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didn’t seem to notice the impossible tremor, simply stabbing another piece of wood through the disintegrating door as though hoping to pin the reaching zombies in place.
    Ken spun.  Picked up a chair.  He swung it as hard as he could.  It went through the office window and kept going, careening through with the pealing crash of glass shearing apart.  The window sailed away.
    “What the hell are you doing?” shouted the gray man, still writhing under his mother on the floor.  “You got glass all over me!”  He was a big man, tall and broad and solidly-built, but he sounded like a spoiled child who had just been told his party was over early.
    A sound came through the now-open space.  Deep.  Thrumming.
    The building rolled again.
    Ken leaned out.  Looked to his right.  His heart sank.
    There was no way to get out.  Nothing to cling to.  No footholds, no handholds.  Just sheer concrete and glass.
    Behind him, the door to the office sounded like it was about to fall apart completely.
    “We gotta do something!” shouted Dorcas.
    Ken looked left.  His heart caught in his throat.
    He looked down.  And his heart stopped .
     

19
     
     
    “You’re kidding.”
    Maggie didn’t scream the words.  Ken almost would have preferred it if she had.  Instead, they came as a whisper when he explained what they were going to do – what they all had to do.
    Boise had been undergoing “improvements” to its downtown area for the last few years – between five and fifty, depending on whether you asked someone who was paying attention, or one of the old-timers who just liked to bitch about things.  Traffic that had once been sparse at all times of the day and night, even in the most crowded parts of the downtown area, had grown congested as it was rerouted to avoid construction areas.  Scaffolding had sprouted like skeletal fungus, protecting construction workers from traffic, and vice versa.
    The Wells Fargo Center they were in had been undergoing some kind of construction.  A crane that was anchored somewhere in the street far below and extended beyond the top floor had been moving house-sized pieces of steel and concrete for weeks.  In the first minutes of the change, the first moments when everything ended, something had blown up at the base of the crane.  It tilted, then slammed into the side of the building.
    Now it was still hung up against the face of the high-rise, slung at a drunken angle as though even the inanimate objects of the old world were in a state of shock about what had happened around them.  The many supports and braces of the tower crawled like a ladder up the side of the building, extending past the top level.
    The bottom was engulfed in smoke, a smoldering fire still barely-visible within the billowing clouds of black.
    The working jib, the long arm of the crane, extended across 9th Street, hanging like a bridge over toward what was left of a ruined building.  Touching, or almost touching….
    “You think we can make it?” said Christopher.
    “We don’t have a lot of choice.” Dorcas looked at the tower, and Ken knew she was wondering what he was: if the crossbars were close enough to jump to from the window.  If someone with one good hand could climb up a good sixty feet, then another hundred feet across the jib, then over to the ruined remains of the One Capital Center.  Assuming the jib even extended it that far.
    And could they make it with children holding on?  Ken knew she was thinking that, too, because her eyes kept flicking over to Derek and Hope.  Not Liz: the baby was still knocked out – he hoped – in the sling on Maggie’s chest.  But the other kids.
    “I… I can’t,” said Maggie.  “I can’t go up.”
    The zombie at the door had its head all the way through.  Its shoulders.  The door was seconds away from cracking in half.
    Ken sighed.  “We have to.”
    “Why can’t we climb down?”
    No one else had seen it yet.  No one else had noticed.
    The