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reached for him.
    The thing was
airborne again.  Floating like ash, but mobile.  Dangerous.  Too fast.
    Ken shrank back.
    The thing darted
toward him like a torpedo, and then seemed to change direction at the last
second.  Something grazed Ken’s cheek.  He felt blood slick his face, and
didn’t know if it was his or the dead thing’s.
    Then the child hit
the ground.
    Ken looked up. 
Dorcas was laying on top of it.  She had tackled it in midair, tumbling with it
to the ground.  The thing was pinned under her greater mass, but still Ken
could hear its teeth snapping together as it tried to bite her.
    Aaron stepped
forward.  He had pulled a piece of metal from one of the broken tray tables and
was holding it like a short javelin.  He half kicked Dorcas away from the boy,
then slammed the metal through the back of the child’s small neck, pinning it
to the floor.  The thing trembled, its fingers spasmed.  Its legs kicked, once
each, though not at the same time.
    All in silence.
    Then it was
motionless.  But only for a moment.  Then its fingers began twitching.  Slowly,
as though it was figuring out how to use them again.  They opened and closed,
curled and uncurled.  The unsure movements of a stroke recovery victim.
    “Get on up, lady,”
said Aaron, helping Dorcas to her feet.  She stood.  Then hollered.
    The dead father had
finally flipped himself around.  Half a man, but half a man was enough in this
situation.  It had crawled forward during the scuffle with its once-son, trailing
a long hose of intestine, like a man knit of too-loose thread, destined to
slowly unravel.
    Ken thought that
strangely appropriate.
    The thing had
grabbed Dorcas’ ankle.
    It bit down.

  16
     
     
    “ No! ”
    Aaron had gone
crazy before.  When he had been touched by acid in the elevator, a thin trickle
that burned a line of third-degree flesh down the length of his left arm, Ken
had thought he would never see anything more terrifying that still managed to
be human.
    He was wrong.
    The cowboy’s face
twisted in a way Ken had never seen.  He didn’t know a person could look
like that.  Aaron had said he was a rodeo clown.  But had hinted at something
else in his past.  Something darker, and infinitely more dangerous.
    In his face,
already wrinkled by long years in the sun, already stained by soot and grime,
Ken thought he now caught glimpses of sun in alien places, of dirt that could
never be washed away.  Aaron’s face was not that of a man, not that of an
animal.  It was that of a machine, programmed to do only one thing.
    Ken realized the
cowboy’s face looked a lot like the face of the zombies.
    “NO!” the older man
shrieked again.  He brought his foot down on the head of the half-man that was
gnawing on Dorcas’ foot.  Dorcas’ own scream disappeared in the thundering rage
of the cowboy’s roar.  Then disappeared again in the dull thud-crunch of a boot
slamming through hair and bone and brain and bone again before coming to rest
on buckled carpet.
    The half-thing
began twitching.  Frenzied tremors rippled through its body as the chaos that
took control of these things whenever their brains were damaged seized it.  Its
fingers curled back on themselves, then one hand reached straight into the air
as though the headless, legless torso were trying to pull itself erect.  The
other dug deep into its abdomen and began pulling soft tissue from its body.
    Aaron didn’t even
notice.  His cowboy boots kept pounding down, slamming into the thing’s head –
where the head had been – over and over and over until what had been
brain and bone and blood was little more than a gritty stain on the warped
floor.
    The father-thing
never made a sound.
    The son-thing,
moving a bit more with every passing second, never wailed.
    The mother-thing
kept trying to pull herself free a few rows back.  But mutely.  Mouth opening
and closing in silent screams, airless breaths.
    Aaron kept grinding
the paste under his