The Colony: Renegades (The Colony, Vol. 2)

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Hope didn’t answer.

  He spared a glance at her. She was staring up at nothing.

  He didn’t know what to do for her. She hadn’t been bitten. She couldn’t have been. If she had been bitten, she would have changed already. She wouldn’t be Hope, she would be dead and gone, just a corpse that hadn’t been buried.

  But something was happening to her.

  And there’s nothing you can do about it now. So just move.

  He dropped through infinity. Wondering if his descent would ever end, or if the change that had come over the earth had also changed the elevator shaft. What if it went on forever? What if it just kept going until Ken and the rest of the survivors found themselves in the deepest pits of Hell?

  We’re already there.

  And there was truth in that.

  Derek was gone, after all. His son was gone. His wife was somewhere beyond his reach, his baby girl with her.

  And his daughter… what was happening to Hope?

  She was cooing again. And he felt something in the cable. A shiver. A tremble.

  “Guys.” Christopher’s voice floated down from above, the tones of a strangely lighthearted oracle. “We should hurry.”

  And the way he said it told Ken why Hope was cooing. She had sensed it before anyone.

  The zombies had bridged to the cable again. And there was no way to knock more debris down on them.

  The vibrations in the cable became more pronounced, and it wasn’t hard for Ken to imagine the hands and feet gripping the metal fibers, slipping down hand over hand. Skinless fingers feeling their way down in the dark, questing for helpless prey.

  “Faster,” someone whispered from above. Ken couldn’t tell who it was.

  He opened his grip on the cable. Opened it until he was nearly falling. Preferring to die on impact than be captured by the things above him.

  The air whipped past his ears, whistling and whining.

  But it couldn’t hide the sound of growls above.

  Or the sound of his daughter sighing and giggling in his arms.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yessssss.”

  56

  Ken hit something. His left foot hit first, and a bolt of pain seared through his toes, his ankle, his shin, his thigh bone. His hip almost buckled under him.

  He had fallen too many times today. He had twisted his back. He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but there was something going wrong inside him.

  He stumbled back, off-balance.

  It registered – albeit dimly – that there was something to stumble back on. That he was on some kind of flooring. Terra firma.

  Then his heel collided with something hard. His left heel, of course. New pain rocketed up to his back. He screamed.

  Hope giggled.

  He realized he had let go of the elevator cable. He probably would have let go of Hope, too, if she hadn’t been more or less attached to him with his belt.

  He tripped over whatever it was, falling backward in a series of jumbled half-steps that took him away from the cable, away from the only tether he had had on location or direction.

  His right foot went behind him, a reverse lunge step. Too far for comfort, and the agony in his back increased.

  His foot came down on nothing. Nothing at all. Just dark, empty air.

  Ken had a panicked moment to wonder what was happening. A terrified instant to realize that he must have reached the bottom of the elevator cable. To then understand that the logical thing at the bottom of an elevator cable would be the elevator itself.

  And that he was about to fall off the side of it.

  Hope clapped gleefully in the dark. Laughing as Ken pitched into nothing.

  57

  The fall was short.

  Less than a few inches. And it came with a tearing sound.

  Someone grunted.

  “Help me, you idiot.”

  Ken didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t one of the survivors, one of his people.

  Then he saw the form in the darkness, huge and black. Fear rippled through him for a moment, joining the pain in his back and leg and creating a strangely discordant harmony of terror and agony.

  “Help… me….”

  Ken felt himself slipping backward. Downward. The dark figure moved toward him.

  He finally realized who it was. It was Buck. The big man had caught Ken’s shirt sleeve. The shirt – the ridiculous long-sleeve thing that said “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP).” that Ken had gotten from a dead man – was not designed to bear a person’s body weight, and it was tearing. He could hear it ripping at the seams, pulling away from him.

  And then what?

  Ken grabbed for Buck’s shaded form. The other man grunted as Ken accidentally flailed and hit him a half-dozen times before finally managing to get a good grip on his arm. Buck backed up slowly, and Ken felt himself drawn back to the top of the elevator car.

  He made it all of two steps before kicking something else and tripping. At least this time he tripped forward.

  “Jesus,” snapped Buck. “Can’t you stand up straight?”

  “Sorry,” Ken mumbled. Then he screamed as pain lanced through his ankle. Not nerve pain, not whatever was wrong with his back and left leg. In fact, this wasn’t his left leg at all.

  It was his right leg. His right ankle.

  He looked down.

  And screamed again. Not merely in pain, not merely in horror. This time it was revulsion and a sense that right and wrong had abandoned themselves, that madness reigned supreme.

  The zombies that had bridged to the cable had been shattered. They had been broken. But they had not been destroyed. And the proof was all around him. The proof was at his feet. The proof held tight to his foot.

  A hand had somehow grabbed his ankle. The hand led to a forearm, but the forearm did not in turn lead to anything else. It simply ended.

  Ken flashed to watching Thing on reruns of The Addams Family. The disembodied hand skittered around and caused mischief wherever it went. A ridiculous sight gag made even more ridiculous by what passed for special effects back then.

  But what held onto Ken’s leg was no special effect. It was real. And holding so tightly he could already feel his foot going numb. Blood started to seep around the hand as the pressure of the grip started to shear Ken’s skin away from his flesh.

  His knees buckled and he almost went down. Stopped himself.

  Next to him was a head. A still-moving head. Eyes staring in rage. Mouth opening and closing.

  What if he had fallen on it?

  What if it bit him?

  He reeled back. Felt gorge rising in his throat.

  Buck grunted. He shuffled forward and punted the decapitated head like a football, kicking it off the side of the elevator before kneeling next to Ken and ripping the hand away in one brute motion. Ken yelled as the hand tore more skin from his already-lacerated flesh.

  “Come on,” said Buck.

  Ken nodded. Tried not to notice how much of the top of the elevator was moving.

  Failed.

  58

  Ken only took a single step before he asked, “Where’s Maggie?”

  “Who’s Maggie?”

  A double-thud interrupted them. Ken saw two bodies, nearly intertwined, land on the elevator. Dorcas and Aaron. The cowboy still had his arm around Dorcas, and seemed hesitant to let go of her even when they had both feet on the solid platform of the elevator.

  “Move, move, move!”

  The light grew brighter around them. Ken looked up.

  Christopher was a few feet above. Coming down fast.

  And behind him, it looked like the darkness itself had come alive.

  59

  Ken had seen Christopher climb through places he would have thought were inaccessible. The kid was a born daredevil, a combination of adrenaline junky and natural ability.

  But he was losing ground to the teeming mass of things that cla
mbered over each other as they climbed down the cable behind him.

  Ken looked at Buck. Even in the dim light of Christopher’s flashlight, he could see the big man pale visibly.

  “Come on,” said Buck.

  He yanked Ken – still stumbling – over the uneven mass of machinery and broken cables that comprised the top of the elevator car. And now that the light had grown a bit brighter, Ken could also see how close he had come to pitching off the side and into nothing. They were nowhere near the bottom of the shaft. It had to be at least another five or six floors to the ground, and who knew what that would even look like?

  Buck had saved him.

  And now the big man was leading him to a dark gap in the top of the elevator.

  “Emergency hatch,” said Buck, seeming to key off Ken’s look.

  Ken hesitated. When a horde of monsters was on your trail, going into a windowless box didn’t seem like the wisest course.

  “Get in,” said Buck.

  “Are you nuts?” said Aaron behind them.

  Ken looked over his shoulder. The cowboy was casting about, looking for alternate escape routes.

  “There’s nowhere else,” said Buck. His voice rose to a screech, half pleading, half enraged. Then he shook his head as though resigned. “Fine, do what you want.”

  He moved to the hatch and squatted beside it. Then looked at Ken. “But your wife is in here.”

  Then he dropped down and disappeared into the black square.

  60

  Ken’s feet started moving the second he heard Buck say Maggie was in the elevator. It didn’t even occur to him that the man might be lying. Not until he was bent over the darkness, looking down and wondering what the best way would be to get in.

  Alive. She’s alive.

  He sat on the edge of the hatchway, dangling his legs into darkness. Even knowing Mags was down there, it made his skin crawl to see himself disappear so suddenly and completely.

  We’re all going to die.

  Unless we give up.

  Give in.

  Ken realized that he was hearing the growling from the things above. That his thoughts were somehow being coopted by the zombies’ hypnotic howls and rumbles. But it didn’t matter.

  He didn’t want to go down there. Not into the darker dark. Not now.

  Give up.

  He felt something warm at his cheek. Hope had laid her head on his chest, looking up at him – or at the things coming down the cable – and she was moaning, her breath warm on his face. An unnerving smile on her small features. She looked sad and hungry and hopeful and gleeful and afraid all at once.

  “Dammit.”

  Ken saw Aaron kick something over the side of the elevator. A twitching thing that could have been an arm or a leg and that in any just and right world should not have moved at all. The cowboy turned to look at Dorcas, who was staring at him.

  “Buck was right. Nowhere else to go.”

  “I don’t want to –“ Dorcas began.

  Aaron shook his head. Looked up, then grabbed her around the shoulders and hustled her the few steps across the top of the elevator.

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  Give up.

  Give in.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  The elevator shook as Christopher touched down.

  Ken pushed himself off the edge of the hatchway. He fell into darkness once more. Landed and took a stumbling step away, thinking dimly that he had to get out of the way before the others came in.

  He was right. He barely moved out of the way before another black figure came into the cab. The form didn’t fall, but was lowered by one arm. Dorcas.

  Aaron followed, jumping easily to the floor, his cowboy boots thudding as he landed.

  Only Christopher left. And as the young man started to lower himself in Ken realized:

  Who would close the escape door? It wouldn’t do much good to run in here and then leave a clear opening for the things to follow.

  “Wait –“ he began.

  Too late.

  Christopher dropped in with a grunt. A thick clunk followed him almost instantly: the sound of metal clacking against metal, of wood and plastic bouncing up and then settling down again just as fast.

  He pulled it shut. He pulled the hatch shut.

  Ken didn’t feel like rejoicing, though. Because the things that were following the young man had already shown an ability to get through doors. What about closed hatches?

  Was it even locked?

  Christopher landed in a crouch, still holding Buck’s LED light. He straightened and turned around quickly, illuminating the other survivors.

  And Ken finally saw Maggie. She stood beside the closed doors of the elevator, leaning over and around the still-slumped form of Liz. The toddler’s skin looked pale and waxy, and Ken feared the worst. Then he saw a thin stream of spit spill out of his baby’s mouth, catching the light for an instant before it broke off and hit the floor.

  He’d never been so happy to see one of his children drooling. Because the dead didn’t produce saliva, did they?

  “Maggie,” he said. He supposed he should have shouted it, should have screamed it and leaped across the cab to her. But the word was barely a whisper, and he didn’t move at all.

  He was afraid she wasn’t real.

  He was afraid he was seeing, not a woman, but a memory. A hope of something gone.

  Maggie turned her head. She didn’t look happy to see him; barely looked at him at all. She looked at Buck. “It won’t open,” she said.

  “Maggie.” This time he said it a little louder. He managed to take a step toward her, and reached for her.

  “Don’t touch me.” She didn’t scream. A scream would have been better. A scream would have splashed all over the inside of the elevator, would have hit everything and everyone and maybe spread some of the venom around. Instead, the words seemed to hit Ken square in the face. He felt like he’d been punched, or like someone had taken a hammer to the bridge of his nose.

  Total silence reigned. No one seemed to breathe, as though all that had come before was merely a precursor, a curtain call to this main event.

  Ken knew what was happening. You didn’t stay happily married for as long as he had without understanding your spouse. You didn’t understand your spouse without seeing the things they loved. And you didn’t see the things they loved without understanding their deepest fears.

  She had seen Derek fall.

  She had seen Derek change.

  And it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been Ken’s fault. That there was nothing he could have done. That Derek had done it himself in a stunning display of selfless courage. She couldn’t blame Derek for what had happened. You didn’t blame the hero for the loss. And the girls… too young to bear responsibility for what happened to Derek.

  So that left Ken.

  He wondered for a moment if his marriage was over. If the Armageddon that had killed so much of the world had also murdered his marriage. And wondered if that would render his life worthless. So much of who he now was began with the words husband and father.

  What if half of that was gone?

  Maggie’s face was phasing through a series of emotions, none of them good. Distrust, anger, confusion, fear, sorrow. All of them seeming like sharp knives cast directly at him.

  Then Maggie seemed to notice Hope. The little girl was still keening. Almost singing wordlessly from her perch on Ken’s chest. Reaching toward the ceiling, staring up with fever-bright eyes that did not notice or did not care to see her mother only a few short feet away.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Maggie said. It was almost a whimper, the venom gone from her voice as fast as it had come. Now there was only fear. Terror that bit as deeply and painfully as had the hate.

  “I don’t know.” His words sounded empty. Sounded like the worst kind of lie: the truth of helpless despair.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  Ken stepped
toward Maggie. He felt like if he could hold her, could even touch her hand, they could fix this. They could get through this.

  He knew they could survive as long as the family remained. Derek was gone, but they could endure. The family could ride out the storm.

  Something hit the top of the elevator. Then something else. Then the whole cab shook as what sounded like a hundred feet pounded across the ceiling.

  A moment later, the strange sucking noises Ken had heard before oozed their way into the elevator, and thumps and thuds resounded through the walls of the suspended cage that had become their world.

  And then noises came through the floor.

  The things were crawling on the walls. Everywhere. Above, below, around them.

  Something coughed outside the elevator. A gagging, choking noise that made Ken’s hackles rise, because he knew what it meant.

  Smoke started seeping in through one of the corners of the elevator where the back wall met the ceiling.

  Something else coughed. More smoke, this time coming from the floor.

  “They’re gonna burn their way in,” said Dorcas.

  “Or just burn us,” said Christopher.

  61

  Buck was on the door in an instant. “Move!” he yelled. He shoved Maggie out of the way, and Ken saw Liz’s head snap to the side as his wife was pushed with her oh-so-precious cargo.

  “Hey!” shouted Ken. He jumped at Buck. Not really knowing what he was going to do, only knowing that the man had lain hands on his wife, had bounced his baby girl around like she was less important than a sack of flour.

  He thought he might be able to kill the man. He wondered for an instant if the only monsters were the ones outside the elevator.

  The floor lurched. Not just a little, either. Ken’s feet almost went out from under him as the world suddenly tilted to the right, to the left. Then dropped a good six inches.