Other disasters were occurring in town, smaller in scale but great in impact. A tiny car had been thrown into a building, like a toy from the hands of a great, angry child. It had once been someone's house, but now nothing of it stood, even though its neighbors were less badly smashed. The small vehicle's pilot was killed instantly when a bit of plumbing, driven with the force born of velocity and a solid wall behind, impaled him. It was a sight that Jetta's passenger never wished to see again, and scrambled clumsily to escape. This appeared a businessman of some sort, in a very expensive (and presently ruined) suit. He was handcuffed to a brushed aluminum briefcase. From the moment he escaped his transportation-turned-prison, the sun pained him.
He retrieved a long, stereotypical white lab coat from the crumpled car, then held his baggage above his head as though to shield himself from falling arrows as he ran to the next house. He found it locked and its door unanswered despite his shouts, he continued down the lane, repeating his request at each new door.
In a basement in the center of town, a very frightened disk jockey tried to break into the locked office above him. He could not divine why its doors were locked now, but once their magnets were engaged there was no opening them. He knew something had happened, but in this below-ground restaurant the explosion was more like a mild earthquake. No one else was down here – the place wouldn't have started business until noon, but he liked to sit with his coffee down here anyway.
Normally, it seemed like his domain. BJ thought of this entire building as his, indeed it once had been. Some years ago, in a fit of mismanagement, the city council decided to mortgage its own hall and courthouse. To follow up that clever work, they promptly defaulted on that loan and forced the bank to foreclose. The taxpayers responded, though they managed to restrain themselves from hanging the offenders, and within a year were prepared to buy the structure back. But in the meantime, a small radio station had moved into them – this dome being the tallest building within twenty miles, and build atop a hill no less – and it came cheap. When the city freed its building, they only recovered the first and second floors. The topmost and basement levels remained in private hands.
The citizens promptly reclaimed the food court below, then sentenced it to the neglect common to all public food service institutions. It survived by taxes alone. The radio station on the third floor was another matter. KZOT was instantly popular upon its debut, so closing it was not an option. Instead the council cleverly invented the elected position of “Disk Jockey.” This had very little effect accept to increase BJ's popularity. Now, he was the representative of the people. Now he had to, by law, play what they wanted to hear – so he could play nearly anything and they would assume someone out there liked it.
But this basement, with its glowing red emergency lighting was not freeing at all. The commercial break was long over. His coffee grew cold. In frustration, he took to pounding on the locked door with a broom handle. The dull thuds were echoes of the earthquake that had shut him in.
The moment Lou and Ursula stepped away from that broken body and turned their backs on it, Amy let out another of her increasingly-characteristic shrieks. Ursula whirled around, while Lou looked at Amy for a moment. Her arm was stiff in front of her, and her mouth wide open. The discussion around Joseph's olive-drab bag was suddenly ceased. Mrs. Sprucesat was moving.
She was not alive, mind you, living people do not move in that way. Her arms held her up, her legs dragged along behind. She looked something like a runner, crouched and waiting for the gun, except her legs sometimes kicked uselessly. Perhaps they were trying to run, commanded by some separate impulse. Her toothless mouth – evidently she wore dentures which lacked holding power – opened and closed as though it was chewing something. The broken body, its spine fractured and its torso hanging, charged at the fragile-looking woman before it. Lou had spun about by this time, and was moving. He was a man of the wilderness, and knew on instinct when a predator was about to pounce. This was no longer the corpse of an elderly, friendly woman who worked behind the jewelry counter. It was some deformed monster, and it was attacking. More frightening that its locomotion was the thing's eyes. They were clouded over, like those of a corpse would be, but their pupils burned a reddish-orange.
He stepped forward like a batter to the plate and kicked its head. The skull came loose and flew beyond the low remains of a wall. The torso continued its attack, though, for a moment. Its legs nearly forced it upright. Then it stopped moving. It was still. In its resting place, the burning pupils were extinguished.
A moment later, a shotgun roared, tearing the body apart and scattering tiny chunks across the ground before the stunned survivors. Five pairs of eyes glared at the offending shooter. When Lou kicked it, it was a monster. Once stilled, it turned back into a human's corpse.
“What? It attacked the girl! Y'all seen it! I had to shoot it!”
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