brought by the strike, flowing gracefully when her head topples off her body and rolls onto the floor.

Magpie slices her new blade against the ground, half, it seems, in an attempt at shaking the blood off, but half in fury. Her eyes are red, wet.

“I’m sorry,” Jarod says.

“Don’t be. It was the only thing to do.” Magpie’s lips are dry and chapped, her voice cracking when she parts them to speak.

No water left from the river, none to drink or even clean the atrium once this is done. But as Jarod scans the mall, the grim understanding dawns. None of that matters. This might be it. This might be the fight that they don’t win. The one nobody survives.

Magpie dashes across the atrium, joining Tyler as he fights a losing battle. Daniel is nowhere in sight. One of the Esthers is at the opposite end of the floor, another by Jarod’s side, a third closer to the breach, each fighting with whatever loose boards or tools they’ve scraped off the ground or culled from the dead. No place for subtlety, no time for modesty.

He grips his golf club and grits his teeth, driving his weapon full into the mouth of another oncoming zombie. Not a few feet away Gabriel acts as his mirror, swatting and smashing in the opposite direction, fighting the swelling tide of undead pouring in both over the barricades and through the breach.

The banging on the wall comes to a head and the wood splits apart in a shower of dust and splinters. A breach opens, but instead of shambling and jerking, the dead things from outside break into a run, swarming directly for the wall. Like the others their hands are lifted out, not in hunger, but as if reaching for the boy who would rightly be called their maker. Their eyes are focused on him, no longer so dull as before, but now filled with unholy fire, fear, something that could almost be similar to the adoration with which a child gazes upon his father.

The wind blows in through the gap in the barricades, bringing with it the stench of the city, the smell of undeath. The last time this happened the wind brought the Hive its most horrible visitors, the strongest zombies the colony had ever faced. With a shudder Jarod realizes that the strongest of them all is already inside, and he’s the very reason that the atrium has exploded into chaos.

“Is he doing this?” Gabriel calls out. “Is he controlling them somehow?”

“I don’t know,” Jarod shouts. He glances over, wondering how Robbie can even do any of this, how he might even muster any control when twin spikes are slicing at his palms, when a knife is digging its way into his neck.

It’s when Jarod understands that he’s worried, that he’s quietly hoping Robbie survives this somehow. Maybe he was right all along, and he’s changed, no longer that feral creature Jarod met the night of the outbreak. Then he was telling the truth about the horde. When he’s hurt, they feel it, and they come. And when they do –

Even amid the screams of the dying, one wail rises above them all, casting grotesque ripples through Jarod’s skin and flesh. The hunter, the one with the knife. He’s dropped it, and he’s gazing down. Not at the weapon, but at the hand that’s thrust its way through his back and out his stomach. Other zombies pull at his entrails as he shrieks on, his insides spilling out of the gash they tear into his torso. The horde knows, a collective brain, and the horde hurts those that have hurt its master.

Beside him, on his knees, the engineer who brought the chains is clutching at his face, or what’s left of it. His cheeks are torn ragged, deep enough that rows of his teeth show through. The dead mill about him, tearing at his skin and flesh, ripping into him with a fervor and utter recklessness that Jarod has never seen, not in the zombies, not in anything. Even wild animals know to stop hurting something when it’s dead.

And above them all, splayed across the wall like their maker and messiah, Robbie slumps unmoving and unmoved, his hair a matted corona of gore, blood spattered and spilled down his temples, at his throat, down the holes in the palms of his hands. At his feet his children ravage more of the living, drowning the tile in blood and meat, ripping, tearing, chewing.

They gaze up at the boy expectantly, as if waiting for him to answer, to approve of their massacre. One of the dead things nuzzles at his shin, rubbing the ruined mass of its face against it, dead gray cheeks against the perfect suppleness of living skin. But Robbie doesn’t move.

Dead. Finally, truly dead, or only unconscious – except that it hasn’t helped at all. They guessed correctly. Dealing with Robbie has done nothing to stem the tide of the undead, more and more of them pouring in through the gap, their numbers thoroughly overwhelming the living.

Jarod stumbles, then gazes blearily around him, some part of his brain still disbelieving that they’ve already lost, still ignoring how many have died. The tiles of the atrium, slick with blood, could almost be like the tiled laboratories at the Vertex facility, the same place where Robbie died his first death, where he was born a second time. All around them corpses are leaking into the ground. Some of them begin to shudder, reentering the world to the motions of Paragon’s hideous dance.

“We need to go,” Gabriel says. “Now.”

Tired. Thirsty. Frightened. Jarod lowers his hand, letting the club trail across the floor. He studies Gabriel’s face, then laughs, the sort of chuckle he expects to hear from a madman. “Where?” His voice trails off, nothing but a whisper. “Where could we possibly go?”

“Fall back,” Tyler screams. “Fall back.”

It’s an order he has never had to issue. The living are hopelessly overwhelmed, crushed under the deluge of the undead, so many rotted bodies rushing to fill empty space like so much corrupted water. It’s alarming to see how empty the Hive really is, and how the coming of the horde is like a flood sweeping across a plain, cleansing, culling the weak.

Only the strongest survive. Wasn’t that what Hargrove said, when Jarod found him on the rooftop? When the man who isn’t a man blinked into existence just behind him, to tell Jarod things that only broke his resolve, to taunt him?

They rush up the stairs, whoever remains, the last survivors. It’s small comfort that Jarod recognizes his friends among those faces when so many have been slaughtered. There were some sixty of them before this all started, a little piece of society, a morsel of civilization. Now, nothing.

He risks a look back. From the top of the stairs it’s clear that the mall has descended into carnage and butchery, the atrium glistening and red like an abattoir, or the sacrificial altar of some hungry god. The air rips with the sound of skin and flesh tearing, of living men and women screaming as they’re torn apart. That’s all they are once you come down to it. Just meat. Shanks and chops and hunks. All the same underneath, soft, weak. The same red insides, the same organs and bones. Just meat.

Tyler growls as he lashes out with his machete, then kicks a headless zombie down the stairs. They’re following. They can keep ascending if they want, but there’s no stopping the dead now. If they can climb walls, stairs are nothing but a temporary obstacle.

“Hurry,” Magpie says, ushering Esther up the stairs. Her copies are nowhere to be found. Her clothes are spattered with blood, her face streaked with tears.

As they reach the second floor, Tyler and Magpie bolt the gate behind them, the one she installed specifically for this purpose. If anyone’s left alive down there, they’ll have no chance of making it up. Jarod almost laughs. Nothing survived down there.

“We should have retreated earlier,” Magpie says.

Tyler rakes at his hair in frustration, his knuckles white around the shaft of his machete. “How could we have known?”

“We couldn’t,” Gabriel says in a hush. “We didn’t. We didn’t know.”

“Gather what you can,” Magpie orders. “All of you. Then we leave.”

“How?” Jarod shakes his head. “Where?”

“The salon.” Esther’s voice sounds like it’s piping from somewhere far away. “Ladder escape.” Her eyes are focused on the atrium below, on the bodies and broken things that were once her charges, her children.

“The kids,” Daniel mutters. He looks around, like he’s only just seeing for the first time. “Where are the kids?”

Jarod’s stomach churns as he looks further up the stairwell. The landings above them are already slick with blood. It happened when they weren’t looking. The dead knew where to go. They knew, somehow, and the weakest, the littlest of the Hive were some of the first to fall.

“No,” Daniel whimpers.

“Not now.” Tyler grabs him, crushing him in his arms. “Please, Danny.”

“No,” he whimpers again, this one louder, drawn out, and he falls to his knees. Tyler reaches for him, but at once Daniel’s body seems to be as heavy as stone. Palms planted in the ground, he heaves, sick with grief, sick all over the tile.

“We failed them.” It’s wrong to see Esther like this, her face sallow, the light in her eyes extinguished, none of the hardened strength Jarod once feared, and once knew.

“We didn’t know it would come to this, Esther.” He lays a hand on hers. “We didn’t know.”

Something shambles at the top of the landing.

“We failed them all.”

The figure on the stairs clambers down clumsily, drenched in gore. Daniel wriggles away, and Tyler’s hands shoot out and clamp over his mouth to stifle his voice. Magpie stumbles back, her shoulders sloped, and Gabriel’s grip goes weak. And Esther, Esther weeps.

The dead thing comes closer, eyes that once filled with wonder at the sight of the Hive’s greatest heroes now only glassy and dull. It stretches up a hand, slender and still caked with blood. It hisses in a voice that only small lungs can make, lips drawing back, tiny teeth gleaming bright red. The child shambles forward, ichor spilling down her chin.

Jarod bites back his tears. He holds up his golf club, then steps forward.