The Colony: Velocity (The Colony, Vol. 4)

by Michaelbrent Collings

  He wondered what had happened to Master Arman. If his old teacher had survived the Change. He hoped so.

  “Be determined through calm.” The swordsman’s words.

  He took what he wanted from the side of the cab.

  Christopher was still screaming.

  Ken felt the calm that he had always sought, the calm that had always eluded him. Not the feeling that everything would work out the way he hoped, but the sudden realization that, live or die, he was trying. That, live or die, everything would turn out the way it should; the way it must.

  Determined through calm.

  Musashi had been a ronin. A samurai whose lord had fallen.

  Ken had no master. His world had fallen, and all that was left were his friends.

  Through calm.

  His family.

  Calm.

  He plucked the cherry red fire extinguisher off the side of the cab. It was held in place by a clamp designed to be stiff enough that the extinguisher wouldn’t come off during the normal jouncing of the machine’s operation.

  In Ken’s –

  (calm)

  – hands it fell open like the arms of a long-lost friend.

  Christopher was still shrieking.

  Ken eschewed the handle or the shell. He pulled the hose assembly, throwing the red canister over his shoulder like some strange scuba gear.

  Then dancing down. Dancing like a swordsman. Like the calm Musashi in his Five Rings, moving from prologue to epilogue. Inevitable start to inescapable end.

  He used his bad hand to grab a bracket similar to the one Theresa was still using. Then he stepped on Christopher’s shoulder. The younger man screamed again, terrified anew at what was happening. But Ken could not help that.

  He was calm.

  This was how it had to be.

  He used his foot to push Christopher back against the side of the thresher, then used the same thrust he had generated to lean forward. The momentum thus created traveled through his foot, his leg, his torso. Velocity increased as it traveled up his arm, then through the hose of the fire extinguisher.

  The canister snaked out, then the forward momentum ended like the crack of a whip, turning forward to down in a tight arc.

  The head of the zombie that had been pulling Christopher toward it disappeared in a spray of blood and bone. The thing danced. But Ken barely noticed the dance as he pushed it away. It was not Musashi’s dance, so he did not care.

  It was not calm, so it did not deserve notice.

  The fire extinguisher exploded as well, the impact separating tubing and handle and canister. It disappeared into the frenzy.

  Ken let it go. He had no need for it.

  The thresher lunged forward as the driver shifted gears.

  The undead were suddenly left behind.

  And all was silent.

  All was…

  … calm.

  44

  It didn’t last.

  Nothing good could last, at least not now, not so soon after the change.

  Perhaps not ever again.

  Ken felt the calm that had captured him suddenly release him. He felt the pain in his back, his leg. The agony sprouting from absent fingers and sending tortured tendrils grinding their way through his left hand and arm.

  He vomited on Christopher’s head.

  It wasn’t much, just a thin gruel of storm water and the power bars that Ken had managed to choke down while lying in a semi-comatose state and then awake for far too short a time in the underground areas of Boise.

  Still, it was enough to wring a shriek out of the younger man.

  “Are you kidding me?” Christopher glared up, then averted his eyes in time to barely avoid getting a faceful of round two. More warm vomitus trailed around his ears and down the back of his shirt. He looked up, squinting to make sure he wasn’t going to get hit a third time, then unleashed a stream of invectives so enraged and inventive that Ken almost smiled.

  Sometimes the universe sends us gifts.

  Sometimes the gift is a calm to get us through an impossible moment.

  Sometimes it is a faceful of puke, and the incredibly hilarious sight of a once-too-handsome-to-be-believed friend trying haplessly to clean himself off one-handed while clinging to a giant tractor that trundles through a dead city.

  Christopher was still screaming, still raging.

  The redheaded Theresa started laughing with Ken. Wheezing “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh” over and over, a phrase that seemed so innocent and out of place beside Christopher’s raging epithets that it just made Ken laugh all the more.

  Another laugh joined theirs. Aaron, the old cowboy hanging off the side of the ladder, the arm threaded through the handrail and one foot on the ladder the only things keeping him on the vehicle. He was laughing so hard that he was crying, tears rolling down his weathered cheeks like streams cutting their way through long-dry beds.

  They had all lost people. Had all found them in horrible ways. Ken sensed that Theresa, too, had been touched by the loss that was felt so keenly and quickly now.

  Of course she has. It’s the World After. Everyone alive has lost someone. The lucky ones haven’t found them again.

  The thought just made Ken laugh all the harder.

  A moment later, Christopher laughed as well.

  Hooting like maniacs, they rode the thresher through Boise.

  45

  The laughter petered out.

  Aaron fell silent first, and Ken saw steel come back into the cowboy’s eyes. He began scanning: left, right, left right. Up, down. Left, right, left, right. Up, down. His eyes moved methodically and without ceasing. The other side of the thresher was a huge blind spot for the time being, but at least on this side nothing would get past the wary eye of the older man.

  Ken looked around as well.

  He saw nothing.

  But he heard a cry. One of terror, one of fear.

  And his heart almost jumped out of his body for happiness.

  He climbed as quickly as he could toward the cabin. The grace and agility that had been endowed upon him like some Heavenly gift were gone, so it seemed to take forever. Forever in which he could bask in the sound.

  It was Lizzie.

  The sound of his daughter, crying. Not the sound of a tiny demon shrieking for help, not the sound of panting, of gasping, of –

  (give up give in)

  – growling that demanded despair. It was just the sound of a little girl hungry and tired and afraid.

  It was music.

  Ken pulled himself to the cabin and was almost hit by the door as it opened. It would have been a sort of cosmic irony, to survive all that he had only to get whacked in the face by the cab door and so thrown off and probably crushed to death by the blood-inked wheels of the thresher.

  He threw himself back, barely missing the acrylic door.

  “Ken!”

  It was Maggie. She didn’t sound panicked. She was happy, he could hear the smile in her voice.

  He clambered in the cab. Not all the way – there wasn’t room – but he poked his head in.

  The toddler stopped crying when he did, and for a wonderful moment he thought it was because she had seen him. Then she giggled and he realized she was being licked rapidly on the nose by Sally. The snow leopard looked like he was grinning, and his huge pink tongue was lapping at Liz like she was a cool drink of water after a too-long thirst.

  Ken felt like he had come home. He would often walk into the house – was it even there anymore? – and hear Liz laughing. Running up, not to him but to his briefcase or his papers or some other thing he carried that had caught her eye. And that was all right; that was the way it should be, in a way. He was her father, and if he was doing his job she shouldn’t feel like he was a rare treat, but rather a permanent and comforting fixture in her life. Not an amusement, but a security blanket with strong arms to wrap around her.

  She didn’t laugh at him, she laughed at Sally. A hand batted out and pun
ched the snow leopard, hitting him right on his truncated ear. Ken’s heart lurched again, this time in fear that that the snow leopard would revert to its wild roots and attack the little girl.

  Sally didn’t seem to register what had to be a painful punch. He just kept licking, lapping, and Lizzy kept laughing.

  Maggie looked at him, smiling. She didn’t say “She’s back, our baby is here again.” She didn’t have to. Ken saw it in her eyes, and it was as loud and clear as if she had written it in hundred-foot letters in the sky.

  Buck looked morose. He was staring at Hope, waiting for her to wake. She slept on. Moaned once, but did not move her body. Still locked in whatever coma or fugue commanded her body during the attack.

  Ken touched Buck’s shoulder. He thought it strange that he, the parent, should be comforting a comparative stranger about the continuing insensibility of his own daughter. But he also knew Buck wasn’t really a stranger. Not anymore. They had all shed blood for one another. They were all family, and that was right, and Buck was worried about this girl in his arms the same way he would worry about a sister, niece, mother, daughter. She was his and he was hers.

  That was right, too.

  The thresher lurched.

  Ken worried for a moment about what new horror that portended.

  Then he realized that the driver had downshifted. Slowing down.

  “We walk from here,” he said. “Or most likely run.”

  46

  Ken saw why the driver stopped: there was another roadblock. A city bus had overturned and spun halfway through a building. It sprawled halfway across the street, blocking too much of it for the thresher to pass.

  Everyone got out quickly. Sally first, leaping down to the asphalt, landing silently. He favored his left front paw, but did not whine or whimper. Just looked around like an advance scout.

  The rest of the survivors piled out. The driver and Theresa came last.

  Theresa hugged the driver, and Ken could tell that whatever he and the others had been through, these two had had similar experiences. Had been bound by pain and death and sacrifice. Family.

  “Where’s Brandon, Elijah?” she said.

  The huge man shook his head. He tried to talk, choked, tried again. “When you were being attacked, he hit them with the RPG.”

  Theresa’s face shone with the dread certainty of someone who knows the end of a terrible story, but cannot help but listen to the whole of it. “He could have run,” she whispered.

  Elijah shook his head. “There wasn’t time, and you know it. And he didn’t know how to drive the –“

  Theresa cut him off with a gesture. She hugged him again. “I know,” she said. Her voice was a harsh whisper. “I know, you dumb bear.”

  Elijah hugged her so tightly Ken thought he could hear Theresa’s ribs creak. Then he released her and Ken could see wetness shining on his face. “Your brother let himself die so we could live,” he said. “Let’s not waste that.”

  Theresa nodded. The harshness came back into her expression, her eyes deadened. She looked at the group.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

  She looked at the still-crying Lizzie and the still-silent Hope as she said this.

  Ken didn’t like the look she gave them.

  47

  The run was blessedly short. Ken could feel the survivors – at least the ones he knew, if not Elijah and Theresa – going slower and slower with each passing yard, foot, inch.

  They had to move around piles of debris, over crashed cars. One time they even had to help one another under a pile-up of construction scaffolding that had formed a weird tunnel that all-but-completely blocked the street. It was strangely beautiful, and Ken couldn’t help but feel like he was being born again as he crawled through one side of the tunnel and came out another.

  They heard the growl. The call to surrender. But it was far, and weak.

  They had time, they had entire minutes. And that seemed better than anything Ken could remember. An eternity of safety. He almost didn’t know what to do with himself.

  Start a new hobby, Ken.

  Build a business, Ken.

  Sail around the world, Ken.

  Figure out what the hell’s going on with your kids, Ken.

  The last was troubling, and impossible to figure out. At least for now. He shelved it.

  They ran around a final series of half-demolished buildings. The structures stood gray and already seemed to be crumbling in the harsh light of the day, an apocalyptic scene that seemed months into the dissolution of society, not mere days.

  How far can we fall? How fast?

  The speed at which everything had crumbled was astonishing. The rot had set in, not merely among the undead, but among the basic structures of life before the Change. Everything was moving too fast. Ken felt like he was on top of an ice floe heading toward a waterfall. Trying to keep upright, trying to balance, trying at the same time to jump to a new location that would no doubt provide footing just as treacherous as the spot he had just abandoned.

  They turned a final corner.

  No more buildings ahead. Just empty space. A long straightaway for a while, more buildings in the distance, but nothing for at least half a mile.

  But Elijah was slowing down.

  “A beauty, ain’t she?” he said.

  Ken didn’t understand. And then he did. He looked at the one thing between them and the next bit of civilization.

  Buck was a bit faster on the uptake. “Are you totally fricking kidding me?” he said. He glanced at Maggie, apparently remembering her giving people an earful over choices of language in front of the kids. She didn’t look back, and Buck looked relieved that “freaking” wasn’t on the forbidden list.

  Elijah nodded. “That’s my baby.”

  Then he turned to face the group. Theresa did, too. And they were both holding guns. Theresa had hers pointed at Buck, and Elijah’s was directly centered on Maggie.

  No, Ken realized. Not at Maggie and Buck.

  They were aiming at Hope and at Lizzie.

  48

  Ken moved. The calm before had been the eye; now he was the hurricane.

  But before he could take more than a step, someone grabbed him. An arm went around his throat, cinching in tight. He felt the hand at the end of the arm clasp something.

  Figure four. A good one.

  The thoughts were automatic. They were also the last ones that were fully-formed and conscious before black threads began weaving across his vision.

  A proper choke hold does not cut off air. Going without air is not a full choke to martial artists. It is suffocation, and suffocation can be endured for seconds or even minutes.

  A choke, a true choke, however, is much more dangerous. It cuts off both air and the passage of blood from heart and lungs to head. It causes the brain to lose oxygen. It causes unconsciousness in seconds. If held longer than ten or twelve seconds it can cause paralysis, brain damage, death.

  Ken saw the black move across his eyes.

  What’s going on? Wazzgoinon?

  He saw Christopher move at him. Saw a boot kick out and catch the young man in the solar plexus, dropping him. Maggie screamed. Buck clearly wanted to move but just as clearly didn’t know what to do while still holding Hope and facing down the barrel of a gun.

  Ken disappeared into black.

  49

  Tok-tok.

  Tok-tok.

  Tok-tok.

  Tok-tok.

  Ken had a Big Wheel trike when he was a kid. He loved the feel of the plastic grips, the streamers his parents bought him and the way they waved behind the grips when he went so fast it felt like he could fly.

  But he especially –

  (Tok-tok.

  Tok-tok.)

  – loved the sound. The big plastic circle at the front going over the seams in the sidewalk cement, followed by the sound of the two smaller back wheels following suit.