Renegades by Michaelbrent Collings Page A

Ken.  Move, dammit!
    He knew that to stay would be to die.  The things were reaching out.  Grappling half-blindly in the ever-darkening stillness of the long coffin-shaft.  Perhaps ten feet above where he and Hope and Dorcas hung, perhaps another seven or eight feet away from the cable.  Only a few feet, only a few moments.
    But he was frozen.  Frozen by the sight of the monsters that were coming for him.  By the things that were happening all around him.  By his wounds.  By his exhaustion, his hunger, his thirst.
    Most of all by his daughter, his Hope, reaching for the beasts.
    “ Go. ”
    Ken didn’t know whether he was the one who said it, or if it was Dorcas urging him on.  He didn’t know if it really mattered, either.  He didn’t see how they could possibly outrace creatures willing to slice themselves to ribbons and able to stick to featureless walls.
    Then he felt Hope’s heartbeat.  She was reaching for the things above them.  Reaching, growling, groaning, almost moaning in what sounded like pleasure.
    But he felt her heartbeat.  He remembered holding her for the first time.  Barely bigger than his hand and still trailing the lifeline to her mother.  Cupping her in his palm and feeling the hummingbird-pulse of her heart as she screamed at a new and terrifying world.  Feeling the softness of her skin and whispering to her that he loved her and he would be her daddy forever and he would protect her because that was his job and that was what daddies did.
    He couldn’t give up.
    He began to lower himself again.
    Looked down.
    And stopped.
    Another pulsing bridge of bodies had extended out over the emptiness just below them.  This one even closer to the cable, the leading edge of the zombies just inches away from grabbing the thick tether.
    There was nowhere for Ken and Dorcas and Hope to go.
    They were trapped.
     

49
     
     
    The things had been silent before.
    Now, inches away from completing the span of flesh that would enable them to reach their prey, Ken could hear them again.  Sniffling, grunting.
    Growling.  Always that same growl, that same wheezing noise that invited listeners to come to them.  To give up.  Give in.
    To die .
    He wanted to.  Wanted to let go.  To let it end.
    Suspected it was already over.  Even if he hadn’t accepted that fact yet.
    Certainly Hope seemed to want the end.  She strained for the things above them, reaching up like a supplicant at the many feet of a throbbing, wheezing god made flesh.
    Then she noticed the things below.  She cooed.  Cooed , like she was a baby again and had just received a shiny new toy, or had just seen her mother after a long absence.  And then she was reaching not up, but down .
    More appropriate, Ken thought, because if this was some strange god, then surely it was a god of darkness, of abyssal regions too black to contemplate.
    The mass below them was larger than the one above.  It was impossible to tell how many of the zombies were clinging to the side wall of the elevator shaft, and to each other.  Ken couldn’t tell where each ended, where each began.  There was just a massive agglomeration of oozing arms and legs, of dripping trunks and heads partially covered by black, cancerous growths.
    He couldn’t see individual monsters.
    But he did see the hand that reached out and grabbed the cable.
    Surprisingly, the thing didn’t haul itself onto the line.  Didn’t pull itself up to where Ken and Hope and Dorcas waited, easy spoils.
    It just held.
    And Ken realized that the thing didn’t want to grab them itself.  That wasn’t its job.  It wasn’t its place.
    Ken looked at the bridge of bodies.  Saw a half-dozen things scampering across the span.  And knew that these were the hunters.  The killers.  The beasts that would end his life. 
    Half would go up to kill him and Dorcas and Aaron and Christopher.
    The others would go down and finish Maggie and Liz and Buck.
    The things were not only working together now,