Finally it came to me. “What happened to my mom?”
He stopped abruptly, hands frozen in mid-motion. “That was a long time ago,” he said softly. “This is what matters today.”
He stood and went to the door of the tent. Outside, the sounds of the camp filtered through the slit in the heavy canvas. He pulled the flap shut and returned to my cot, and his eyes flashed like hot embers on a dying fire. “You have to understand something, Querry,” he said in a fierce undertone. “Everything around you is a relic from a world that’s disappeared. The trucks, the tents, the weapons. The uniform on your back is the uniform one of them wore, half a century ago, when their armies marched in the millions to destroy each other. They damn near succeeded. They sucked the place dry, bombed it to pieces, and left us with . . . this.” His gesture took in everything, the endless emptiness of the world outside. “Then, when there weren’t enough of them left to kill each other, the Skaldi came and tried to finish the job. Some might say they’ve already won. But from where I’m sitting, they’re exactly fifty-one survivors short of their goal.”
He leaned in closer, fixing me with his eyes. “The past is gone, Querry. We’re still here. The only things you need to remember are the things that will help us stay alive. I haven’t lost anyone in a very long time. And I don’t intend to start now.”
I dropped my eyes and nodded, understanding.
“All right,” he said. “Now focus. Again.”
And it began, my reeducation into the life of Survival Colony 9. It continued through six months of drills, attacks, escapes. It continued through Korah’s smile, Aleka’s stony gaze, Yov’s sneer. It continued through days I hoped I would remember my past, nights I began to doubt I ever would. In six short months, I tried to relearn a lifetime, and he was always there to remind me when I forgot.
But through the entire six months, I never forgot that first morning. I never forgot how I watched his hands, his eyes, how I formed his words silently on my tongue. How I tried to focus on what the colony had suffered, what it needed from me. How I tried not to let all I’d lost flicker across my mind.
3
Post
The missing scouts returned the second morning after the attack in the hollow.
Most of them, anyway. They’d found the remains of our camp, figured out from the scorch marks and tire tracks what had happened, and tramped across the desert to our new hideout. They’d met nothing along the way.
But one of the scouting teams, a man named Danis and a woman named Petra, never reported back. My dad tried raising them on the walkie-talkie, but all he got was static. Not that this was unusual. All he got most of the time was static.
What was unusual, though, was for Petra to lag behind. She was our best scout, the one we always counted on to keep us on alert. She wasn’t the best at taking orders, she pretty much did her own thing, but my dad overlooked that in her case.
Her absence settled over the camp, heavy as a stone. No one said anything, but I could see in their eyes what they were thinking.
No chance she’d gotten lost. She might still be scouting, trying to draw them off our trail. But it might be that the one in the hollow had finished with that body and jumped to hers.
So we had to be careful if she did return. She might not be herself.
That’s the worst thing about them. Besides what they can do to you, I mean. They make you suspicious, paranoid. It’s not so bad when they attack the whole camp. At least then you know what you’re up against. More often, though, they show up in the body of someone you used to know, a scout or some other straggler. They insinuate themselves into the colony, wait for nightfall, for someone to stray off by himself. Then they take that body and leave the other behind. Tyris figures they use up a body in days, weeks at most. But even when you find the remains of their last victim, you’re never sure who’s infected. My dad told me about this one guy, years ago, when he was second-in-command of Survival Colony 9. The guy had a mannerism, or a tic: the left side of his face would jerk up in a sort of half-smile. When the Skaldi took him, it copied that quirk so perfectly no one knew it wasn’t him. It fooled everyone except my dad, who insisted they drag the guy in for the trials. My dad’s predecessor nearly became the creature’s final kill before it got fed to the flamethrowers.
“I can still see it,” my dad said to me. “The head was the last thing to go. And I’ll swear it still had that half-smile on its face.”
Leeches, he calls them. Soul-suckers. Others call them a whole lot worse.
No one knows how they do what they do. How they mimic the people they infect, why they use up bodies so fast. You’d think after a half-century of being hunted by them we’d have a better idea of what we’re up against, but the sad truth is, we’re no closer than we ever were. No one knows how many of them there are, why they tend to attack singly, why their attacks have always come from the west. I’ve heard that the cities, what’s left of them, are overrun by Skaldi, and that’s why the colonies fled to the desert fifty years ago. But it’s all rumor. No one’s ever seen Skaldi outside the bodies they steal, or at least no one’s ever lived to tell the tale. No one even knows how they got their name. They’ve always been called Skaldi, and I don’t think anyone’s ever figured out where the word came from.
And no one knows where they came from, either. The first anyone heard of them was after the wars, when the survival colonies had newly come into existence. Once the colonists realized the Skaldi were among them, their task—rebuilding civilization—turned into something a lot less lofty: staying alive. Everyone has a theory of Skaldi origins. Radiation, evolution, outer space. But no one knows.
All anyone knows is that they’re here.
* * *
When the missing scouts straggled into camp, I was still in bed. Not sleeping, just lying there, running over lists in my head. Trying to fill in the blanks. I knew I should be up, I knew I needed to set an example. I also knew that with my dad a fine line existed between toleration and fury. But it was one of my few moments to be completely by myself, and I wasn’t willing to lose it.
This morning, though, it wasn’t going to happen. The scouts were too beat to go back out, and we needed to investigate our new surroundings. We’d never been this far west, not that I could remember, and Korah confirmed what my memory couldn’t. We’d seen no signs of Skaldi at our new camp, but that was like saying we’d seen no signs of air. Some things you don’t need to see.
So while the scouts dozed in the tents, me and the rest of the teens went out on recon. In the company of grown-ups, of course. Not that it’s all that dangerous in the daytime. The Skaldi mostly come out at night. Aside from the obvious advantage darkness gives them, Tyris thinks the light hurts their skin and eyes. Something about what they do to the bodies they steal makes their flesh burn easily, she thinks. But she and Soon took along flamethrowers just in case, and Aleka carried one of our four functioning walkie-talkies. Before we left, she sat us down for a lecture.
“We have no idea what’s in this sector,” she said. “If anyone steps out of line, Laman will hear of it.”
“I’m quaking in my boots,” Yov muttered. Aleka glared but said nothing.
Tyris and Soon went up ahead with the main body of teenagers, and I pretty much stuck with Aleka. At first I expected an environment totally unlike anything I’d seen—canyons, prairies, I didn’t know what—but it turned out the land didn’t look so different from what we were used to, except the east-west road had vanished into the dust. Bombed, probably. The desert undulated a little like waves, but other than that it was as bare and blank as ever. Once the tents and trucks disappeared into the heat haze, I had the feeling I always got out in the field, like I was a thousand miles from where I’d begun. I’d turn around and in the time it took to turn back, I’d need to use the sun to orient myself. Every once in a while I’d see Wali or Korah glance back, as
if they were checking up on me. Wali wasn’t so bad, I’d gotten used to him looking at me coolly, like I was inside a jar. With Korah it was different. My heart jumped every time her dazzling blue eyes swung my way. And then Wali would put his arm around her shoulders or slide his hand down her forearm, and I’d watch the muscles flex beneath his shirt and I’d look somewhere else before he got any ideas.
My dad had called this a recon operation, and there was something to that. Not only did we need to keep an eye out for Skaldi, but we needed to map this new terrain, to avoid the places so littered with drill pits and sinkholes you could vanish into the land, others so strewn with mines you could blow yourself into the sky. But like all our operations, this one’s unstated purpose was to hunt for food. The land farther east yielded just enough to keep us constantly hungry: tough roots that could be gnawed, tree bark that could be boiled into a watery soup, the occasional desert bloom. Termites afforded a rare delicacy, if by delicacy you meant anything that carried an ounce of protein. We came across their mounds every so often and battered them apart with gun butts to get at the swarming creatures inside. They tasted terrible, like everything else, but they were numerous and easy to catch and there was no telling when you’d have another chance at a meal that size. When you found them your stomach went to war with your head. Your stomach always won, even if your head wasn’t happy about it.
We’d been stumbling around in the sun and dust for a couple hours, not finding anything except the distortion heat makes on the horizon, when Wali swore he saw something up ahead, a shape the color of the dust creeping on all fours. We froze, and Aleka scouted ahead with our one pair of working binoculars. I crept to her side.
“Skaldi?”
She strained into the distance, and for a second I thought I saw her go rigid. Then she relaxed. “False alarm.”
Yov’s laugh broke the desert stillness. “When’s the last time you heard of Skaldi crawling around like babies?”
“Laman told me they don’t always try to imitate you,” Wali said. “It depends on what they want your body for.”
“Laman told you,” Yov sniffed.
“He said if they’re only using it for locomotion they don’t take care of it. They let it get broken, dirty.” For once, he looked embarrassed. “Dirtier than usual, I mean.”
“You sound like Space Boy,” Yov said. “Laman this, Laman that.” He turned to me, smiling cruelly. “That right, Space Boy? Daddy write the gospel?”
“Then what do you think it was?” Wali demanded.
“How should I know?” Yov said. “Could be an elephant that didn’t get the news the world ended. Or a figment of your overactive imagination.”
Wali balled his fists and seemed ready to go for Yov, but Korah pulled him away. Her whispered words thrilled me even more than if I’d actually heard what she said. Yov smirked at the two of them, looking about as concerned as he would have if a beetle had dive-bombed his face.
It was getting dangerously close to midday, and Aleka had just about decided we were wasting our time when Yov reported spotting shapes that looked like trees farther to the west. At first I figured he was still messing with Wali, or maybe he’d gotten sick from the heat and seen something that wasn’t there. But when Aleka trained her binoculars in the direction he pointed, she made out what looked like a row of stakes on a ripple in the land you might call a hill. A mile distant, possibly more. But she decided it was worth checking out. “Carefully,” she said. We pulled our caps lower on our heads and plodded forward, raising trails of dust that eddied around our legs before sinking back as if they’d never been there at all.
In less than an hour we drew close enough to see that the shapes weren’t trees but the remains of buildings, perched on the only elevation for miles. Aleka called a halt at the base of the hill, and she and Soon conferred for a minute. He thought the structures might be the ruins of a survival colony, one of the earlier ones that had started rebuilding before the Skaldi killed them off or forced them to run. But Aleka said no survival colony would have built houses that large. And she was right, they dominated the landscape, a cluster of them standing stark against the lowering sky. Our boots struck clumps of something black, the remains of a road.
We climbed to the crest and surveyed what was left. The buildings the road had once led to consisted of nothing but shells, uprights and crossbeams without roofs or floors, cracked patios and walkways surrounded by acres of emptiness. Beside some of them, deep rectangular holes had been carved into the ground, holes now filled with hills and valleys of dust like subterranean sand dunes. Those used to be swimming pools, Aleka speculated. Whatever had leveled this place had made a crater in the center, and she pointed out how the shockwave had flattened the buildings in a circle outward from that point. But we found plenty of usable stone from collapsed walls, plus broken stretches of metal fence with tall, sharp points in a perimeter around the entire compound. Aleka suggested, haltingly, that this must have been a gated community, built by rich people far from the cities for protection. All I could think was, they’d thrown away a lot of money to construct their own cemetery.
Yov voiced my thought. “What were they trying to keep out?” he scoffed. “Dust?”
“Laman will want to know about this,” Aleka said.
She called base on her walkie-talkie. After a few minutes of silence followed by a few minutes of crackly talk, to which she gave short replies like “seems to be” and “nothing obvious,” she announced, “They’re coming.”
We sat in the shadows of the houses to wait. The sun had climbed to midday, and looking out over the land was like squinting through rippling ribbons of heat. I squeezed my empty stomach to keep it from growling. No one talked.
A half hour later I saw the trucks inching across the plain, clouds of dust billowing behind them. My dad must have been impressed by what Aleka told him if he was willing to relocate camp so shortly after we’d moved. He’d told me a hundred times: fuel was like blood. Only more precious.
The trucks crawled up the hill, coughing and wheezing, pulled up on bare dirt, and stopped with a squeal. My dad, moving faster than I’d seen him move in weeks, jumped down from the cab. He took a long look at the place, hands on hips, nodding slowly. Then he turned to us.
“Who found it?” He directed his question at Aleka, but I could tell he hoped the answer was me.
“Yov,” she said. “The kid’s got eyes like a hawk.”
My dad stepped over to Yov and reached up to pat him awkwardly on the shoulder. Yov had a calm look on his face, like he was saying, “Hey, just doing my job,” but I knew I’d be hearing about this later. From both of them.
“Good work,” my dad said.
Sure enough, Yov looked sidelong at me and smirked.
“We’ll have to double-check,” my dad said. “Aleka, have your team sweep the perimeter. Querry,” he said, signaling, “get over here.”
While Aleka and the others fanned out to circle the compound, I accompanied him to the interior, near the crater. For an hour he had me get down on my hands and knees to peer in the dust for signs of Skaldi. He’d taught me how to detect their presence, but it’s not easy. When they leave a body behind, there’s nothing much to see. Emptied, like a sack of skin.
He kept up a running commentary as I crawled around in the dirt searching for evidence. “It doesn’t have to be much,” he reminded me. “Scraps, flakes. Teeth. Anything they might have left behind.”
“What about this?” I lifted a long, thin strip of some translucent material from the floor of a ruined house.
He scrutinized it. “I don’t think so. Bring it back, though. I’ll have Tyris take a look at it.”
Eventually we came to the very lip of the crater. He considered sending me down inside, but the walls fell away steeply and the rock looked precarious. He made me hunt around the edge anyway.
“Seems clea
n,” I told him when I was done.
“Check again,” he said.
I dropped to the dust and searched once more for signs I couldn’t see.
We strolled back to the others when he was satisfied with my inspection. “Something about this place,” he said. “Familiar. Like I’ve heard someone talk about it before.”
He shook his head, remembering, not remembering. He’d told me stories about what cities used to look like, with shining towers of steel and legions of cars streaming down the avenues. But he’d never seen one himself, not that he could remember. Only the old woman had, and the holes in her memory gaped as wide as the cracks in the houses that were left.
When we returned to the others, I could feel the anticipation in the air. No one budged, but all eyes zeroed in on him.
“Aleka,” he said. “Report.”
“No sign,” she said. “And Laman—there’s food.”
The magic word shivered through the crowd. His face remained composed, but I saw his eyes light up. “Where?”
Aleka led the two of us to the structure farthest from the nucleus of camp, a windowless square of gray cinderblock overlooking the hill’s eastern edge. My dad said it looked like a bomb shelter, but even if bombs had been flying or Skaldi breathing down our necks, there was nowhere near enough room for our whole camp. Probably it had belonged to a single family in the time before. It seemed to be the only building in the compound with working locks, two in fact, one in front and one on a trapdoor that led to a basement level. But the doors stood open, the deadbolts sprung. A flight of rickety wooden stairs led below. And in a corner of the basement, on the packed dirt floor, sat a pyramid of wooden cases filled with rusty metal cans.
“You’re sure it’s edible?” my dad asked, holding one of the cans up in the glow of Aleka’s flashlight.
“According to Tyris, properly canned goods have an effective shelf life of forever,” she answered. “But Laman . . .”
Survival Colony 9 Page 3